Welcome, Good Friend!

Wow, we’re actually here. After years of stumbling, learning, experimenting and creating, we are launching with uncommon products and leading with our values. There are countless decisions during the creation of a product that broadly break down to two choices–do you want your product to be safer, genuine, ethically sourced, and more beneficial to the customer, farm laborers and earth? Or do you want the product to be cheaper? We are intensely proud to say that at each decision, we chose quality, customer and community benefit. We bring you the fruits of sustainable, empowering agriculture, never chemist-made flavor, fragrance or preservatives. This is our greatest strength and biggest weakness. Insisting on Vanilla planifolia, not a chemists’ rude attempt, costs more. However, it creates a better, genuine product. We have an abiding belief that doing well by all–farmers, laborers, customers, employees, the earth and future generations–will build goodwill and, in time, bring success. For that to work, we must tell our stories–from an unflinching look at the compounding harm of plastic, to the good possible in agriculture if people decide to empower and build rather than exploit.

Balms contain plant oils and butters. They are better for your skin because the ingredients are closer to your skin's natural oils in chemistry and function. Your skin’s natural oils are called sebum. They are integral to healing healing and ensuring the integrity of your skin barrier. Your oils are also likely essential to the ecosystem of microbial life on your skin. And we are just getting a glimpse of how your microbial life benefits your health. Too often, through overzealous washing, systemic health issues, or otherwise, your skin may lack natural oils. Frequent, vigorous hand washing–helpful to stem disease–also washes away your natural, beneficial oils.

Lotions are far more common than balms, but not for any reason benefiting your skin. Manufacturers prefer lotions because they are inexpensive–filling a plastic bottle with water is cheap. But water is not beneficial to dry, irritated skin. Your skin sweats, but to cool, not heal or protect your skin. In addition to uncertain benefits, lotions have a dark side. Water feeds bacteria and fungus. Lotions will spoil and turn flagrantly foul in a very short time. To prevent the product from fouling, chemists add potent, broad-action preservatives–they wipe out all microbial life. The preservatives continue to kill microbial life after applying to your skin. This may be a problem. The microbial life living on and in you are you. You cannot draw a clear line between you and them. Your mighty microbial multitudes protect from disease, regulate healthy development, digest food and produce vital nutrients, even regulate brain function and mood. This is why prolonged antibiotic use can be harmful–you compromise your co-pilots. Sadly, and all all too often, after decades of use, we learn preservatives are carcinogens–they increase cancer risk. And that is not the sole harm. More than a few antimicrobial compounds still widely used are Endocrine Disrupting Compounds (EDCs). Yup, they are so ubiquitous they get an acronym. EDCs disrupt hormone function. Hormones are the stuff of life’s regulation, the stuff of us. We compromise hormones, and us, at our peril.

We never use chemist-made ingredients. Most body care companies, even natural, organic companies, use chemist-made flavor, fragrance, dyes and preservatives. So, while your favorite lip balm may smell and taste like passion fruit, you are not consuming passion fruit. You are consuming chemists’ “flavor.” This is assuredly inauthentic–an abuse of customer trust. We won’ t do it because in addition to being disingenuous, chemistry houses do not have a good track record on safety. Too often, after much use, we learn chemist-made flavor, fragrance, or preservatives harm human health–a painfully recurring theme in body care. When we say our product contains coffee, cinnamon, or cacao, rest assured it is exactly that. Moreover, we stand with the farmer who grew it, come what may.

With a clear eye of our failures, we are proud of our values, insights and conviction. They are foundational to all that is coming. Should the good people in their wisdom see fit to elevate us from the background, we will learn, grow, and expand our customer, social, farmer, and ecological benefits. Business is a human creation. It will be what we make. When you support Drew’s Honeybees, you are supporting entrepreneur-ism that is ennobled by honesty, kindness and sacrifice for the common good–capitalism with an eye to what could be. You are empowering the vow at our root–to do some good. Together, we can challenge many of the pervasive harms in capitalism. We hope to never flinch from the fact that harm, and good, flow from human choice–our choices.