Category Archives: The Scent Project

we need a shirt that says ‘we survived the Red Ants Pants Music Festical!’

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It was our first show at a music festival, and it was our first music festival in a cow pasture, and it was the windiest cow pasture I have ever been in!

A pound of soap and a gallon of shampoo made me feel a bit less gritty last night when we got home. And I was still smiling from the festival.

On Thursday we had to wait three hours, just to let the wind storm pass on by before we could even get our show booth set up. For good measure we left the front and back open so the wind could continue to blow through. I really didn’t want to track my booth down in the next county. Our pop up camper felt a bit sturdier, just a bit.

Just looking at the stage, the vendor booths, cars and campers arriving, you just couldn’t help but feel that something special was going to happen. In a town of 800, surrounded by pastures and sage brush pretty much forever in every direction, over 10,000 people arrived during a three day period. Not a sour word or moment. It was festival atmosphere from the get go, even through some pretty incredible storms.

While the head liners were big names, and awesome in their own right, it was the smaller bands, and some of the local bands that rocked the place. I love working to music, our office has something great going every morning. But working a show with live music from noon through 11pm is just down right dreamy! I think out of all of the bands, I would have to say Taj Mahal brought it, and was probably the hit (my opinion, I would love to hear others?). He has energy like no other performer we saw, and he plays with soul, big huge I can feel you a mile away soul. He’s loud, grateful, cool as beans, and blues to the bone. Love him. Still my favorite after all these years, and he got me out dancing for this one! Lovin in My Babies Eyes. 

Piper and Renn had smiles the whole time. They were rock stars! They sold in our booth all day, restocked, held the tent down during wind storms, cleaned off dirt, danced, ate, and fell asleep each night listening to great music. It might be hard to get them to do a regular trade show in the future!

Our Paw Pudding and Diffuser Oils debuted this weekend. We were thrilled with the reception. We ended up selling more of these two items than our original Aroma Mist products. What was fun to see, were people that didn’t even have dogs were appreciating our products because they are chemical, preservative and emulsifier free. And we listened, and kept hearing the same thing throughout the three days, and we will be adding two new products to our line in the very near future. We met people from all over the country, some chatty, some drunk, some that felt like long lost friends.

Here is to good intentions, great music, and more gatherings! woops I mean trade shows ;-) Nancy

we are off to the Red Ants Pants Music Festival!

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Last year, in February to be exact, I decided to take my aromatherapy products from our training classroom to the public. It has been a fantastic ride so far, and our line is growing!

Was it the long winter nights that prompted this decision? Most likely. It isn’t that I needed more work, or another business to run, I was plenty busy. And then add family on top of that and you could honestly say, uber busy.

But I really had a belief in what I was blending for clients, and wanted our products to have a bigger venue. How do you market aroma products for dogs and their people, an inter species product?

During our first year we were busy with research and test trials. My assistant and I investigated shipping and packaging, labels, bottles & containers, advertising, marketing, etc. All of the foundation work necessary to get this product out to the public. My business mentors called it my development year.

I did the local Farmers Market, local Art and Craft shows, and then two rather large national Trade Shows outside of the state. And a ton of what is called gorilla marketing. I found out that is were I shine, and that is where our early success started.

Farmers Markets are awesome, touching base with clients, forming relationships, great conversations, and coffee!

Art & Craft fairs are kind of funky. Some are good some are a bomb. I would say they were my least favorite venues last year, and in saying that, we did ten around the state. We did well but the atmospheres in most of them were weird, for our product at least. Nonetheless we will continue to go to the ones we enjoyed, if nothing else they are a great advertising and marketing opportunity.

The Trade Shows are a boat load of work, starting weeks/months prior to going. Booth display took me totally by surprise, as did the amount of literature, take aways and samples to give away. But we were wildly successful, enjoyed them, and will continue to do at least two to three a year. I like the buyers days the best, it is business and direct, and fun to negotiate new partnerships. We currently have twenty six wholesale accounts across the country, and I love the home spun relationships we have with each of our partners.

