As a new and very interesting product range for Pickings and Parry, we thought we'd give you a little more background on America's foremost natural fragrance company.
Juniper Ridge formulate Wilderness Perfume by distilling and extracting fragrance from wildflowers, plants, bark, moss, mushrooms, and tree trimmings that they harvest on the Western American trails. All of their products are named for the wild places they come from. The company is built on the simple idea that nothing smells better than the forest and that the only way to bring this beauty home is to first strap on your boots and go there.
Every Juniper Ridge product has a harvest number stamped on it. Unlike synthetic fragrances, these wilderness perfumes are extracted from real, native-plant sources. You can look up your product’s harvest number on their web site to see photos of the plants and the fragrance extraction techniques used.
They crawl around in mountain meadows, smell the wet earth beneath fir trees, and spend whiskey-fueled hours arguing over the scent of the wind sweeping over a glacier. Making their fragrances throughout the West, on dirt roads and trails, around campfires, and in the Oakland, California workshop. All to capture the beauty of the Mojave Desert at sunrise, or a late-season Sierra with winter right around the corner.
All Juniper Ridge products are 100% Wildcrafted and produced using old perfume making techniques including distillation, tincturing, infusion and enfleurage. A hundred years ago, all perfumes were made this way. Today they’re the only ones who handle every step of the process themselves, from beginning to end. These formulas vary from year to year and harvest to harvest, based on rainfall, temperature, exact harvesting location, and season. The exact formula depends on what they find in the wind; a conversation with the living, wild ecology.
The outer-experimental edge of what they do is in the Field Lab. These extremely small-batch, trail-made fragrances are usually produced in numbers usually less than a hundred, and are designed as aromatic snapshots, capturing the wind on a particular day in a particular wild place.
All of the plants used are wildharvested with the utmost sensitivity and respect for the existing wildscape. The guys return to the same stands year after year to carefully monitor regrowth. They never use alien or invasive species and are actively involved in native plant restoration projects from San Diego to Seattle - Even 10% of all their profits are annually donated to a portfolio of Western Wilderness Defense organizations.
All in all, Juniper Ridge are one very traditional and, at the same time, very innovative group of people. They are doing something the right way, with care and attention - we like this a lot, and think it sits well amongst our other products and their stories. Stand by for more news updates and information on other products and people.
