Simply be – the Change

Does the site look a bit different?  It’s a pretty radical change for botanical earth but one that’s been in the works for over a year.  I truly wanted to practice more of what I believe – more indie business influence and better sustainability.  There’s been so many people helping and the change is still on going.  I’ll just highlight some of the major changes and talk more about each later in the weeks to come.

New Hosting Company – I moved Botanical Earth from YahooStores to a woman-owned, carbon-neutral hosting company.  Acorn Host holds my beliefs of “conscious capitalism” and I can say their customer service and support is better than any hosting company I have ever been with in 7 years.  While I lost SEO benefits and exposure by going with a smaller company, their policies and quality of service out weighs any marketing with the big hosting giant.

New Design – Our new looks was created by Purr Design.  Lindsay took my ramblings and turned them into something I felt but never imagined.  No more conforming to what an eco-friendly business should look like.  If I see one more white, green and blue label, website or banner from a company claiming “natural” and their products are nothing but greenwashed synthetics, I ‘ll scream.  Purr Design gave Botanical Earth the push it needed.  I can’t say enough good things about my experience with this indie web designer.

New Packaging – You’ll notice more glass and less plastic in our packaging.  While I used plastics to help reduce shipping costs, I read one too many studies that people don’t recycle plastic as much as they do glass.  With flat rate shipping from USPS, I no longer feel that customers will be impacted with higher shipping by using heavier glass.  Also you’ll notice a lot of bio-degradable clear bags made of organic corn starch to replace the plastic – so now with some orders, everything from our product, packaging and shipping materials will be bio-degradable or completely recycleable.  New labeling is on the way too.

If you may have heard, our little town of Winfield Missouri was hit pretty hard with the flooding of the Mississippi River.  While we are not personally effected, our neighbors are and I have been working with the Humane Society and the Food Pantry to help out.

So thanks for checking in on Botanical Earth – we’re still in business.  The volume of business has increase so much that I had to make so changes in how I do business (thank you happy BE customers!) and needed some time to redesign our shop.

A sort’a new look for botanical earth

If you check out our on-line store, you’ll see the start of our new look at botanical earth.  While you’ll still see the original logo of the “b” and “e”, our new logo is up on the site!  Hopefully over the next couple of months I’ll have the blog redone too.

Our new logo look was designed for us by Jessica Lim, a super creative indie artist in Australia.  The woman is all about design!  She took my ramblings of what I wanted and made it clean and simple – and in blue and white – my favorite color combo.  I just had to ask her to design something for us because she runs her own store called “Wild Garden“  and I love her sense of style, plus I just had to work with someone that has a company named wild garden!  Check out the wonderful designs on her own site and her design blog, and let’s not forget her Australian/New Zealand Design shop, ModaMuse….really she’s amazing!

Patchouli Citrus Soap updated

The new Patchouli Citrus Soy Milk soap is now available.  We cut it the other day and it looks great!  With the earlier cold weather, the soy milk base is a nice creamy white and it really contrasts great with the red clay chunks.  The colored chunks are heavily scented with patchouli and citrus essential oils.

Originally, the soy milk line was solid color soaps, but I wanted to do something to make the stand out.  The chunking just gives it a more artistic look than just the solid bar – I hope everyone likes the change.