Today we leave for the Red Ants Pants Music Festival. It was juried for the vendors this year, and they looked at women owned businesses in Montana first! Woop!. I am hoping this will be a good venue for us, as it sounds like a fun way to sell over a three day period. Six to eight thousand people will congregate in a cow pasture outside of White Sulphur Springs Montana to listen to great music, camp, eat, and buy stuff. This sounds like my speed as long as the wind doesn’t kick in and carry everything to Kansas!

Happy music festival weekend, Nancy

our days

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Life is full for us right now, it’s so crammed busy, but busy for the right reasons. I know this to be true when my face literally crashes into my pillow at night, and the next thing I know, it’s 6am and I am getting sweet border collie kisses to please get up!

Our new facility is coming along and classes have started. So exciting! Still work to be done, but it is usable at this point, and everyday more projects are knocked off the list.

The garden is busting over right now. The recent heat just made it all explode. We are cutting and drying nearly every day. Forty bundles of Lavender cut and hanging all around my office, along with lemon balm, spearmint and tarragon. It is truly not a bad place to work!

My kids are here and there at camps, drumming, slack lining and having a great summer. My dogs have been running with Spore and playing in the yard when it isn’t too hot. They have had a couple of commercial project calls/interests, but that industry seems to be hurry up and wait. While we wait I work on the behaviors for fun, why not, I like to train. Barking, growling, grabbing keys from a truck, running away with keys, riding on a hay stack in a wagon, chin on paws, digging a whole and burying treasure, walking slowly with an old man. They love when new behaviors are started, it’s the FUN zone. I think at this moment though, they all may be slightly lavender stoned from the drying plants. Sleeping, with what appears to be a slight smile :-)

We have had two weeks of visitors. I can’t even tell you how good it is for the soul to cook, and eat, and laugh with friends from what seems like a very long time ago, to brand new. I love garden dinners with yummy food and wine. Simple as that!

The days I am really loving though are our Farmer’s Market Days. In a weird way it feels like my day off. I love being around other people that make things, an artisan gardener type of community. It inspires me every week. My family gets up about 5:30am on Saturday, we pack up the car and the kids and I go and sell at the Farmers Market. My husband sends us off with a thermos of tea for the kids, and a thermos of coffee for me, and if we are totally organized, burritos to go! woop!

My kids have the Meuwissen & Co. Art Cards booth. They have a lovely following and are doing custom orders now. Recycled stuff, coffee, alcohol labels, origami, tea wrappers, all with good humor, even geek humor, it’s awesome.They are making money to go towards their 8th grade Europe Trip … Tenacious, determined, hard workers!

The Scent Project booth is so fun for me. I get to talk about my plants, products, kids and dogs. Wine and food are the only two things missing! Our product line is growing, slowly but surely, and I love the hands on aspect of the market. I get to meet my customers face to face, talk, smell, make that connection. I love it! This week we had our Lavender Pillows, they are seasonal for the most part and completely dependent on good chemical free dried lavender florets. They smell so completely yummy it’s hard not to huff them all morning!

Our next market is the Red Ants Pants Music Festival, July 26-29th in White Sulphur Spring , MT. A three day event that has put us into big production as of this afternoon. Emily Lou Harris and Mary Chapin Carpenter will be there, how cool is that… This is going to be fun, fun, fun…

Here is to the busy, busier, and busycrazy days ahead. As long as I have my family, my dogs, my garden, my business, and delicious food and wine, it will all be good!

Nancy

the SCENT PROJECT – happy 1 year anniversary!

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Hard to believe it has been a full year that our Aroma Mists have been out and available to the public. A huge Thank You to our clientele, both furry and non furry alike, and to those curious enough to try our products.

This post is long over due, but since it’s our anniversary, it’s fitting to tell the tale behind the scents, and why we are doing what we are doing!

