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March 27, 2009
Goodbye to our old warehouse
I have to admit, I'm feeling kind of nostalgic this week - we're busy moving into our beautiful new warehouse, but we're leaving our old one behind. It was a grungy, cold warehouse, but it's also where we grew up as a company. Before I moved into this warehouse six years ago, I was running Juniper Ridge out of my basement. I didn't have any employees then - I did everything myself. I wild harvested the plants, made the soap, answered the phone, shipped out the orders, and showed up every saturday at the Berkeley Farmers market with a truck full of goodies from the mountains. When the phone would ring in my basement, I would literally run from the "production area" (a 10' x 10' room with an antique gas stove and a bunch of pots - total fire hazard, I can't believe I didn't burn our house down) with soap oils dripping from my hands, to the "shipping area" (second room small room with a table, phone, and ridiculous amounts of boxes, wild herbs drying on racks) to answer the phone. I got the warehouse space because business was booming and the boxes and wildharvested herbs were overunning my house. One of my customers at the farmers market was a buyer at Whole Foods, and he loved my Bay Laurel soap because it reminded him of his childhood in the hills of Northern California. And even though I was only selling to three national park stores and exactly one organic food store, Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, he swore up and down that if I could make enough soap, he would get me into a bunch of Whole Foods stores. I took him at his word, moved into the new warehouse, and indeed six months later I was selling to most of the whole foods stores in Northern California.
Part of the purpose of this blog is to promote our business paint a rosy picture of life here on the ridge, but I would be a big, fat liar if I pretended that things here were always pretty. I'd never been a boss before, and I had no idea what that meant or how to do it right. I always thought it would be easy. I mean, when I was nineteen and worked at Earth and Sea Pizza in Byron Bay Australia during an extended break from college, I thought wow, wouldn't it be great to be the boss - then instead of being told what to do, I could sit on my ass and tell other people what to do, that would totally rock! But when we started growing and I actually became a boss, I had no clue how to do it right - I mistreated some employees terribly, and got knocked around like a rope-a-dope zombie by others. Think of the movie Raging Bull here - Robert DeNiro up against the ropes with the slow-mo shots, saliva and blood flying through the air, his minefield-like face distorting horribly with every new punch ... Hey I know that guy, it's me, and that's exactly what it felt like at times!
I'm so glad that those days are over. I wish I could say I had mixed feelings about leaving, but things are so much better these days.I'm really happy to say goodbye to the old warehouse and all the chaos and roller-coaster like highs and lows that characterized the loosely held together mess that Juniper Ridge was during the years we grew from one-guy-at-the-farmers-market-company into something bigger. Somehow we managed to keep the best people through all those trying times, and now the strangest thing has happened - work is fun again. How did that happen? it was so miserable for so long, and then about a year ago, the learning curve finally caught up with us and we started running things right, we started gelling as a group, and suddenly work was fun again. So here's to our new warehouse, here's to growing up, and here's to having fun!
Posted by Hall in Juniper Ridge
