Business partners Adelia Kittrell and Liz Sanders might be from different parts of the state — Kittrell from the hills of the Ozarks, Sanders from Hot Springs, the country’s original spa city — but the two have more than a few things in common. They’ve both worked on the Heifer Ranch in Perryville. They live just blocks from each other in Little Rock’s downtown SoMa district. And they’re both interested in herbs, homemade teas and natural remedies, which led them to start making their own products, first for fun, and now under the brand name Main Street Apothecary.
As the team works on expanding their lines of soaps and teas, they’re also experimenting with formulas for creams, salves and tinctures, with the possibility of a storefront — an actual apothecary — in mind for the future.
Q: How did you two come together to start Main Street Apothecary?
Adelia Kittrell: Well, it’s kind of happening slowly, or we’re trying to make it happen slowly, so we can learn as we go. I’ve never owned my own business before, so this is a new venture for me.
Liz Sanders: With my partner, Ryan, we started a little LLC (Bussey-Scott Garden) so we have some experience keeping track of what it makes and what we spend and all of that, so that was helpful.
AK: I had a previous life as a Peace Corps volunteer in South America, and I made a lot of my own soap with women as part of what I was working on down there. When I came back, I was like, “There’s no reason I should ever buy soap or any of those things ever again,” and then I just found myself doing it. But it didn’t feel right. I decided I want to re-learn using materials here, because they’re different from what we used [in South America]. So we just started it as a girls’ night. We invited some friends over and would make soap and make different products. And then Liz and I got together and we thought, “We could do this!”
LS: I’ve been working on farms since 2008 in different aspects of them. I worked on a dairy farm for a while in Washington, I’ve done different CSA kind of farms through WWOOFing [Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms], I worked at The Cathedral School garden, and then I was a Heifer volunteer for a year at the ranch. I’ve just always been interested in growing my own plants. So with my little business with Ryan, Bussey-Scott Garden, I would take some of our herbs that we would grow and make teas out of them. …
And then I’m really careful about — we both are — what products we buy, what’s in them. So we have always been interested in using the most natural products we can. So the way we know what’s in them is to make them ourselves.
AK: I think in general, we just want to provide a healthy lifestyle for people. It started with me wanting to be self-sufficient, and be safe and healthy and natural, and then we thought, “Why not provide that to the community as a whole?”
Q: How often do y’all get together to handmake soap and other products?
AK: We get together once a week. We make soap, and we experiment with creams and salves and teas. We sew tea bags, we stuff them, and we get them all stamped and packaged.
LS: That’s another thing, we can only go as fast as we can afford to. The first year is paying for all of our bottles — and we want to use glass, so that doubles our price point — all of our packaging, our labels, printing those things, so even though that will last us awhile, that first initial investment is expensive.
Q: Why do you think Little Rock needs something like Main Street Apothecary?
LS: Little Rock definitely does not have anything like it yet.
AK: It’s very unique. It’s a niche market that hasn’t really been tapped into yet. There’s lots of soap makers, that market’s no problem. But we sell casteel soap, which is olive oil-based, rather than an animal-fat base or milk base. There’s lots of goats milk soap and that kind of thing going on. But this is a unique soap. And we’re only using essential oils, natural oils for a scent; most the soaps you see on the market use fragrance oils, which are alcohol based, so you’ll find [something] like banana split scent, and that’s obviously formulated somewhere. We’re trying to stay as basic and natural as possible, and that need wasn’t really being met.
LS: It’s a different aesthetic, I guess. And then the teas, those things are not being done by anyone. And the tinctures and the salves … Little Rock doesn’t really have anything that’s a nontraditional wellness-based retail operation that meets the whole needs [of a person], where you could go in and get advice on, for example, skin needs, and then be treated with herbs or with a salve.
AK: And we’re a long way off from having the knowledge base to do that, but that’s our goal down the line, is to be able to offer people something more natural.
LS: … I think the population here is becoming more interested in that, and it could be very beneficial for a lot of people.
Q: Right now you sell your products at The Green Corner Store and farmers markets. Where do you see Main Street Apothecary in the future?
LS: Our close-term goals are creating more and being at more events …
AK: And getting systems in place. Like inventory, and getting those cycles down, because soap takes four weeks to cure. So knowing and kind of being able to predict what a customer wants so we can provide that. This year’s been a really good planning year because we’re just starting out, we’re just finding out what our customers’ tastes and wants and demands are, so for next year I’m already planning what I’m going to plant in my garden for the tea and soaps. I bought a distiller so we can distill our own essential oils. All on a very small scale, but we’re taking baby steps.
LS: I’m also in school to be an esthetician. I want to focus on skincare for clients using natural ways. So we hope we can make some products that can be utilized in a facial, aromatherapy, using different oils and scents that can be used in stress-reduction or inflammation of muscles, things like that. So all of these things are connected from a farming/growing standpoint. There are a lot of ways you can be an esthetician, and you can be one in a very unnatural way, depending on the products you use. … It would be great down the road to have a little shop with dried herbs and teas and things that we can prescribe, and be doing facials and massages.
AK: But we want a little more expertise before we get there.
Q: How did you decide on the name?
AK: Well we both live one block off Main Street. And we’re both really involved in the Main Street/SoMa area. [Liz] was the market manager at The Bernice Garden Farmers Market, and I’m on the board there. It seemed appropriate.
Q: It also seems appropriate because the word apothecary makes you think of this older time, and an old Main Street is where you might find one.
AK: Exactly. It’s about going back to basics.
LS: It would be really easy for us to go online and order dried herbs. That’s no big deal. But it means so much more to us to grow them first —
AK: — on Main Street —
LS: — and then package them into teas.
AK: And when we run out, we run out.
LS: That is one thing, when our plants — they’re perennials — when they die for winter, we’re out. And I think it’s one of those things, if we grew, we’d see what we can do with that. But for now, we want to stay as small as possible.