Local Beauty: Personal Care Brands Harvest Natural Ingredients

Growing an Alaska Beauty Brand

The Behrendts made use of Jarred’s interest in ethnobotany and wild gathering to start Alaskan Dream Botanicals. A sensitivity to sulfates—which show up in many common beauty, hygiene, and cleaning products—persuaded Renee to try making her own soaps. The couple’s shared love of the outdoors, especially the scents of nature, sealed the deal, and a small business was born.

The hands-on labor doesn’t stop with the harvest season. The Behrendts handle almost every aspect of growing, harvesting, manufacturing, packaging, marketing, and shipping their products themselves—most of the time. “When [Renee’s] folks come up, her mom sits in a chair all day, every day, labeling products—and she is a machine,” Jarred says.

In both Alaska and the Lower 48, the trucking industry is seeing an aging workforce. According to the Commercial Carrier Journal, a trade publication, almost 60 percent of the national driver workforce is older than 45.

Nationally, a dearth of young drivers is sometimes blamed for what some see as a pending existential crisis in the driving industry. Under this theory, young people are avoiding the trucking industry out of concern that self-driving cars and trucks will make the jobs obsolete in their lifetimes.

Crum says autonomous trucks will eventually make their way to way to Alaska highways. But he argues that’s not a reason for young people to avoid the industry. Automation, he says, will assist drivers, not replace them.

“Some of those vehicles are the wave of the future. It’s going to happen,” he says. “The response to this from both the American and Alaskan trucking associations is the same and that is: planes are almost fully automated. But when is the last time you got on a plane that didn’t have a pilot?”

In the Lower 48, the work schedule of long-haul truckers may also be discouraging some younger people from pursuing truck driving jobs. But that’s less of a factor in Alaska, says Aves Thompson, executive director of the Alaska Trucking Association. Alaska is a big state, but there are few long routes that take employees away from home for weeks, he says. A trucker can go from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay and back in few days.

Since the couple’s early days selling lip balms and soaps at local markets in 2015, Alaskan Dream Botanicals has expanded in more ways than one. Their products come in forty-seven different scents, and they now have more than 950 SKUs (stock keeping units) in their inventory. They’ve transitioned from experimenting with ingredients in their kitchen to working in a dedicated facility with a warehouse, storage, and retail space. In addition to harvesting in the wild, they maintain a garden and propagate some of the plants they rely on, such as devil’s club.

Careful Cultivation

While the Behrendts are steadily growing their business to the point of hiring a full-time employee, Lauren Padawer of Alaska Glacial Essentials Skincare is happy being a one-woman show. The Cordova-based entrepreneur got her start when, on a rafting trip down the Copper River, she smeared mud on her skin and discovered the benefits of a “glacial facial.”

With the help of cosmetic chemist Charlie Kim, Padawer launched a glacial mud-based skincare line she initially considered marketing to spas—a business plan that led her to an eventual appearance on the ABC TV show Shark Tank. Today, she’s shifted to direct-to-consumer and business-to-business wholesale accounting for 80 percent of her sales.

Rather than bring on additional help or hand over aspects of her business to contractors, Padawer is keeping things close to home.

“A lot of businesses find ways to outsource, but I found a way to ‘insource’ as I grew because I felt like it brought more control and integrity to the brand,” she says. “I’m able to scale up or down according to what I have going on in my life.”

Eliana McKee of Eira Cosmetics, meanwhile, is on the threshold of expanding; her new luxury skincare line, Eirwen, launches soon. What started as a hobby making soap led McKee to pursue a degree in cosmetic chemistry. Soon, she was buying a house—not only to live in, but to operate her business from. Like Padawer, McKee runs every aspect of Eira Cosmetics herself, including researching the properties of her ingredients, such as locally harvested sugar kelp, and conducting monthly microbiological tests to ensure her lab area is safe.

“If you want to do things by the book, it’s a lot of work,” she admits. “Before you even start making money, you are already spending a lot.”

Expenses have gone up recently, with higher shipping costs and increased tariffs on international goods. With each hurdle she’s faced as a business owner, though, McKee says she has advanced a little bit further in her journey.

“The first thing was setting up a website. Then it was, can I do barcodes? I was petrified of bar codes! But I learned about them,” McKee says. “So the next step will be having an employee, getting a loan, and setting up my own factory, once I recover some of my initial investments.”

In the Weeds

Houlihan worked as a ranger at Denali National Park before she started Alpenglow Skin Care, indulging her interest in Alaska’s native plants. Her background served her well when she started looking into natural skincare after struggling with reactions to adult acne products.

Today, Houlihan relies on a garden and a high tunnel to provide her with the herbs and flowers that go into her infusions and extracts. She has dug deep into the science of “companion” planting, using local knowledge to understand which plants grow best together.

Even the most independent local business owner can’t do it all. Wanderflower Body Co.’s Caiti Alexander relies on tallow rendered from Alaska-raised beef fat from a supplier in Delta Junction and seaweed from Kachemak Kelp.

Alexander, who worked as a nurse prior to launching Wanderflower Body Co., learned the ropes of running a small business by observing the operations of her suppliers.

“Working with different businesses and farms, I meet a lot of people who understand what my priorities are,” she says. “Building partnerships that are real partnerships… has taught me that I can set the boundaries I need to keep handcrafting my products in small batches to keep the quality high.”

Timing is everything when ingredients are harvested seasonally. Alexander must plan carefully when she orders raw materials. “The kelp farms plant in the fall and harvest in the spring, so they ask me, ‘How many pounds do you want for next year?’ It’s a lot of looking ahead—and then, it’s a farm, so if the weather isn’t ideal, you don’t always get what you think you’re going to get,” she says.

What Price Beauty?

The same state that provides the lush glacial mud and delicately scented fireweed also roadblocks local manufacturers with high shipping costs and supply shortages.

“If I could source everything locally, I’d be thrilled,” Houlihan says. Shipping costs to get ingredients from the Lower 48 and to export her product to her customers are a constant struggle. She has concentrated on budgeting wisely; rather than spend on advertising or “flashy” packaging, she invests her profit into ensuring the quality of her products.

“One of the biggest complaints we hear from other makers is, they can’t get things up here,” says Renee.

Purchase minimums at wholesalers are often much more than some small businesses need, so they either have to “scrimp and save and figure out how to use that huge amount,” Renee says, or they must figure out an alternative.

A co-op might be one approach, but the Behrendts have a different idea: creating a supply company. “We’ve got the storage, and when we’re bringing a pallet at a time, we can take a little bit of a hit on the flat fee for that,” Renee explains, and Alaskan Dream Botanicals can take the delivery at a lower price than fellow small manufacturers.

Helping peers control costs is, the Behrendts believe, one more way to keep things local.

“So many Alaska businesses, once they get to a certain level, they move out of state,” Jarred points out. “We refuse to do that. Some businesses will say, ‘It was born in Alaska.’ But that’s not made in Alaska. It’s not the same thing at all.”