It started in our own bathroom
We're a working farm. We raise our kids here, grow vegetables, keep bees. And for years, we were buying moisturizer and lip balm and sunscreen from the same stores as everyone else, slathering things on our skin that we wouldn't dream of putting in our food.
That felt wrong. Not in a crunchy-ideological way — in a practical, this-doesn't-make-sense way. We know exactly where our eggs come from. We know what the chickens ate. But our skincare routine was a mystery ingredient list from a factory we'd never see.
So one summer, we started rendering tallow on the stove and stirred in beeswax from our own hives and calendula we had dried on the porch. That first batch — slathered on after a long day in the field — became our original Edible Sun Balm, the product that started everything.
What we wanted didn't exist
We looked. We read every label, asked every question. The "natural" skincare market was full of products that were mostly water and synthetic filler with a few botanical extracts at trace levels — enough to call it "infused with lavender" without doing much lavender-infusing. The genuinely good stuff was expensive and imported, with supply chains as opaque as conventional products.
So we made our own. Started in the kitchen, then in a small-batch setup in the barn. Calendula from our garden. Beeswax from our hives. Oats from a neighboring farm. Our hands, the same hands that pull weeds and gathers eggs.
The philosophy hasn't changed
That kitchen-batch mentality is still the DNA of everything we make. Every product we sell was first made in our own home, used on our own family, passed around our kitchen table. If it wouldn't make the cut there — if the ingredient list doesn't meet our own standard, if it doesn't work the way we expect — it doesn't ship.
We don't use synthetic preservatives. We don't use ingredients we can't explain. We don't make a product until we know exactly why every single ingredient is in there. That second product — the one you'll find on the bathroom shelf now — is our Moisturising Day Cream, built around a different balance of grass-fed tallow for everyday wear.
That limits what we can make. That's fine. We'd rather make a few things well than a long list of things adequately.
Why "Eight Bare Feet"?
Six humans on the farm. Four cats, two dogs, a herd of goats, and too many chickens to count. That's far more than eight feet. But there's a simplicity to the idea — something close to the ground, open, straightforward. No pretense. Just the thing.
That's what we're going for. Farm-fresh skincare that does exactly what it says, made by people who use it themselves.
