THE WILDCRAFTER
Limited time, members only pricing on our products for our European customers
We are hikers first and are committed to defending Wilderness. We donate 10% of our profits to organizations like The Conservation Alliance, check in with to learn about their latest efforts to protect wild places for their habitat and recreation values.
Clark St. Mercantile in Montreal offers a very select range of products, focusing on relaying the story behind each product & brand, with the goal of providing an escape from the disposable culture in which we now live, to offer the choice to buy products that will last, from brands that strive to create quality over quantity. Visit their website to learn more...
Wilderness Collective has a great article about a day in the life of a fragrance wildcrafter, written by our own Obi Kaufmann. Read the entire article below:
A day in the life of a fragrance wildcrafter—on the trail with Obi Kaufmann and Juniper Ridge’s Field Lab.
I got everybody up too early this morning. The campground was awash with the moans of the sleepy undead as they returned to life in their sleeping bag tombs. Last night’s campfire went way later than anybody had expected, which just speaks to our normal idiocy because every campfire goes way later than we think it will. When the Juniper Ridge team starts passing around the whiskey flask, everybody dreads the way dawn will always come way too early. Alas, dawn is the best time to get on the trail in order to beat the early summer sun and get our harvesting done before noon.
Coffee is quick to happen and the zombies transform back into the happy campers we know and love. Juniper Ridge’s so-called “Field Lab” crew are used to it actually: going out looking for wildflowers with a bit of a lingering hangover. It is our pride and our passion to be out in the field, collecting components for real fragrance blends that deliver a truly evocative sense of these wild places. This trip took us over the ridge from Big Sur on California’s central coast, on the Eastern border of the Ventana National Wilderness, deep in the Santa Lucia Mountains.
After coffee, we secure our camp, fill our water bottles from the big...
Toast Travels has a great interview with Juniper Ridge founder Hall Newbegin. Check it out below:
"When I started out, it broke my heart to see what passed for fragrance. All those fancy, tiny bottles filled with manipulated petroleum – yuck. I wanted to make fragrances that smelled like the places I knew and loved as a lifelong backpacker and hiker. Nothing smells better than the sage-covered mountains of Big Sur, or wildflower meadows along Mt. Hood’s Timberline Trail at the height of alpine summer – that’s real fragrance.
People think of fragrance as being a shallow experience that just happens in our nose. It’s so much richer than that. Smell is the oldest of our senses. It by-passes reason and goes straight to the ancient parts of our brains – right to our emotions. Until really very recently in our evolutionary history, we depended on our sense of smell (and on wild plants) for our day-to-day survival. So it’s no surprise that we have deep faculties for interacting with nature through our noses, even if those faculties are laying dormant inside of us.
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. You can’t buy our materials or ingredients anywhere because nobody else does what we do, no-one works with the plants we work with. I’d never substitute European sage oil 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 favourite wilderness areas, harvest plants there and distill them into fragrances. Sometimes we even distill the fragrance on the road in our converted whiskey still. No-one else in the world is making fragrance this way and probably for good reason – it’s a questionable business model.
We’re the world’s only wild fragrance company. 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 1960s, the perfume industry abandoned the techniques and ingredients they’d used for thousands of years and stopped making real fragrance. Our materials are everything to us. They’re not just important to our products, they are our products. We create our fragrances by spending months in the backcountry, drinking beer, crawling around like squirrels, smelling all the plants and dirt so we can bring you the real feel of the real place."
After three weeks of infusion in a bath of organic jojoba oil, the Coastal Sage is ready for the Press. Press Day is always a great time in the workshop, the whole place smells like a late Spring meadow in Big Sur. This infusion will be utilized in our new Backpacker's Colognes coming out this Fall, but you can certainly experience a lot of the same bright, floral notes in our Big Sur Cabin Spray.
"Bringing the blessings of California's nature to cosmetics. Soap made from materials gathered in the mountains by men who like hiking. Sold on the free market, it was the beginning of 'Juniper Ridge.' After that, it expanded to cologne, room fragrance, incense, etc., though the original concept hasn't changed. The ingredients, picked by mountain walking-loving staff while camping in the California mountains, forests and deserts, is not cultivated by hand, but possesses only strength of plants grown by nature (of course the ingredients are gathered lawfully).
The Products, made from essences extracted from various types of wild flowers and leaves, branches, moss, mushrooms, truly the bounty of the earth. The natural fragrance surrounds you with the peacefulness of great nature every time you use it." - translated from the original article
We're featured in Australia's Smith Journal - "Californian perfumery juniper ridge specialises in capturing nature’s odour. We spoke to Obi Kaufmann about the life of the manly, modern-day perfumer..." click here to read the full interview >>
We were featured in Get The Five's list of innovative startup companies last week, click here to view the article >>
Hatchet Outdoor Supply, one of our retailers in NYC, was recently featured in Brooklyn Magazine's BK Style section, check it out here >>
Check some more press featuring Juniper Ridge at the links below:
• Lifestyle News Network - Natural Scent: Cabin Spray Brings the Outdoors In
That time has come again, when we say goodbye to Spring and hello to Summer. In Juniper Ridge's world, that means we turn our attention from wildcrafting coastal sage in the mountains of central California and begin thinking about conifer harvesting in the high country. Josh, one of our senior distillers, shot this gorgeous shot on the way back to camp after a day of sage harvesting in the hills just south of Big Sur. We will be posting some stories, exclusive photos and news from our community here, at THE WILDCRAFTER, once a week. Thank you for subscribing.
"Plants and wilderness are the spiritual core of Juniper Ridge. When I'm struggling or feeling lost, I hit the trail and am reminded of the bigger thing: wildness itself. That’s the thread I’ve followed my whole life—in business, in my free time, with my family—and it’s the thing that always sets me right again. I think everyone needs to be part of something bigger than themselves to tame the anxieties and feel whole again. I’m sure religion does that for some folks. Wilderness is my church and the trail is my ritual." - Hall Newbegin, founder of Juniper Ridge
NYLON FOR GUYS
OPRAH MAGAZINE
CHALKBOARD MAGAZINE
HAPPY FATHERS' DAY FROM BEAM & ANCHOR AND JUNIPER RIDGE
HAPPY FATHERS' DAY FROM WINTER SESSION & JUNIPER RIDGE
From the Winter Session website: "The intrepid team at Oakland, CA-based Juniper Ridge ventures into the wilds of the West...
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