Our Story
The Inkling
Our business began with a formative experience: when I (this is Brady speaking) was in college I read an article about folks doing a local thanksgiving and they made their own sea salt. I thought that sounded fun so when I was home from college I made sea salt for Christmas gifts with my friends by boiling seawater on my parents' stove. It took forever, made a huge mess and wasted tons of electricity. But seeing those crystals form hooked me!
The Idea
Fast forward to 2012 and my girlfriend Leah and I had been working on a vegetable farm outside of Seattle, and thoughts of salt making drifted back to me. I figured I might be able to use my new skills at building greenhouses to make salt a better way! My now wife Leah heard me discussing this idea, and not long after shared a food network video she saw about a business doing just that! And I thought...I can build that!
Going For It
And since 2012 was supposed to be the last year ever, I was in a very impulsive mood and decided to try it out! Leah and I built our first evaporation house in August of that year on my parents' farm and made our first batch of sea salt. In December we took some jars to a farmers market and made $700 on our first day. We were stoked!
Growing the Team
Over the last 13 years we've been so lucky to have been able to gather an awesome group of salt crew around us. Folks that care about this awesome product that we get to grow, and care about taking care of our customers! From product creation (Tyler), to operations management (Essine), salt farming (Ian), spice blending (Anna), store sales (Maddy and more), our sales team, the list goes on. Our employees are our biggest asset and we work hard to make this an awesome place to work!
We Opened a Store!
In 2023 we got the opportunity to do something we'd been dreaming about for a long time-open our very own store! It has been way more fun than we could've possibly imagined and our community has supported us in a huge way. Now we have the chance to tell our story and share our yummy stuff directly with anyone who comes to Friday Harbor! We of course sell all our salts and our caramels, but also now we get to sell Leah's amazing cookies, a bunch of cool packaged foodie stuff from other small brands and some amazing home gifts.
Constantly Evolving
Fast forward to now and we currently have 14 evaporation houses, producing around 20,000 lbs of salt a year. We have come out with about 40 unique products, and keep trying to push ourselves in terms of the flavors we use and the design we put into our packaging. We see this business as a never ending chance to learn about ourselves and be creative and we get that chance because of you, our customers!
Future Dreams
As we look to the future of our business, some of the things we are dreaming about are...
1) Coming up with more fun blends and salt types to make your food taste better!
2) Getting our yummy salts into more cool grocery stores and gift shops across the country
3) Grow our business so we can keep offering better and better benefits to our employees.
4) Ship Leah's amazing cookies nationwide
5) Keep serving more and more customers in new and different ways in our shop in Friday Harbor.
6) Eventually open an agritourism location where people can come learn about how salt is made!