When I look back over the last several years and my time in my business, The Brown Barn Company, I am amazed at the transformation - of us, myself, my family, our employees and most of all our brand.
Starting out with the goal of bringing the best quality handmade bath & body products available to our customers seemed simple enough at first - but then we found other products we fell in love with and wanted to share with our customers. Tea, Coffee, Cheese, Ice Cream..Wine, Chocolates, Olive Oil and Vinegar...wait a minute - those are not bath products (most of the time)! We had a problem - how can we sell all of this and still remain true to our original vision? Does our vision fit anymore? Now what?
We have spent the last 18 months pondering and striving to answer these questions and more.
- Have we changed? After much reflection and discussion, Alyssa (my daughter and business partner) and I realized that what we really wanted to bring to our customers had changed. We'd moved from wanting to provide a great bath product to wanting to provide great products that enrich the lives of our customers on many levels. We recognized that creating a soulful lifestyle is about more than a good hot bath (oooooo...I can't believe I just said that!!!). We looove our bath products, our bath products are our heart - our soul - but there is just so much more to share! A great bath is made better when it includes a small tray of chocolate truffles, a cup of tea or a glass of wine. A morning shower is followed by that perfect cup of coffee...Coffee with toast and yummy jam....Jam and toast on a pretty plate....A beautiful towel to dry the plate after you use it...the list just goes on. We find we love all of these products and soon found we wanted to make them all - but that was out of the question - we do a great job of making bath products but we can't make cheese, coffee, tea and towels. We can however, sell them!
- What do we sell? Brown Barn isn't just about baths anymore. Brown Barn is now a marketplace for Artisanal and other quality vendors. We have added culinary, gourmet and home decor products with clothing and jewelry coming next. Our goal is to bring you into our lives and share what we love - from bath to food to home items. We've removed the "bath" boundaries we'd self-imposed and opened our lines up to other vendors and products. Now we are only limited by our imagination and the lines we are able to locate.
- Who do we sell? Even though we've expanded our lines we are still being extremely fussy about who gets to be part of the Brown Barn product line. Vendors are carefully selected based on some simple questions - Will it serve the needs of our customers? Is it good for us and our customers? Is it made well? Packaged beautifully? Does the price make sense? Can it be reproduced so we can keep selling it? And more importantly - do we, as the owners of the company - absolutely love it??
- How do we sell? We also recognized that it wasn't enough for the customers to walk in the store, pick something off the shelf and walk out. I was always a little let down when selling this way. I have a Master's degree in Education so perhaps its been ingrained into me to teach, and I was a real "hands-on" type teacher so putting up a poster and leaving it at that just is not enough for me. We want the customers to experience the products and the process, to learn and feel when they come into Brown Barn. It's taken us almost two years of research and trial and error but we feel we've fallen onto the right products and selling methods for Brown Barn and our customers seem to agree! When you visit Brown Barn stores now you will find a blending bar where you can sniff and blend your own fragrance and then watch your product being finished in front of you; you can sample a tea and coffee before purchasing; you'll soon be able to sample your own blends of Olive Oil & Vinegar before buying the perfect combination for your table; you'll be able to taste wines before buying. We want you to have a sensory experience as much as a visual. We want the store to be exploratory - smell, sight, taste, touch.
- What does this make us? Well - it makes us more than a bath store but less than a department store. We've been stewing on this question quite a bit. We think we are an Artisanal Marketplace. You may have already noticed a change in our logo to "Artisanal Products - Authentic Living - from Seed to Soul". We are focused on bringing great products from vendors we love and trust, trying to not only focus just on the small hand-makers but also celebrate the ingenuity and superior product lines of larger companies who do it well. We are not going to be locked into a small niche but we are going to create our own niche - the Brown Barn line.
We hope you enjoy your next visit to a Brown Barn store. We are planning on opening stores regularly throughout Wisconsin in the coming years and expanding from there. We are also working on new web-sites and trying to come up with ways to bring the store experience to our customers virtually.
Thank you to all who have remained on this journey with us and welcome to those who are just now joining us! We hope we are able to help you find the perfect products to feed your soul and warm your home.
Christine Untiedt
Founder
The Brown Barn Company llc
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