Odor de Door County

This week we made our first sojourn to Door County, Wisconsin to scope out a possible future store location. But also, as life-long Wisconsin natives with a nomad’s love for travel, it had been gnawing on our conscious for years that we had never visited one of the most well-loved travel destinations in Wisconsin.

The things that I enjoy most when traveling are of course the things I can’t find at home: Cherries, cherries, CHERRIES!!!! (Eh-hem…avid fruit lover here) Beautiful, big, blue bays nestled between green, wooded cliffs. Charming shore-side towns filled with shops, galleries, and eateries. Harbors adorned by a smattering of sailboats that when silhouetted by a setting sun, cause you to stop and stare.

But as a naturalist, what I found most striking were the cedars which, coming from an overly deer-browsed community, are scarce to non-existent back home, but here were fairly large and plentiful, softening the shorelines with fans of lacy, green leaves, and also, the tiny dead alewives that dotted the white rocks along the waterline of Washington Islands’ beaches.

Both visually striking, yes, but as you can imagine, odorously striking. Slightly malodorous in the case of the fish, but for me smelling fish kind of enriched my experience on the lake…where it just had my mom near gagging.

This got me meditating on the diverse effect of smell on people, which I so often see in the store. One customer can open a jar of body butter and hungrily breathe in whatever scent wafts from that particular jar, and then the next customer may pick up that same jar, start to take a smell, and quickly jerk their head away in distaste.

We are all unique individuals, with unique personal chemistries and what smells wonderful to one, can smell like dead fish to another. Even more confounding, what smells great ON one person can smell like…well, maybe not dead fish…just not great, on another.

So while we promise never to make a product that smells like dead fish to anyone (we do, however, make a soap that will make fish like how you smell) I encourage you to remember, all smells are not the same…because people aren’t.

Wishing you only good smells! Alyssa