Renee Harris: I decided to name my business "MadeOn" because on each handcrafted lotion bar, I write the date the bar was "made on" to show authenticity and freshness. I got the idea from a container of high quality sea salt my mother-in-law sent me from Southern France. Each can has the signature of the French worker who packaged it, to seal it with a personal touch.  It’s worked out beautifully since then because my products have no preservatives (which often irritate the skin), and a six month shelf life, so the freshness factor is something else I get to emphasize.

RH:  I get that question quite a bit and my quick answer is, "all seven didn’t come at once!" 

Really, I’ve learned a lot as our family size grew and when I gave birth to twins when my older two were ages four and two, I quickly realized how much my older two boys could contribute to the household.  While tandem nursing, they were very helpful in bringing mom water, the telephone, or putting together simple snacks, and we had plenty of time to develop their love of learning through a lot of book-reading (later translating that into homeschooling, which they’ve become fairly independent with).

As the family grew, my children have taken pride in learning new skills that benefit the family – they love to cook (we devote our Fridays to cooking), and because I’ve granted them more responsibilities in and around the house on the days that I’m busy growing my business, they’ve become kidpreneurs and are sought out by our community when neighbors need odd jobs done.

If moms are allowed to brag here, I’ll point you to their blogs so you can see what types of hobbies and skills they’ve developed. Click here and check out the blogs of the last five submitted bloggers, who are my older five children (and if you have a child who blogs, please submit the blog to our website! Blogging is a wonderful way for young people to develop their writing skills and get focused on one particular topic).

About the big family part: as part of being good stewards of the life that God gave us, my husband and I take seriously the responsibility we have with being good stewards of our fertility. Like the parable of the talents, what do we do with our fertility? End it (sterilization)?  Choke it (chemical birth control)?  Delay it? Or nurture it?

By choosing to nurture it, we’ve practiced Natural Family Planning over the years to keep our health in top shape. But along the way, we’ve also learned a lot about priorities. Because those lessons involve many factors (finances, our culture, child rearing, expectations from others), we started a website several years ago to encourage Christians in the area of Natural Family Planning: www.sweeterthanhoney.org.

We balance it all by taking out or changing what gets in the way, and you’ll get the gist of that from our website.

RH:  It starts from either a personal need or suggestion from a customer, and then the process is:

1. recipe searching online
2. testing on my family
3. testing with friends or loyal customers
4. testing with others who may have never tried my products
5. online survey and occasional follow up
6. submitting to Environmental Working Group  for a low hazard rating
7. adding it to the product line. 

The best part is getting my Facebook people to help me out with ideas and suggestions.

• The BeeSilk Lotion Bar: my primary product and best-seller was the result of looking for something online to combat my major dry skin issues and when I found it worked and was so easy to make, it turned into a business that’s been a blast to run
• Lip balm: it’s what happened when I applied the lotion bar to my lips on one particularly dry, chapped lip day
• Second Life Hair Butter: a few people using the Beesilk Bar told me they used it for their hair.  Huh? My next project was to make it a softer consistency and the timing was just perfect to test it by a friend who had just adopted a few children from Ethiopia.
• Bug Repellent Bar: my kids sleep out on the deck on hot summer nights, so when the mosquitoes arrived to attack them last summer, I took advantage and made up the Bug Block Bar.
• Au Chocolat Bar: I LOVE the smell of chocolate, so this was out of pure selfish reasons that I made this bar, using cocoa butter instead of shea butter.
• Simply Soothing Diaper Rash: I have a two year old who loves fruit… need I say more? Actually, it was his little bum, and several inquiries from various people, that brought this project on. (Read more in this month’s newsletter – look for a coupon code if you want to try it at a discount.)
• Custom Scented Bar: I did this out of customer request, but in the end, I decided it was too much work and I was afraid it would be too difficult to please each particular customer with the amount of scent they want in a bar.  I’m not totally opposed to doing it, and I’ll gladly create a scented bar on occasion, but it’s not my main focus.

Not everything works as planned:

• Belly Butter for Pregnant, Itchy Moms (created out of personal need, and requested by a local pregnancy spa; it worked well but the scent was quite strong – wheat germ oil and cocoa butter made it smell like a whole wheat chocolate chip cookie)
• Natural Sunscreen/Tan Enhancer (I played around with it but then got busy so I may revisit this one next year; in the meantime, the rash cream could work as a sunscreen!)

RH: 

1. Effectiveness.
2. Simplicity.
3. Ingredients found in Nature.

In that order.

It used to be that when I tried various products to combat my dry skin, I wasn’t concerned about what was in the product.  My fingers had so many cuts, I could barely perform the day-to-day tasks of running a busy household.  So I have to admit I was a bit shocked that something as simple as the lotion bar recipe could moisturize my dry skin and heal up my cuts, but it did!

It just so happens to line up with my cooking philosophy. If I want to add broccoli to tonight’s dinner, I could have my sons open a frozen package of chopped broccoli, boil out all the nutrients and drain, add a can of mushroom soup, heat, and serve over white pasta. They might experience a hint of broccoli flavor in there. (By the way, a can of soup alone has 14 ingredients in it!) 

Or, I could allow my children to really develop a true taste for broccoli by steaming it, adding a drizzle of high quality olive oil, a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and a pinch of sea salt. Four high-quality ingredients and it’s all extremely healthy, not to mention tasty.

The same goes with the lotion (that is, high-quality ingredients that are healthy… but I don’t promise it to be tasty!)

One quick story on the diaper rash cream, my latest product.  Coconut oil is amazing on the skin and many moms use it alone for diaper rashes. They told me that although coconut oil works okay, they have an issue with the greasiness, and to be effective with fighting rash, it needed something else. Zinc oxide is that something else that works amazingly well on rashes. Combine the two and you have a thick liquid. Add beeswax to the mix and it suddenly becomes creamy, with about the same consistency as Desitin, but without the white mess and fishy smell. And I promise you, it’s just as effective. If you’re a cloth diaper user, it’s even better than Desitin because it won’t leave a residue on your expensive cloth diapers. 

Again: effectiveness, simplicity of ingredients and all-natural.