it’s all part of the journey
Every business owner needs a well-crafted sentence to convey in a moment what the company does. Westwood Color's is something like “We bring natural beauty into your life with botanical inks and hand-dye fabrics.” That's the easy part.
But then someone always says, “Wow. How did you start doing that?” I wish that could be summarized in a single sentence.
Westwood Color is the convergence of many paths. In February 2020, our family was in it's tenth year of operating a wild mushroom business, we were perfecting a cultivated gourmet mushroom operation, and I was opening a baby clothing company that catered to cloth diapering and used naturally dyed cotton. So of course, pandemic restrictions turned those plans upside-down, and rather than mushrooms and baby apparel, we turned to our timberland and started sawing custom lumber. As a bonus, managing our woodlands led to even more materials for dyeing fabric- the piles of bark, the plants salvaged from skid roads, and the unfortunate casualties from wind damage. The customer base is now builders and do-it-yourself types, rather than restaurants and retail outlets.
Then someone always asks “But why the inks?”
Nature offers a multitude of colors but not all connect with cotton. I was passing an abundance of colorful mushrooms, lichens, and flowers, and wanted to know what else was possible. Had my background been wool or silk, the inks might not have happened. I would have just dyed wool or silk. Turns out my background involves a super crafty mom and an old-school graphic artist dad. This equates to hundreds of writing utensils at my fingertips and a bottomless pit of paper with every weight, texture, or color a girl could want. Ink it is.
Next is usually “But why all the wild stuff? How do you even know what to use?”
Okay, I learned a lot about wild mushrooms and native trees from my husband and in midwifery school I started my journey with the other wild foods and medicines. Around that time I also studied principles of fermentation and “low and slow” methods for a proper bone broth. Can you believe I use both of these skills for making ink and dyeing fabric? I could rewind a bit more, back to my undergraduate days, when I realized I loved history. When I say history, I actually mean the stories more than a simple timeline of events. I never tire of hearing how people lived, the food they ate, the clothing they wore, the ways in which they traveled, and how discoveries and inventions were made. All those historical paths have brought us to present times and I like to think that idea is reflected in the Westwood Color concept. Yes, we embrace experimentation, but our foundation is certainly in the ancient and old-world arts when all of man’s colors were offered up by nature.
It wasn’t that long ago when all of man’s colors were offered up by nature.
Three paragraphs in and I still can't offer you a concise explanation for why I do what I do. I could keep going on about all the contributing influences to Westwood Color's formation but what a strugglesome bore that would be. I will instead leave you with a thought on that overused adage, it's the journey not the destination. It has been quite a journey to the Westwood Color “destination”, but I know it too will be part of a journey to a destination not yet determined. So let's get rollin'!