The Wildforth Story: From Garage Still to Full Formulations
In January of this year, Wildforth didn’t exist yet. I was just doing what I often do, following my curiosity. I harvest some Douglas Fir needles from the backyard and ran them through a still to make essential oil. From there, I found myself wondering what else I could do. This got me thinking about conversations that Zee and I often had. How products seemed to be getting worse as corporations searched for ever greater profits. How something as simple as a beeswax lip balm that had always been in my pocket when I backpacked throughout the Sierra Nevada mountains had become another brand filled with questionable ingredients as it passed from one major company to another. We could do better. That is what led us to our first experiment, a hand salve using only U.S.-grown ingredients.
Standing at the kitchen counter and scribbling observations in a notebook, we weren’t aiming for anything elaborate that first day. The goal was simple: a good, work-ready salve that soothed and protected chapped hands. We went to local stores and gathered beeswax, sunflower oil, hazelnut oil, flaxseed oil, oat flour, and vitamin E, all ingredients that fit our vision of staying local and functional. We called it Hand Salve Base V.1, a launching pad to iterate and innovate until we were satisfied.
The process was basic: melt the beeswax, mix in the oils, pour. In less than an hour we had our first sample, a repurposed tin container filled with yellow salve cooling on the counter. The result? Fine. It was better than the “natural” balms we were comparing it to, but we knew we could do better than that. We had found a baseline and now we could climb.
We tested it on ourselves, friends, neighbors and the verdict was encouraging. The texture was smooth, it had decent staying power, and noticeable soothing and protection for hands and skin that was damaged by the cold winter months. But we knew it could be better. We were already researching, trying to understand things like lipid profile and active botanicals. The importance of not just performance, but feel and scent. It could be lighter, faster absorbing, better at soothing and supporting the healing process. Most importantly, we wanted a product that could speak for itself, that was more than expected, more than perhaps people thought possible. We didn’t want to just match what was out there, we wanted to innovate with everyday botanical ingredients.
That first jar didn’t become a final product. But it became something more important: proof of concept. Even in its simplest form, our salve felt like a step toward a brand built on our values of local sourcing, scientific formulation, and honest performance. From there, the journey wasn’t about whether we could make a good salve. It was about how far we could take it.
