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I grew up spending summers at my great uncle George’s tobacco farm in Robertson County, TN. (Population of around 400 people back then, around 1,000 now.) Robertson County is known as the “Dark Fired Tobacco Capital of the World.” Although the numbers are not as high as they once were, tobacco farming is still a wide industry in the county where I spent much of my childhood. A lot of my mom’s family still lives in that area.
Everyone in the family pitched in when it was time to hang the tobacco to cure in the barn. Farmers like uncle George had to diversify by raising cattle and other crops, because they were only allowed to grow so much tobacco. It was a simple life, and when you needed to buy something in a strictly rural area like Orlinda,TN, you usually went to the Farmer’s Co Op. So as a child, I grew to love those types of stores and the people that worked in them.
Fast forward-In 2009 my mom was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. A retired hairdresser, she was using traditional pain relief creams along with prescription drugs (some of which were removed from the market due to side effects) when she developed a severe reaction to one of the dyes in the (blue) cream.
I was fascinated with white willow bark as a potential hero ingredient. I had read (oddly enough originally in a yoga magazine) that the Chinese, Native Americans, and Egyptians all used the bark of the white willow tree for thousands of years as a pain reliever.
We started researching and experimenting with white willow bark blended with various essential oils. During the 21 stabs at a winning formula, we had Willow Balm emu, Willow Balm vegan, Willow Balm Sport (higher menthol), Batch 21 (had MSM powder in it), Willow Balm 3-6-9 (focused on Omega fatty acids) and several other formulas that just weren’t good at all. Looking back now it’s funny but at the time it was dead serious experimentation. Once I put samples into cheap aluminum lip gloss tins that rusted around the rim and ruined the 100 samples.