(Omg, I get wordy when emotional. TL;DR: I love you 🫶🏼)

It’s been another wild year! I’m prone to over sharing whenever I write a personal message, and this year won’t be any different 😅 but this year end is not feeling quite as heavy as the last three.

Many of you have been around since the beginning, but here’s a little recap of the last three years:

We opened just after Thanksgiving in 2019. Our original opening with a kitchen (for @wunderbudder) fell through but we opened anyway, planning on building a kitchen in the spring of 2020. Well, you know what happened, so instead of building a kitchen, we had to close for three months.

We didn’t have a customer base yet (except some of you who are still here - I remember 💛) and we were too new to receive any funding. We scrapped our way through 2020, and through 2021. We just barely hung on for over two full years until the spring of 2022 when it came to a “now or never” moment to finally build our kitchen.

We were only supposed to be closed for 4-6 weeks, but after losing our contractor, I had to take on much of the work myself (and with Mike and friends 💛). A short close turned into four months.

I spent most of the last three years barely hanging on, “putting out fires”, and spending all of my time just trying to catch up.

But after our reopening in September, everything has felt different. I finally feel like we’re where we need to be.

We got here for two main reasons:

One is that I’m tenacious AF (along with having a super supportive Mike)

And the other is ALL OF YOU.

Our long beginning seems like a sob-story, but it’s really an amazing story about community.

It means so much to me that you all support this little local business (actually two businesses in one, Alchemy & Herbs and Wunder Budder), from going out of your way to support us when we were closed, to us becoming part of your regular refill life.

From our “please, I hope they like us” stage to “oh, they keep coming back, this is amazing and how can we become better” stage.

We only started making teas because you all kept asking for them, and now they’re our best sellers!

We wouldn’t be here without you and this amazing community within a community that we’re building together.

I’m so grateful for all of you, and I’m looking forward to what this new year will bring.

(Workshops! It will be bringing workshops. Drop a note about what you’d like to do. We start planning in Jan.)

I can’t wait to see you on Jan. 7th!

Xo,

Lisa