Main Street Mavericks Business Spotlight: True Lavender Collective

True Lavender Collective on Main Street in downtown Ashland was the Main Street Mavericks’ first stop in Southern Oregon. With the lavender smell spilling onto the street, the shop was a genuinely spectacular sensory delight.

What started as a Pelindaba Lavender Farm franchise had to carve out a new path when the famous San Juan lavender supplier closed its doors without telling any of its shop owners ahead of time. Orders paid for went unmet, phone calls went unanswered, and Julie Harden had a choice to make. Keep going with her dream? Or use this as a sign from the universe that it was time to quit.

We sat down with Julie to hear about her amazing store and how she turned some bad news into a collective of the finest lavender products in Oregon.

Q&A With True Lavender Collection

Tell us about yourself and your small business!

I’m Julie Harden. I am the owner of True Lavender Collective. We are located in Ashland, Oregon, which is the southernmost part of Oregon, about 15 miles north of the California border. We have been in business here since July 2018.

True Lavender Collective is a collective of the best-curated collection of lavender products that we have found. We have partnered with eight different Oregon Lavender Farms, including some local to us here in the Rogue Valley and north of us.

We also manufacture and handcraft some of our own products here locally. You will find anything from culinary lavender products to home and pet care, lavender items, personal care, therapeutic care, lavender decor, and about 200 plus products in our lineup of lavender jewelry and lavender ceramics. Lots of fun things. If you love a lavender lifestyle, we probably have some things for you.

Tell us about your favorite thing about your business.

I think my favorite thing is that I make my own decisions. So, as a small business owner, I’m not working for anyone else anymore.

I get to decide what’s a priority, what’s not a priority, what my customers may want, and what I may want to see in my business. I have the flexibility to try new things and see if they work. I have the flexibility to create my own products and just continue to look for and curate the best items I can find dedicated to the beautiful lavender plant.

Tell us about your proudest moment owning your business.

I think whenever someone walks in here, takes that deep breath, and enjoys the free aromatherapy, they immediately are settled and calmer. They walk into a beautiful space and experience all things lavender, which is really a whole lavender experience that they’ve never probably had.

People who tell me that this is their favorite store in town or they think about coming to Ashland and want to immediately come to the store. They share it with their friends and family. Those are some of the proudest moments. To know that people love it here as much as we do and want to come back and tell others about it.

What is your top piece of advice for small business owners just starting out?

My top advice is to be realistic. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme at all. You are going to make some trade-offs in making money and some livelihood aspects to be your own boss and make your own decisions. And I would set aside five years for this. I don’t think you can really tell if something’s working within a year or two for a small business. There’s just so many aspects. COVID, fires — just things that we didn’t think of or expect.

That’s pushed out my five-year plan probably two years. But yeah, it’s not something you can just churn and try for a year and see how it goes.

I really think you have to be realistic and set aside time to dedicate to something to see if it’s going to work. So that’s my advice.

What is the best part of being a small business owner?

I think for me, it’s getting able to create products that I want and need right now. And I know my customers have needs, and before, when we had an exclusive supplier where we had to carry every single one of their products, we would make suggestions for products, and many of those never happened.

Earlier this year, when that changed, the very first product that I made was a lavender pet mist. I am a very proud owner of a little miniature Labradoodle who goes with me everywhere. And this was a product that I knew I could use in between her using lavender pet shampoo, of course, but also something to spray on her coat and keep her neutralizing odors and keep that fresh sense.

So this is the very first product that I created, and it’s very quickly becoming the number one seller in our lavender pet line. So that’s the best part of being a small business owner.

What is the biggest challenge your business has faced?

For about five years of the business, we were a franchise of one of the largest lavender farms in the United States. That essentially meant we had an exclusive agreement with them.

We sold every single one of their products in our store. They were our single supplier, and we rented their brand in effect and used their brand to benefit and be a local shop here in Oregon for people to get their items instead of having to travel to a northern part of Washington to get them.

For the first five and a half years, it worked smoothly. You don’t envision a company 24 years old suddenly closing, but that’s exactly what happened at the end of January of this year. We got word that the land was being foreclosed on. The owner was behind at least 3 million in his payments, and the bank was done, so those procedures had already started.

The owner did not share that information with us. He stopped communicating with us in late December.

There were seven franchise owners across the United States. We had checks bouncing before our commission checks. Then we heard, basically piecing the information together, that the farm was ceasing operations immediately. I was out about 13K from orders that I had put in and never received. All the way up to another owner who was owed more than $60,000.

So we were all devastated and trying to figure out what that meant.

Three of the seven stores closed, and the remaining four of us are still in contact. We have regular calls that I put together, and we’ve each taken different paths. We are trying to rewrite what our business is about.

But yeah, immediately, it was like, okay, I set aside five years for this. And that was the five-year mark for me this year. So was this the universe telling me, like, is this it? Am I supposed to go and do something else? And so I sat with that for a little bit and then started looking and thinking about products.

Are there products that I would want to bring in immediately? And could I get new suppliers? Could I make my own products?

Still feeling a passion for doing that answered that question for me. So, I set aside February. I knew I had at least three months’ worth of inventory to keep going. That was a blessing to have that. I had some local farms here with which I had already developed relationships. I immediately reached out to them. One could provide me with raw materials, and another one had finished products that we now carry in our store.

