Can you believe it’s been almost three years since we started this journey? I can’t. But sure enough, Chris took his first class on beekeeping from The Honey Exchange in Portland in January of 2017. I still sit here in disbelief at all these little ladies have given us.

Reading back through my very first blog post about the bees to my first blog post about experimenting with the wax making lip balms and hand balms I am reminded just how much we have gained over the last three years.

Since that blog post, I have started making everything from sugar scrubs to beeswax food wraps and soaps! The experimentation has been the funnest part for me. Oh, and getting to test my own products. OMG I LOVE the vanilla sugar scrub!! I always make just a little extra when I make a batch for me! I mean, who doesn’t want to smell delicious? (Ok..I admit that might be the Italian in me 😳).

In my other life, I work in IT. Chris will often tell you that I am the business and technological minded of the two of us. So when we got the bees and Chris started putting together videos, I spun him up a youtube channel. That was ok for a little bit, but we were getting so many great photos of the bees, the hives and all the flowers around! We needed a website!

As we continued along this path, I experimented more and more. I gave the products away as gifts; thank you’s or housewarmings and such. The feedback I got was amazing! People were excited! I had so many people ask me where they could buy more. And that’s when I knew, I needed to open a store.

I have always been rather entrepreneurial minded. Trying my hand at consignment sales on ebay back in the early aughts proved more of a pain than I could handle while still working a day job and living my 20 year old life😉. I was a little nervous to try something on the scale of an entire store quite so soon. So I setup a website and let it sit… for a while.. The “Coming Soon” page taunted me for months.

After several years of keeping, Chris got licensed and inspected to sell on the third year. Then came the harvest. We certainly weren’t going to store that much deliciousness in a bucket forever. I quickly got us some bottles and put together the labels and we had a product to sell. There was just the little matter of my “Coming Soon” page.

Who would buy something from a store that just had honey though? The sugar scrubs and lip balms would do to sell as well. I sourced some flour sack tea towels from another small business, added some jewelry I offered to sell for a friend and we were good to go live! Our products have organically expanded as time allows for my experimentation. We now have tea strainers and soon we’ll be selling our tea towels and mugs!

We have been overwhelmed this holiday season at the support from family and friends and astounded that we sell to people who don’t even know who Chris the Boxing Beekeeper is!

Thank you so much for all of your support! Thank you for sending your friends to our site! Most of all, thank you for coming with us on this journey. This a road best travelled with company, and we’ve got plenty of room!

Thanks for listening to me buzz!

~ Jen, Founder, Honey Pantry, Entrepreneur, Small Business Owner and oh, also The Beekeeper's Wife!