Shelly Hill is a vibrant and down-to-earth woman whose passion and spark fuels “Wildfire & Sage,” a handmade and small-batch wellness-product company, based in Ketchikan, Alaska. “Wildfire & Sage” produces herbal products from tea to skin care with the “intent to nourish and replenish the body, both inside and out.” Her products aim for simplicity and purity and consist of five or less ingredients, with one or more of those ingredients found locally in Southeast Alaska.

I recently caught up with Shelly over the phone, and asked her a few questions:

What do you do for work?

Other than running “Wildfire & Sage,” I’m an Herbalist, Wellness Coach, and Yoga Instructor. I have also just started a job as the Small Business Adviser for the Ketchikan area.

What do you do to for hobbies?

Hobbies and creativity aren’t necessarily the same thing. I was literally just thinking how I currently do not feel like I have much creativity happening and therefor don’t have many hobbies happening. To be honest I love watching TV, I don’t know if that is a hobby? But I would say TV, reading, plants. I really like plants, so I spend a lot of time trying to learn about them and I get out and walk and hike to get out and see plants. I love photography, I would say that is a hobby. And watercolors, “I have been learning how to watercolor for years,” she said good humoredly. Hobbies kind of feed into old-timey hobbies, and seasonal hobbies, like, I attempt to knit in the winter.

What is your creative outlet?

That is a hard question. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is what is a creative outlet? I would say, a lot of times it is taking a walk or anything that has a semblance to the meditative clearing of the brain. I recently told someone if they had to live a day in my head, I don’t think they would make it. It is just constantly going. If I can get a little hippy for a moment, I associate creativity with air. Air and ideas, ideas are air too; and it is like, you almost have to ground those things. It is really hard, because I have so much floating around in my head that when I sit down to write, I can’t think about what I want to write. Things need to tumble around. When I am walking, my body is moving, it has something to do, and my brain clears. I find walking grounding, the opposite of air, so I can better formulate thoughts and ideas if I have had a walk. I know some people are very visual for their creative ideas, they like to make a vision board, etc., but that just stresses me out more. Because I don’t know the image that I want yet. I have to be grounded first. “I try to live with the earth, I like earth metaphors,” she says.

What fuels your desire to create?

“One of my big mottos or manifestoes for my brand, my logo, and actually my life, is *Simplicity.* I think we live in a really complex world, but it doesn’t have to be. So most of my products have fewer than five ingredients, you just don’t need a ton. In some ways my brand is just an extension of myself.”

As for what motivates me to create, “Well, my anxiety doesn’t let me stay in bed in the morning,” she says with an easy laugh. “I have an ever present need to be doing something in life in general.” But with my business I find what motivates me is the thought that people need to take their health back. But the convoluted traditional health system, driven by ever changing trends and fashions, makes this difficult. I think nutrition plays a huge role in our wellness, but sometimes it is adding things in and not always just taking things away, and it is being very aware. The motivating factor for me there is that I want to have a product that is trusted and made with the best ingredients and intentions, and is user friendly. For example, we all know pharmaceuticals have side effects. I am not against western medicine or medications, but what if we need them later on and we have already used them too much, or can’t take them in combination. I feel that pharmaceuticals shouldn’t have their hand in everything. Why not use herbal remedies for what you can on a daily bases, herbal prevention, and when a definite need for medication arises use medication as the backup. Say you are given an antibiotic that is going to destroy your gut microbiome; if your system is strong it will work better and the microbiome will bounce back much quicker than if your system is already weak from previous antibiotics and medications. She then added, “I am not perfect, I am currently eating a totally processed organic pop tart as we speak.”

What are your favorite mediums and ingredients to work with?

Mediums: would be plants, photography, and watercolor. Ingredients: would be rose hips – I love rose so much that it finds its way into almost every formula I create. So rose and then nettle - I want to use nettle as the base for almost everything. When it comes to my products, because I am selling without being able to directly educate, I try to keep it to tonic herbs, so herbs you can use tonically without any ill effect, rose and nettle are at the top of my list.

How did you get started?

I started with yoga when I was 16; later on, through yoga, I found Ayurveda practice, which is overall health, including, food is medicine, in a way. Then in Hawaii in 2012 I discovered a passion for helping people treat minor ailments with herbs and food from the land through working in a horticultural therapy program. This then spurred my interest in looking back, and discovering my own family’s natural remedies that had been passed down for generations. Which brought me back home to my family’s farm in Tennessee and my studying Appalachian folk medicine. I have a hard time pinpointing when and how I started, because I feel so many different roots have led me here and to the beliefs and systems I have, that of simplicity and education, things like that.

What is your process/what do you do with your finished product?

It can go a couple of ways, depending on the season. Ideally, I like to have set products that I rotate seasonally. My teas are always available, but I might do a mushroom hot chocolate blend for the winter or a bug spray for spring and summer. I think of the season and of common ailments that I would want a remedy to treat. Currently I am working on a formula for UTIs, a blend in tincture form. To develop my formulas I use my own knowledge, research and reach out to peers and past teachers, to provide the best product with the best results with local ingrediency. I only work with tonic herbs that have no side effects. I make my blends and I and a few others will test them, then I go into production. Before I make a large batch, I try a small one, see how it sells and what the feedback is.Then I sell the finished products locally in over ten stores and four communities in Southeast Alaska, online nationally, and I am working on expanding further into wholesale sales to larger retailers. I am about to bring in more help, as I bagged over 900 bags of tea this summer. If it was my only job I would be very content, but that on top of a day job is a hard, as most entrepreneurs know.

A FEW OF SHELLY’S PRODUCTS APPEAR BELOW, AS WELL AS A GLIMPSE INSIDE HER PROCESS

All photos provided by Shelly Hill