When WishGarden Herbs founder and president Catherine Hunziker purchased the company from a colleague in 1987, the company literally fit in her hallway closet. Now, 35 years later, WishGarden has a national reach and continues to grow in both size and mission. In this interview, Catherine shares her memories of WishGarden’s past and her vision for its future.
Q. How did you become interested in herbal medicine?
I was in college during the flower child era, which was all about getting back to nature. In the early 1980s, I wanted to live somewhere where peaches grew, so I moved to the Ozarks and lived in a cabin in a beautiful river valley. It was a part of the country where many back-to-the-landers lived.
I was walking early one morning when I came across a meadow where wild turkeys and deer were grazing. As I stood there, I heard a funny sound: the buzzing of bees hovering around a bush that was in full bloom. Mid January! It turned out to be witch hazel, and I was simply impressed, because for it to bloom at that time of year, the life force had to be incredible.
Soon after, I met a man in the community who was a herbalist. He grew herbs and made things with them to sell at the local cooperative. It was these two experiences that really got me interested in medicinal plants.
Q: How did you go from living in a cabin in the Ozarks to running a spice company in Colorado?
I lived in Colorado before moving to Missouri, and when I moved back here I continued to be involved in the midwifery movement. I had previously trained as a midwife and was now teaching childbirth when a friend of mine told me she wanted to leave her herbal business, which she had bought a few years earlier from the founder, another local midwife. midwife named Barbara Wishengrad.
At the time, state laws did not allow midwives to prescribe medications, so they were one of the groups that returned to herbal medicine during what we call the herbal renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. That’s one of the things that makes our story a little different than a lot of other spice companies; our original focus was on the use of herbs during pregnancy, during and after childbirth. If you work as a midwife with mothers and newborn babies, you need tools that are safe and body-friendly, but also effective.
I bought the company in 1987. Coming from the back-to-the-land movement and the midwifery community, I wanted to be part of creating a sustainable future and I wanted to do something that incorporated my interest in plants and herbal medicine incorporated.
I would call that the first life cycle of WishGarden, when we were selling primarily to childbirth experts. I grew about 45 different types of herbs that I used in the formulas and made and shipped everything from my garage. It was all mail order and all the marketing was word of mouth. Many of the original formulas we developed for the childbearing community are the same ones we still offer today!
Catherine with son Sam, after the home birth of daughter Anna (1979).
Q. How did you expand from primarily maternity formulas to the broad product range you have now?
As my clients and their clients started using the products, I received many requests for other formulas. ‘Can you make something for my child? Can you make something for my husband, or my brother, or my sister, or my friend?’
So I started formulating for post-pregnancy: immunity, stress, sleep – all things people need for general well-being. Kick-Ass Immune Activator and Deep Lung were both requests from a local naturopath, and Serious Cough was actually a request from the school my daughter Anna attended.
I also started selling at the Boulder Farmers’ Market, where WishGarden was the first value-added booth not to sell produce or flowers straight from the farm.
Catherine sold WishGarden formulas at the Boulder Farmers’ Market in the early 1990s.
Q. You’ve come a long way since you had a one-man stand at the farmers market! How did that happen?
As the business started to grow, I was able to hire employees and move into a commercial space. Then, in the early 2000s, Whole Foods and the Vitamin Cottage in Boulder, Colorado, were the first two stores to start carrying our products in stores. At that time we still had handwritten labels on all the bottles!
I started learning how to navigate that industry, and that began our second life cycle, which was focused on establishing ourselves in the physical retail space for natural products. We started here in Colorado, then the stores took us to new markets in the Rocky Mountain region to the Pacific Northwest and into Texas and the South. We were still way too small to do any kind of marketing, but we learned how to leverage that buzz by doing demos and handing out samples and eventually sending out teachers to provide training to staff and members of the community.
Q. What’s next for you at WishGarden?
Our third life cycle, which I would say we are just beginning, is becoming a national brand by expanding our retail reach and focusing on e-commerce and marketing. As we’ve matured as a company, we’ve also been able to bring on more people, including my son Sam, the CEO of WishGarden, and my daughter Anna, our Director of Customer Experience. That has given me the space to return to what I have always been most interested in, namely the plants themselves. Most of my personal goals have to do with establishing a community-supported Herbal Ag Hub to facilitate the cultivation of medicinal plants regionally and beyond and to educate more people about herbal medicine.
The first thing I want to do is create a home base for growing and processing herbs for commercial and home herbal medicine. It will also be an educational space to demonstrate good manufacturing practices (GMPs), such as how to dry herbs efficiently and economically and how to keep them clean so they pass microbial testing. In recent years we have entered into contracts with local farmers to source more of our herbs closer to home. We have always sourced herbs that are organically, sustainably, and ethically grown, but sourcing locally grown herbs here in Colorado is relatively new to us, and many of these smaller local growers need help setting that up in a way that allows that is. affordable and scalable and that complies with botanical herb regulations.
One of my other goals is to help support the viability of the regional foodshed and farming community. It can be difficult for farmers to survive, and I’ve always felt that adding medicinal plants – which can generally be sold for more per pound than other products – could generate more income for farmers. For example, right now the vast majority of the elderberry we use in the United States comes from Eastern Europe, but it grows great here! I would also like to help explore how we can grow more of our wild plants like Osha and Yerba Mansa in a sustainable way so that people can benefit from their amazing medicinal value without overharvesting them in the wild.
My fourth goal is to focus on regenerative land use. Soil – not dirt, but living soil – is crucial to saving our planet from the climate crisis. So even though it’s not specifically about herbs, it’s an integral part.
This all has to do with what I would call our primary mission: helping people rediscover herbal medicine. As humans, we have evolved with herbs as our medicinal partners. When the pharmaceutical industry emerged, they brought a lot to the table, but along the way we lost sight of what herbs have to offer. And what they have to offer is a lot!
Catherine at Jack’s Solar Garden researches agricultural voltaics and medicinal plants.
Interviewer Valerie Gleaton is a professional writer and editor. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also earned a certificate in science and environmental reporting.
For educational purposes only. This information has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, or to sell any product.
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