We were lucky to catch up with Mandi Pickering recently and have shared our conversation below.

Mandi, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

I can vividly remember the afternoon, it was sunny and I had just gotten off work. At this time I was still working for a massive corporate veterinary medicine industry company and I was on my way home to our farm. I had just missed a phone call from my now late grandfather, my best friend. I had recently decided that our farm needed a good name and he was brainstorming for me. I will say, some of the recommendations were an immediate no, in the kindest way if you know what I mean.
We sit on a lovely piece of land with very large oak trees. The kind that make anything seem very small. My grandpa always told me that those trees must be 500 years old. His voicemail, and I still have it saved, suggested to me that the farm be called Wild Oak Farms. That was that. I had no debate and I had signs made.
Where ever this life takes us, our farm will always be called Wild Oak Farms.

Mandi, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Here on our homestead we dabble in a lot of things, but we have a few main focuses. We first and foremost always strive to work as a family, check in and always keep on pulse on what is working and what isn’t. That always comes before anything else.
However, we have a small herd of Nubian dairy goats and our entire business is built around them. A handful of years back we created in our kitchen a goat milk skincare line and I have made it my full time income where I create products and we ship them worldwide. We handmilk our goats and then use their milk to make goat milk body butter, goat milk soap and we also provide milk to some folks in our community. We do have a few other things in our portfolio pertaining to skincare, all made with bits and pieces of things we raise or grow right here on our farm.
It all began one day when I was reading a label for lotion. There are dozens of ingredients and I could barely pronounce over half of them. Our skin is our largest organ and I began to wonder what I was putting on it every day. I knew I could do better for our family. That is where it started, it was just for us and a few friends we would gift around the holidays or birthdays. The journey quickly sped up to where we are now, fulfilling sometimes hundreds of orders every week.

We are a small, LGBTQ owned family farm in Northern Missouri where we focus on raising Nubian dairy goats and heritage Sebastopol geese. We strive to create a sustainable life on the farm and in our business, and in doing so, hope to make an impact in our community and in the lives of many others.

Our motto, while simple, embodies our beliefs and goals.
Small farm. Big impact. We strongly believe that with who we are and what we
create here on Wild Oak Farms, we can and do make an impact on people’s lives. As a queer and non-binary couple in the homesteading community, we embrace the opportunity to challenge the norms and educate others based on our lived experiences on the importance of diversity, inclusion and creating space for all.
We are excited to continue breaking barriers in the homestead community and creating high quality products for people around the world!

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Most often we gain new customers through word of mouth. This can happen organically or through a promotional sale or event, but most often we see new folks trying our products because they were gifted it or a family member had our lotion in their home. We have a large presence on social media and really love the community we have built there @wildoakfarms
It really does bring so much joy when we see someone at the grocery store or even at the airport and we are able to make the connection back to our farm together!

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

We are 98% ecommerce online through Shopify. The platform is very easy to navigate and has been a really great business move for us!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wildoakfarmsmo.com
• Instagram: wildoakfarms

Image Credits

Morgan Weber