THE WILDCRAFTER
Inside the Juniper Ridge Workshop
We are the only company in the world harvesting, distilling and formulating natural fragrances. A hundred years ago, every perfume house in Paris made perfume this way. But when cheap, petroleum-based synthetic scents appeared in the 1960's, the perfume industry abandoned the techniques and ingredients they’d used for thousands of years and stopped making real fragrance. At Juniper Ridge, we still do it the old way. We have two, big doors on either side of our warehouse - the plants come in one door and leave, as products, through the other. Take a tour of some of the steps to making our products in the images below.
Wildharvesting in the mountains
Plant trimmings on the workshop floor
Steam distillation fragrance extraction
Sage that has been run through the still
Smoke infusion in a limited number of fragrance blends
Fragrance blend formulation
Trail Crew Soap production
Cabin Spray bottling
Modern Farmer posted this excellent interview with Juniper Ridge founder Hall Newbegin, check out an excerpt below, and be sure to visit their site to read the full interview:
If you’ve ever wanted to experience hiking in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, you could book a plane ticket and lay down some cash at your nearest REI. Or, you could grab the Yuba River Cabin Spray from Bay Area wildcrafting fragrance company Juniper Ridge, a company that has carved out its own niche as a purveyor of all-foraged scents meant to evoke very specific bits of wilderness. Juniper Ridge doesn’t just want to fill your space with the smell of “the outdoors,” they want to transport the specific sensation of, say, meandering through Big Sur or being deep in the Cascades — via scent. Complete interview >>
Complex Magazine has a new feature with our Campfire Incense, be sure to check it out.
The Field Lab van - keep an eye out for this dusty beast on the back roads of the West. If you spot it, you know we are nearby, wildcrafting aromatics for inclusion in some future fragrance blend. Pictures of last week's trip up the Yuba River and into California's Sierra Buttes by the incomparably talented Thayer Gowdy.
Real, place-based fragrance—the kind that comes from plants, trees, moss, and bark—rearranges your insides, it brings up emotions, transports you to the stillness of the outdoors, and in general does complex shit to us that we’ll never understand. You can’t buy our materials or fragrance ingredients anywhere because nobody does what we do, and no one works with the plants we work with. We would never substitute European sage oil—which we could buy for cheap cheap cheap since it comes from huge farms in Mexico—for our local wild sages because they smell completely different. The only way to capture Big Sur in a bottle is to go there, put your hiking boots on, collect plants, and make it yourself. We wildcraft our ingredients, which means we travel to our favorite wilderness areas, harvest plants there, and distill them into fragrances. Sometimes we even distill the fragrance on the road in our converted whiskey still. That’s crazy! No one else in the world is making fragrance this way and probably for good reason, it is expensive and difficult, but it’s so beautiful—we’re the world’s only wild fragrance company!
Many thanks to Thayer Allyson Gowdy for these amazing images of our most recent wildcrafting trip, be sure to visit her website to see more of her work.
to see more of Juniper Ridge harvesting in the wild, follow us on instagram @juniperridge
#nofakefragrance
#mountainsinabottle
#lifeonthetrail
Juniper Ridge is in NYC for the Capsule Tradeshow.
Great display from Clark Street Mercantile featuring our Trail Crew Soap. Check...
We were featured in this month's Men's Journal! Click here for a hi-res version of this great article from Adam Fisher.
Organic Spa Magazine has a great article on creating a spa experience in the comfort of your own home, featuring our Cabin Spray. Click here to check out an online version of the article.
Our Campfire Incense was featured on the Huffington Post Blog on their List of 6 Must-Haves for a Non-Toxic, Easy, Breezy Summer. Be sure to follow the links and check out the whole list!
Coldsmoke does double duty as a winter sportswear brand and winter sports/lifestyle magazine. They've got a great blog post and photos with our Trail Crew Soap up now, head over and have a look.
We love seeing our products out there in the wild. Thanks to @jeffdepano and @peterhadar28 for these images of our Backpacker's Cologne, Cabin Spray, and Trail Crew Soap. Be sure and check us out on Instagram at @juniperridge, and tag your images of our products #mountainsinabottle, #nofakefragrance, #lifeonthetrail.
Summer is here and the time is right to get in the water! The remote Siskiyou mountains of Northern California are perfect for long days of escaping the heat in cool mountain lakes and winding forest rivers. Can't get there right now? Check out our Siskiyou products for a quick dose of these forests. All of our Siskiyou products are made with real plants, bark, moss and other things found hiking this rugged backcountry.
Juniper Ridge is capturing potent gems that give us both a wide-angle and a close-up of the natural world. At first they shock and tingle my (city) system; however as they settle, and particularly when the solid perfume warms up on the skin there is a subtlety that comes alive, the kind that keeps me bringing my wrist to my nose most of the day for a lingering sniff. I am tickled that the solid perfume is easily portable, and all dressed up in its vintage re-purposed tin.There is nothing like connecting to nature, if we take the time to do it and to notice. Thanks for doing and noticing Juniper Ridge.CLICK TO THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE
Juniper Ridge Big Sur Cabin Spray, $65
Visitors of Big Sur often say it is the closest they’ve gotten to finding religion....
