We recently connected with Michelle Hamilton and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Michelle, thanks for joining us today. Do you have a hero? What have you learned from them?

My heroes are my grandpa Melvin and grandma Elaine. I spent a lot of time with them when I was a little girl on their 3rd generation farm in central Iowa and I know in my heart they have shaped a big part of what Dandelion Naturals is all about. I have very vivid memories of farm life and I cherish and lean into those memories and childhood lessons especially when times get tough today. My grandparents were hard workers; they lived a very frugal yet purposeful life and taught me how to respect and to love people. Grandpa Melvin once dropped us grandkids off at the movie theater and handed me two 10-dollar bills since I was the oldest grandchild without any instruction on how to spend it. When he picked us up, he asked if there was any money remaining. I remember telling him no and that was the first money management talk I ever received, ha! At the time I didn’t take him very seriously, but it has stuck with me, and it has made an impression on me. I remember us kids each buying a big rainbow lollipop about the size of our heads that day. All I know is that they cost much more than a nickel a piece; grandpa always told me that a cup of coffee used to only cost a nickel. I will never forget those lessons and how it has helped me with my business today. Melvin and Elaine taught me that happiness does not come from things rather from relationships, church community, and hard work. In their later years, my grandmother had many health complications from diabetes and my grandfather was her caretaker. His enduring, selfless love for her is something that I admire and strive for today. I miss them deeply and often little ordinary moments in my life today remind me of them. This past Sunday at church we sang Amazing Grace (one of my grandmother’s favorite church hymns) I smiled through the tears and felt them nearby. To sum up a lifetime of memories of two very important people is not possible. I could write an entire book outlining my love for them and all the life lessons that they taught me, they shaped who I am today and I’m grateful to them for that.

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?

I launched my business website in October 2022. I started working on the concept of Dandelion Naturals in January 2022 after big, unexpected changes to my 21-year nursing career which led me to embrace my love for natural living and to start a full-time career creating all natural body care products. Eager to create and share impactful, intentional natural products, I dove right in with the support of my faith and my husband, Matt of 21 years. Bright yellow dandelions are widespread on our homestead in southeast Minnesota in the early spring. These tiny wildflowers, representing the return of life and the rebirth of growth and green after a harsh winter, display abundant strength and power. For me, the dandelion symbolizes resilience, hope, and healing. They remind me of the time of year my daughter was born, a season blossoming with life. Dandelion Naturals is a sweet reminder of the bounty and resilience of nature’s beauty and the love we can show our skin using ingredients picked from the Earth.
My passion for natural living began in 2011 after a visit to a holistic chiropractor which opened a door to a whole new world of wellness. This sparked my passion for the power of eating real food which has evolved into a natural, holistic way of living. I have created many remedies and personal care products for my family over the years; I am self-taught through reading, researching, and experimenting. My business product that I am most proud of and fascinated about is our cold process soap bars. Each bar is truly unique and a work of art; there is something so simple, yet beautiful about experiencing a nice hot bath or shower with a pure bar of soap. For me a bar of soap offers a very simple way to honor our planet through zero waste packaging and to nourish and care for our bodies with high quality, intentional ingredients.
Dandelion Naturals is only 6 months old; I have come a long way in that short amount of time and I’m excited about the challenges and changes that will naturally come. I have built a strong online customer base through our website as well as my Etsy shop; I’m very active on Facebook and Instagram which I believe has helped to get my business name out there. I have attended several pop-up markets since last fall; though these require a lot of time and energy, they are where I get to meet our customers in person and talk about my products. I learn a lot of valuable information through these conversations. I also provide wholesale options to businesses; currently my products are in 10 brick and mortar stores throughout the Midwest and several online apothecary type websites. I’ve also started dabbling in custom orders and have been grateful to work with a handful of local businesses on custom employee appreciation gifts.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

Currently, I am the sole manufacturer of my products. I have the equipment and space to manufacture several hundred bars of soap per day. I am restrained by space to continue to grow that number. My studio is currently in our 2-story farmhouse and we are already maxed on our usable space for the business. Soap takes a minimum of 4 weeks to cure. So we need a pretty large space for curing and storing the soap, along with a shipping area, an area to make the product and an area to store the supplies and ingredients. Our house has quickly morphed into a soap factory! I have a lot of dreams for Dandelion Natural’s Future. My family and I live on a 10-acre homestead in SE Minnesota. We envision a building that would house a store front on our property that offers a wide variety of all natural products for our community from various makers throughout the Midwest, a much larger work studio, and a place for folks to gather for learning about all-natural living. We are also ambitious to grow a variety of medicinal herbs on our property. We have zero interest in having a vendor manufacture product for us or to work with a fulfillment center. We want to always be involved in the process and hope to employ people to come work with us on the farm. When I first started making soap just 15 months ago, my soap batches made a total of 8 bars. Now each of my soap batches produce 80 bars. Scaling up has taken a lot of research, recipe development, organization, time management and pure determination. I have learned that it takes a ton of work to do this kind of work all by yourself, but it is so rewarding to be involved in every single step. I have learned so much about business and about myself these past several months. I’m naturally a driven person and need to be challenged to thrive, owning a small business has done this for me. I’m pushed daily to do and learn new things. Some tasks are not my favorite and before I delegate or hire them out, I’m determined to learn them so that I fully understand my business. I’m working on focusing on not only the present day to day of the business, but also the future. What does the future look like for Dandelion Naturals. When I’m immersed in the day-to-day tasks, it’s sometimes hard to force myself to plan and dream for the future, but I believe it’s a vital thing to do for growth. I’m finding that balance by networking with other business owners and other like-minded folks that are also into natural living, and this has been inspiring, and it has breathed life into my business and has given me a compass. Talking to other business owners about some deep topics helps me to know that I’m not alone in the struggles that I face, and it helps me to get out of my head and to continue moving forward instead of getting hung up. We all have these doubts that creep in and we need to know how to deal with them.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I found myself abruptly without a job in January 2022 and had never experienced that in my career and never thought it would be a possibility as a nurse. I gave myself a month to grieve that loss, to just be and to take care of myself and to dream about what was next. It was a very strange position to be in. I was 42 years old and 21 years into my nursing career. I honestly have zero idea where the soap idea came from. One day in February 2022 I told my husband I wanted to make soap for a living. Our visions didn’t initially align (even though he didn’t say it, I’m sure he thought I was nuts) but eventually our visions have come together, and I have my husband’s full support and he now sees the potential. We have had to make a ton of sacrifices along the way with this huge change in our life. We have had to dig deep into our savings to get this started, we have tightened down on our budget and we have made huge sacrifices with our personal time together as a couple and as a family of 3. I’m often gone on the weekends for pop up markets while he is at home with our 3-year-old daughter. I have worked many long 16-hour days. We accept this as a new season of life and know it will pass. Things won’t be like this forever, but we acknowledge the need for these current sacrifices in our life to earn an honest living in a way that we are proud of and that is honoring to God.

Contact Info:

• Website: dandelionnaturals.com
• Instagram: dandelion.naturals
• Facebook: Dandelion Naturals

Image Credits
Seelhammer Media for 1st and 2nd photo as well as picture of me. All other photos were taken by me.