We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kati Cearley a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kati, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
Our brand focuses on hand making the cleanest bath and body care products possible with ingredients that are homegrown, locally sourced, organic and are free of Parabens, Sulfates, Palm Oils, Phthalates & Dyes! The industry standard for most businesses in our sector is to cut cost and labor to get as much product out to the masses and as cheap as possible, which is turn creates shelves upon shelves full of unethically made products, with single use packaging and are packed to the brim with fillers and other synthetic ingredients!
While our mission is quite the opposite. We focus on handmade, small batch, locally sourced and homegrown ingredients. While also at the core of our mission, focusing on sustainable and regenerative practices to close the loop by limiting our waste, our consumption & our plastic output. How do we do so? We raise and grow many of our ingredients right here on our farm! We milk our own goats by hand every single day, we raise our own bees for our own pure raw honey, we grow all of our soap toppers and medicinal herbs and flowers here on the farm and we make everything slow and small batch 100% ourselves. Other ways we do so are by purchasing large batches of locally sourced certified organic oils and butters for our products, while also striving to be a 100% plastic free packaging business. We practice regenerative practices like reusing our goat manure to feed our gardens and composting our plant waste for more organic material to build our healthy soils. Our ultimate goal is to reduce, reuse and recycle whenever possible!
We select and grow specific flowers and herbs like rose, lavender and calendula for their specific healing and anti-aging properties on the skin. By growing all of our medicinal flowers and herbs for our products right here on our farm we are limiting the emissions needed to get ingredients for our products to our business. Yes, our products take us longer time to make than the big brands and yes even more so yes we have a large overhead because of the pure ingredients we choose to make our products with, but unlike most in our industry, you can read every single ingredient on our labels. Nearly every brand on the shelf now a days is riddled with chemicals and ingredients you can’t even pronounce. Most of which leave your skin dry, itchy, flaky, inflamed, irritated and covered in rashes, which ultimately leave you suffering. We developed our products over many years, first for ourselves and after many requests we begun to make them for others too. What was once a hobby has become a full scale business that we often have a hard time keeping up because of our child and other work obligations but we are grateful for our loyal customers and their willingness to wait for each of our product releases!
“I’ve been searching for your soaps for the last year. Lol It was the best soap I have ever used. The charcoal one helped my sons eczema clear up!” – T Taylors
“Everything from The Urban Ladybug line is treated with so much care, and you can see and feel it in their products. I went to the mailbox and I could SMELL that my soaps has arrived. Not an overbearing fake perfume smell, but an earthy refreshing scent. I’m so happy with all the products we’ve tried; soap, lotion, scrubs, salts and bath bombs.”
We often get messages like this from our loyal customers and have dozens of 5 star reviews on how much our products have changed people’s skin for the better. Which is what inspires us and ultimately keeps us going strong! We pride ourselves on breaking out of the industry standard and providing the cleanest products possible for our customers, ethically, sustainably and with the upmost love and care!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
As far as my day job goes, I sort of fell into the banking industry a half a decade ago when I was desperately trying to remove myself from the food industry. I now get to work in Agricultural lending and help many big farms and ranches manage their day to day business. I absolutely love what I do because it provides a stable income, with wonderful benefits and I get to play a role in providing food for our country! I sought after this career after I became a farmer myself and fell in love with the lifestyle.
As far as my small business goes, as i mentioned briefly before. My business stemmed from our desire to create clean and wholesome products for ourselves. After I lost my mother from cancer when I was 22 years old, I was dead set on cutting out all the chemicals I could from my life. Our skin is our biggest organ and one of the easiest ways for chemical to penetrate our body and have major effects on our mood, health, skin-condition and ultimately our cancer-fighting ability. The sad thing was, I could hardly find any products on the shelf that wasn’t riddled with horrible chemicals. Many of which are banned in other countries and many of which have been linked to diseases and cancers.
It all started with a lip balm and now we have a whole product line from soap to lotion to beard balms, we try to cover it all. With new products in development all the time! After many many many requests from our followers, family and friends, we begin ramping up our production, created an online website/shop and put up our products. What we didn’t expect was to sell out within a day and that the love for our products to grow into a solid customer base who are very loyal! We believe we created this loyalty because we create products from the heart, that are clean, pure, wholesome and that actually help people who are suffering from major skin problems and who also want to cut the chemicals out of their bath and body routines!
We arnt just any soap company though, we truly strive to make sustainable choices by using plastic free packaging, pure and clean ingredients, many of which are homegrown and or organic! What you put on your skin absolutely matters and it truly has changed our lives knowing how many people our products are giving people joy and a better quality of life.
I am most proud of our the fact that our business really strives to make a positive impact on our customers, our landfills and ultimately our planet!
Have you ever had to pivot?
My first small business was actually in the medicinal cannabis industry, back in the Prop 215 days here in California. My husband and I ran a delivery service and grew it to a 6 figure business by ourselves at 20 years old within 2 years. When local laws changed we were forced to close our delivery service down but within a year we were in the permit process of opening a brick a mortar dispensary. It was a very long, expensive and arduous process. One of which I thought would pay off in the end but we were so sorely mistaken. After two years of permitting and a whole new city council in seat, we were voted against and ultimately lost our ability to open up in the small town we had been pursuing for years. This town, which had a medicinal dispensary permit process in place but ultimately decided they changed their minds and did not want us there. At the end of that road, we had spent over $100,000 in savings to open this dispensary and we were about $10,000 in debt, so very tired of the cannabis industry and ready to pivot to something way different. That’s when we decided to sell our home in the city and move out to the country. We got regular jobs and worked our tails off, paid off our debt and decided it was time to sell our home and move out to somewhere we could acquire land and grow our love for growing our own food and flowers. We searched for months and finally found the perfect 1 acre property with a beautiful home and so much potential! We purchased our country home in April 2018 and have spent the last 4.5 years, building the farm, growing more of our own food, raising more animals and building a new business. Not only do we have our bath and body care business but we also have a very popular micro-flower farm which we sell bouquets at a local market and to local florists for weddings and events. We also have a very solid sourdough following and sell our organic heirloom sourdough starter from our website! We ultimately accomplished the most ultimate pivot and are so thankful for we’re this farm journey has led us! We are so grateful to have our small business and are grateful for the lessons we have learned along the way to where we are now.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We run our business with three morals in mind at all times – authenticity, transparency and integrity! While also taking the time to present our business and products in the most professional way possible even though we are just a small farm business!
We don’t strive to be the best in our industry but we do strive to offer the best for our customers and we truly feel like they is the main thing that has helped build our reputation within our market!
We make and grow everything we sell and we love to show our customers the behind the scenes and full process behind it all, from growing the flowers, to milking the goats, to raising bees and developing and making our products, we share it all on our social media because we love the authenticity and transparency it demonstrates to our customers! We also allow our customers to come meet us, ask us questions and experience our products in person at the many market we attend!
Our integrity lies within the way we make our products and how we treat with our customers. As I’ve mentioned in great detail, our products are an extension of us and our love for clean products! What we put in them means as much to us as what we put in our own bodies and is why we formulate them with the best ingredients. And if we ever have anyone not satisfied with our products for any reason or if something every happens with a package out of our customers control we always always make it right! the highest customer satisfaction is the core of customer service!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.theurbanladybug.com
- Instagram:@theurbanladybug
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheUrbanLadyBug?mibextid=LQQJ4d
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheUrbanLadyBug
- Other: TikTok: @theurbanladybug Shop instagram: @ulb_boutique Shop Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theurbanladybugboutique?mibextid=LQQJ4d
Image Credits
All images are my own