None of it is original (and that's exactly the point)

Full transparency: none of the first things we’re making are original.

Some of the ideas we’ve either created or are planning:

An unscented candle (wow, amazing…)
Dehydrated orange slices for a simmer sachet (isn’t that just potpourri?)
Essential oil-scented room and linen spray (available everywhere)
A shampoo bar (not revolutionary)
Salt-based or coffee-based body scrubs (seen it)

You could make any one of these yourself with a free afternoon and a YouTube video. There’s no patent coming, no secret formula, no thing-that’s-never-been-done-before.

Our Cedarwood Sweet Orange room and linen spray, one of the first small batch. This one gets a scent (it's for your linens, not the dog's bathwater).

That’s exactly how you start small. Emphasis on the “start” here.

People who start small don’t open with an invention. They don’t wait until they’ve patented something, or perfected it, or dreamed up a product nobody’s ever heard of. They make things they’d actually use themselves, to the quality they’d want in their own homes, for their own families, to hand to the people they love. That’s our entry point.

Would we want this in our own house?

Would we be proud to give it to a friend?

If yes, we make it.

The candle is for the dogs, honestly

The first one is an unscented soy candle poured into a beautiful vessel.

Unscented, because my senior dog is super sensitive to fragrances. She’s a ten-year-old hound mix with Cushing’s disease, and I still want the whole vibe (picture a gorgeous bubble bath, a candle lit on the edge of the tub, Eden asleep on the bathmat nearby). I just want to know for certain she’s not going to get a rash because of it.

It turns out most unscented candles are tealights or votives. Not something that will last a full bath, let alone a couple. I’ve seen candles aimed at dog owners.

Guess what they are designed to do? Smell so strong that they neutralize dog odors in your home. That’s not gonna work for me.

Nearly everything off the shelf is built around a scent. So we’re making the version I’ve wanted this whole time.

Overhead view of freshly poured soy candles drying in a box: two wooden bowl candles topped with pressed daisies, calendula, and ferns, beside a cluster of white glass jar candles with flat wooden wicks. — Our first batch, still cooling. Pressed flowers set into wooden bowls on the left; wood-wick jar candles on the right.

We could fake this. I’m seeing many businesses that do.

In a disingenuous version of this business, I’d order a pallet of pre-made candles from a white-label supplier, slap a Start Small Farms label on top, and call them ours.

But one of the reason’s I need Start Small Farms in my life is tactile. The fun is in the making. We get to learn candle making tricks like heating the top to smooth it out once its cooled. We get to learn the best time in the cooling process to add pressed flowers floating on the surface. These are dead simple candles and are completely ours. We actually made them, by hand, the way we’d want them for ourselves.

And now we can teach a little candle making workshop. Win, win, win.

Niki holding a finished pressed-flower bowl candle up to a ring light to photograph it, with a full batch of flower-topped candles arranged on the table beside her. — Niki, styling the shot for a finished bowl candle. The whole first batch is right there on the table.

Not original, but ours

I’m sure that in time we’ll have our own inventions. Our own take on a product nobody’s made quite our way. That will come.

Right now, it’s just fun getting started. None of it is original, but it’s our origin. And you have to start somewhere real.

— Kim