When I tell people I developed Aroma Mists for dogs & their people, the polite people restrain themselves from rolling their eyes, the truly ‘I have no boundaries for body language folks’ roll their eyes with gusto! And to be fair, I kind of get it.

Not all people,  but for sure many, have a weird association when they hear the word aromatherapy. It isn’t hard to conjure a new age image of some meditation room, maybe painted purple, with incense, and floating through the room massage therapists.

When people see me in person, they are a bit taken back when I propose the use of essential oils in an aroma mist to assist with their dog. I am not born from gypsy’s. I don’t have bells on my ankles, or toes for that matter. I don’t own a long flowing skirt, or bandana for my head. I’m not vegan, and I rarely do yoga, although I should do more, I enjoy it.

I have been into gardening and all that comes with it since before I can remember, and for certain, long before I started to work with dogs professionally. Essential oils come from plants, plants start growing in the dirt, dirt happens to be the essential starting point in a garden, and that is where I come in! I love playing in the dirt and growing things!

My house is almost chemical free in regards to cleansers, cleaners, soaps, and the like. It has been this way for over 25 years. A personal choice, nothing more nothing less.

When my son was a baby, I found out he was allergic to what I was eating, via breast milk. I cleaned up our families diet, whole foods only (fruit, vegetable, meat, rice, beans) and went to task and learned a great deal more about anti inflammatory herbs and plants. His body and skin needed this assist, and with my gardening knowledge it was only a matter of hooking up with specialists in the herbal world.

I started to grow; borage, comfrey, hops, lavender, calendula, chamomile, tarragon, oregano, basil, yarrow, and the like. I took classes from California to Colorado on; augmenting soil, cultivating, identification, harvesting, wild crafting, tinctures, lotions, blending, distillation, drying, and applications. And I will be honest, at one point I did consider buying a long flowing skirt!

So herbs, essential oils, plants, and their given purposes have been a HUGE part of my families well being, for a very long time.

In 2008 when I was coaching one of our Relaxing your Reactive Rover classes, I had the idea to start adding essential oils to the class environment. It was a tricky group, all of the dogs had seen or experienced evil, and the owners had lost their confidence in handling their dogs in public. The reason I thought about adding something natural is that at that time, psychotropic drugs were being prescribed like Chiclets for dogs. I was flattened with the amount of drugged out dogs I was seeing, and it was not helping, it was masking what was really going on.And the worst part was that handlers were under the impression that the drugs would ‘cure’ their dog, and they didn’t have to do any work.

At first, the scents I used were a bit to strong, they were the blends I had made for my children. So I cut back and started to use micro droplets.

Over the course of six weeks I started to see a change in the dogs and people. In addition to the great work they were doing, everyone was breathing, and breathing deeply and with comfort. Eyes relaxed, body posture soft but still aware, and deep breathing. YAY! Great work started to happen!

I started to sell custom blends to my clients. I was super honest that I wasn’t a snake oil salesman, and I wasn’t selling a cure or a substitute for doing good work. My aroma blends were made for an assist, to add another layer so to speak.

What I found was, clients who used my aroma blends became more intentional, more observant, and chose to do more work. They became self motivated, and all moving in the right direction.

Last year, my assistant Carolyn and I were talking about possibly taking these aroma blends out of the class room, and selling them to the general public. It was a lot of work, but together we moved everything forward and were greeted with such an amazing response.

Farmers markets, trade shows, home parties, phone calls, e-mails, on line sales… Woop!

So, when you see our products when you are out and about at a store, please know they came from a place with great intentions, knowledge and experience.

I love my garden and I love my dogs, and I want that to shine through my products more than anything.

This year we are adding two new products to our line, they will debut at the Bozeman, Farmers Market in June 2012.

I am grateful, happy and always moving forward! If you haven’t tried our products yet, please do. While they are designed to add emotional balance, they also smell ridiculously good! the SCENT PROJECT!

Nancy