Someone once said, “Choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” This sentiment rings true for Laura Craig, owner and founder of Shade Tree Farms in Franklin. What began as a personal challenge to create her own lip balm, grew into a passion for “taking the simplest of ingredients and making something useful.”
Craig desires to bring back the old ways – the days when foraging for materials, living off the land, and raising farm animals was a way of life for nearly everyone. She has made it her goal to create her products using only simple, ethically sourced, locally derived ingredients, many of which are obtained by her own hands from her own land. That way, she knows exactly what everything is and where it came from.
“I don’t ever want to use ingredients you can’t pronounce,” Craig emphasized.
Shade Tree Farms has been in operation for more than a decade, but Craig has been creating products for herself and others for more than 25 years. Her business has grown tremendously since its founding. She credits her mother-in-law, Carolyn Craig, for sending her some of her earliest “word of mouth” customers and her daughter, Meagan Lozano, for being an honest “sounding board” when new ideas arise. The help from her family, in combination with her own commitment, has allowed Craig to sell thousands of bars of her handmade goat milk soap over the years, as well as her many other products, such as bug spray, creams, and lip balm.
Craig is open about her personal reasoning for creating natural products. One of her main motivators is her own psoriasis. She wholeheartedly believes that since switching to natural products, particularly her homemade goat milk soaps and lotions, her skin has been much healthier.
She learned that goat milk soap has a pH extremely similar to that of our own human skin. Additional knowledge Craig has acquired over the years regarding product ingredients is what has kept her in business. She handpicks every ingredient and creates small batches of every product offered to ensure quality and consistency.
In fact, her dedication to her ingredient choices has brought her many new and recurring clients because they feel safe to use her products not only on themselves, but also their children and pets.
“If I lose the passion, there’s no more business. You have to love what you do,” she said.
She has worked diligently over the years perfecting her own recipes. For example, she takes additional time to include a step, called milling, when creating her goat milk soap. This allows for a richer, longer lasting bar and guarantees that her scent choices will linger on until the very last sliver.
Not only does Craig carefully craft every product, but she also believes in providing great service to her community and customers. In fact, Craig considers her business a “labor of love” that involves not only the community but her family.
“I always try to ship orders out within a day,” she stated. “People shouldn’t have to wait for their stuff. I’m always willing to meet locals to hand deliver their orders.”
When her hands are too busy, Craig recruits help from her husband, John Craig, and son, Ian Craig, in order to keep work down to earth and close to home.
Craig provides access to her hand-made products via a website, through social media, at 23 festivals in the South, and at approximately 10 stores in Franklin. Visit https://shadetreefarmsnc.com/ to learn more.