And then started to get supplies from other Oregon lavender farms. It’s a blessing that I am here in Oregon. Lavender does very well here.

Then, the idea of the collective came to me. I knew I wanted to create and manufacture some of my own products. And so that’s what we set out to do. So, replace those top favorites and then bring in new things, such as lavender syrup, lavender bath bombs, shower steamers of sage lavender and white sage, and tons of new products. So that’s really how the collective came to be. Instead of the same brand across the board, five brands next to each other, including our own.

Losing your exclusive supplier when you’re not prepared for it is definitely a sudden challenge. And we’ve thankfully handled that and gotten past some of the hard stuff and launched our website, which is something we didn’t have control of before. Yeah, we are plugging ahead and taking over the world as our new true lavender collective.

Cutting out a middleman has allowed us to increase our margins and pick and choose what exactly works well for us here in Ashland.

So, if they were to start up again? No, I don’t want to go back there. But at the same time, I was glad that it happened in year five and not year one. This was my very first small business, my very first retail store. I learned a lot from them in that process. And I think that allowed me to more quickly adapt and hit the ground running in the new mode.

What is a typical day in the life?

Today started with posting on social media and checking Facebook messages, Instagram messages, emails, and website inquiries. Responding to those and dealing with a crisis where your Wi-Fi is not working in the store, and you can’t process orders.

Thankfully, that doesn’t happen too often, but that is something that I have to deal with on a regular basis.

But then, later today, I will probably be sifting through lavender buds, making sure they’re clean before we start creating some lavender sachets. We have an event this weekend, so I will be stopping at the printer to pick up items for that.

I will be doing some inventory planning. So, I’m crunching numbers to figure out what I need to order, what products I need to make, and what packaging to order. One thing we’re also working on right now is planning for the holidays. So, getting new gift collections together. Packaging is my least favorite part.

It’s trying to find packaging that’s sturdy enough and cute enough and fits the things we want. I’ll probably be doing that today as well.

At night, yeah, more working on labels and packaging things, working on new product ideas.

That’s something I’m really enjoying: searching for new products, looking through my accounting, and seeing the health of my business.

Taking things on and off the website and updating the website are typical things for me now as a small business owner.

How do you set healthy boundaries as a small business owner?

I think that it’s incredibly important to set boundaries and have that balance. Usually, I’m here on Sunday and Monday. Then I like to stay in motion, so I’m usually here on Tuesdays. But this Tuesday, I was like, I cannot be in the store. I stayed at home, set up my fall decor, and did a little bit of work here and there, but really, no. And then other days, I turn off all the notifications on my phone.

I just have to listen to my body and my brain. My brain will tell me absolutely not. You can not go into the store. You cannot work. Yeah, there are days when my dog and I are just in our PJs, watching YouTube videos all day. And just that’s what my brain needs to reset.

But I’m definitely a go go person. If I’m just sitting there, I’m like, I could be working on a social media post, or I could be doing that. But unplugging is also very important.

If we are celebrating True Lavender Collective one year from now, what are we celebrating?

I would love to celebrate that our monthly gross profit from the website covers our lease for that month.

That would definitely alleviate some stress. I would love to have the problem of having so many website orders that I need to hire someone else to fulfill and ship those orders. And I’d love to celebrate being able to pay myself. So, hopefully, next year, we’ll be here doing that.

Tell us about some of the products that you’ve made.

Manufactured locally for us is our lavender body wash. Our lavender hand and body lotion, which has always been a top seller, and then also our therapeutic salve and body butter.

We also have things like our lavender linen water. So, a spray for your fabrics, your sheets, your pajamas, your pillows. This is a perfect spray for that. We also have a lavender body mist that I make. So this is great as you’re out. This is great to keep in the fridge and then have a cool, refreshing mist.

Our lavender insect repellent is also a top seller, so this is one that we recreated, and after the pet mist, this is probably the next product that I created. Our lavender room mist is a recent one. So this is inspired by the old lavender farm but a little bit different, too.

And that’s what I’m finding nowadays: I’m putting my own little spin on things. So this has lavender and a little bit of citrus oil, and I added some lime. So it’s a nice little pairing.

Had you heard of Merchant Maverick before we contacted you?

I had not. But I have spent time on the website since. I watched a couple of videos and am definitely looking at the reviews on high-yield savings accounts and insurance providers, as well as things I think will be really helpful to me.

So, I’m looking forward to digging into more of the items that small business owners can learn from.

Vendor Rundown

What tools does True Lavender Collective use?

What POS do you use? “We switched to Shopify at the beginning of the year. That has been actually a a blessing to us as we went through some challenges and major changes to the business that allowed me to quickly add and remove products and manage inventory pretty easily.”

What do you use for payroll and accounting? “We use QuickBooks Online. I was having someone else run payroll for me with my old CPA firm, and then I switched to doing that myself this year. So that’s been pretty easy.”

What about your website? “That is also Shopify. We launched about two months ago. And as I said, I was able to build that by myself, and I am learning different aspects and updating it. But all in all, that’s been really easy to use.

And your bank? We use Chase Bank. “That was just recommended by the original owner who started this store and owned it for the first year.”

And what about business insurance? “We learned this year that sometime last year, our insurance company just dropped all of their small business plans, and no one notified me, and I didn’t notice that. We didn’t have insurance for probably nine months. I was able to quickly get some basic liability and coverage with Next.”