Meet the Makers
We did not find these people on a wholesale marketplace.
Every maker in the Colorado Edit is someone we went and met. We drove to most of them, with two kids in the back seat, across four Colorado towns and a lot of mountain passes. The girls have fed the goats whose milk ends up in the soap. They painted their own pottery in the studio where our soap dish is glazed.
Here is who makes what, and where.
The Maverick Potter
Salida, Colorado · the Wild Girl soap dish
Our soap dish is the only thing in the shop that is entirely ours. We designed it. The Maverick Potter on North F Street makes it.
Suzanne, one of the owners, heard the idea and said yes to a small brand she had never heard of. Then she handed it to Angie, who has been the one turning it into an actual object: the mountain range, the pines, the deer at the treeline, the WILD GIRL stamp, and a glaze laid on by hand, one dish at a time.
That is why no two are alike. It is not a manufacturing tolerance. It is a person.
The girls painted their own pottery there while we talked it through. Ask them about it, you will not get a short answer.
Salida Sunshine Botanicals
Salida, Colorado · Cooling Mint foot cream
Gena has been making botanical skincare in Salida for decades, built around the plants that grow in the high dry country where she was raised. Sensitive skin and mountain living, as she puts it, were her first teachers.
Her Cooling Mint foot cream is in the box, because the trail takes it out of your feet first and nobody else thinks to put that in a gift.
Standing in her workshop with the shelves of tinctures and the handwritten labels behind us was the moment this stopped feeling like sourcing and started feeling like the whole point.
The Beekeeper's Honey Boutique
Salida, Colorado · clover honey and the wooden dipper
Raw Colorado clover honey, and the little wooden dipper that goes with it, from a shop on West Third Street.
Third stop in the same town, which is how we ended up with three of our six makers within a few blocks of each other. Salida punches considerably above its weight.
Mountain Essentials
Fairplay, Colorado · Rose Gold goat's milk soap and tallow butter
Two things in the Colorado Edit come from Mountain Essentials: the Rose Gold goat's milk soap, a soft pink bar finished with gold leaf and dried rose petals, and the butter made with 100% grass-fed tallow.
The soap box says made with love in Fairplay, CO, which is the kind of claim you can usually ignore. Not here.
And then there are the goats.
We drove out to the farm and the girls spent the better part of an hour at the fence with the goats and the alpacas. I bottle-fed a baby. It is difficult to overstate how good a day this was.
When the label says goat's milk, these are the goats.
Steamboat Soap Company
Steamboat Springs, Colorado · the mud mask
Dead Sea mineral mud and tea tree essential oil, 3.5 ounces of it in a glass jar, made up in Steamboat Springs. Cleanse, tighten, tone: brush on a thick layer, let it dry all the way, rinse warm.
I tried it on the deck this weekend, which is how the photo happened. It is the item people are most surprised to find in a gift box, and the one they come back for.
Tea with Tae
Golden, Colorado · Spa Bliss herbal tea
Spa Bliss: chamomile, lavender, lemon and spearmint, caffeine-free, in five plant-based pyramid sachets that are biodegradable down to the bag. Blended in Golden.
It is the item that makes the rest of the box make sense. You run the bath, you put on the mask, you make the tea, you sit down. And because there is no caffeine in it, you can do all of that at nine o'clock at night, which is realistically when you are going to.
Why we do it this way
It would be faster to order everything out of a wholesale catalogue. It would also be a different company.
Four towns, six makers, and a lot of mountain passes. Every box is packed by hand in Berthoud, and every single thing inside it was made by someone in Colorado we have stood in a room with.