BY SHALEEN DESTEFANO
Rootfoot began as the vision of founder Laura Huth and her desire to connect with the natural earth through the distillation of plant essences. Her brand has since evolved into a hands-on experience for her entire family and we were able to learn more about the evolution of her array of natural Colorado made products.
Rootfoot was established in 2009. Can you tell us what sparked this path for you and how Rootfoot came to be?
Rootfoot began when I learned a few poignant facts about essential oils. These facts became keys to guide me deeper on my path. I was age 24, fresh out of college, and was managing a yoga studio. I learned that approximately 10% of the world’s plants contain essential oil, each of them metabolizing the elements of its environment in a different way which results in a specific scent. Plants that contain essential oil help regulate the health of their ecosystem essentially acting as the immune system for that specific ecosystem. That was what set me on my path. I became enthralled with learning about essential oils and essential oil-bearing plants. I learned by sitting with them, taking in the way the plants grew and expressed themselves, and by breathing them in.
My husband, Dustin, and I met around this time, and he was in this early, fun phase of building his first company, Denver/Boulder’s non-profit transportation company, Bus to Show. I introduced him to essential oils, and started talking to him about my vision for Rootfoot, and there was never anything other than, okay, great, that’s what we’re doing. Our young spirits explored all realms of the oils, we grew a garden, learned how to distill oils, and were experimental in our approach to this endeavor. We were buses and essential oils. He worked on his company and I worked on mine and we helped each other bring our visions to life, all while being extremely, romantically broke. And then slowly a community started to form around each of our projects and increasingly the amazing support from those communities has made it possible for us to keep working on them.
You have a very deliberate and meaningful process for harvesting the native plants used in your products. We’d love to know more your technique and how you learned this craft.
Thank you. Honestly, it has all been an intuitive process. I have wanted it to be this way. I feel completely compelled for Rootfoot to be a reflection of my own authentic experience. I have learned that everything is there if I listen. I am learning from the earth, the plants, animals, and elements. I am learning through observation and spiritual experience. When harvesting plants, it is a moment of communion. It is a slow process of setting intention, joining with the ecosystem and plants. Our young family walks the land, we scan to find plants that seem to have plenty of vitality to share. Outwardly, this might be expressed in some combination of vibrancy of color or density, or shaping of branches. It is possible that there are other signals that we are taking into account unconsciously as well. When we approach the plant, we notice its movement, feel its branches, and smell its aroma. We honor it as the vibrant living creature that it is and ask permission to harvest some of it. With gratitude, mindfully, and sustainably, we prune the plant. We always leave plenty for the plant’s vitality. The steam distillation process after pruning is what creates the essential oil. This process is ceremonial as well. It is essentially moving that plant oil through a cycle of evaporation and condensation, distilling the plant into its essence.
Taking this a step further, what is your mission with regards to our relationship with the environment and ecosystem as a whole?
Rootfoot exists to offer a channel for humans to join consciousness with plants’ wisdom. We are trying to cultivate a deepening of human relationships with the natural world by opening portals where people can have an intimate relationship with nature.
We support the vitality of the planet in working with sustainable eco projects and conscious organic agriculture. Our products are crafted with the utmost regard for our bodies and the earth. They are made of 100% plant material, organic and wildcrafted. Everything is non-toxic and vegan. No SLS, SLES, parabens, GMOS, artificial fragrances, petroleum, or cyclic silicones. Also, we support local businesses and are always considering and improving our imprint on the Earth.
You’ve recently released a line of upscale long-lasting Slow Fragrance, Plant Communion Fragrance. Both have received wide attention, including Vogue and representation at the Austin Proper Hotel and partnership with Kelly Wearstler. What can you tell us about these new products?
Yes, this result has been a culmination of the last three years of my work. Really, it’s the first new project I have done, after having babies. I was approached by Austin Proper Hotel to provide a sensorial experience for their hotel and spa and created a line that provides a series of aromatic experiences, highlighting the scents and interactive properties of specific plants native to the region. Over the years, I had the goal to bring in more of my small batch work into Rootfoot and create an answer to high-end fragrance. It became the ideal time.
Austin Proper now has a full Rootfoot sensorial installation with aromatic massage offerings and physiologically-interactive aromas wafting as you travel throughout the incredibly designed spaces from lounge to steam to massage rooms.
With this work, we also released a high-end fragrance collection within Rootfoot this past December. It is called Plant Communion Fragrance. It is at the epicenter of Rootfoot and the collection showcases the idea of Slow Fragrance, featuring sustainably hand-harvested, hand-distilled and hand-blended fragrances. The result of this meticulous effort is stunning. The fragrances are long-lasting, meaning they will stay with you through the day and are free of alcohol. The packaging also embodies this slowness. Rootfoot completed a major undertaking of plastic-free packaging– which is quite unfamiliar in the current context of the fragrance industry. The glass bottles are gorgeous and hand blown by long-time friend and collaborator out of his home studio near Loveland, CO. We cork the bottles with natural rubber, seal them with wax, and hand stamp. The glass vessels become an object for the home after life as a fragrance vessel.
We sell this collection online and have a discovery set for the Plant Communion Fragrance collection. It comes with a credit toward the purchase of the full-size fragrance.
You are dedicated to sustainability both in practice and in your product design and packaging. This means so much to us as consumers and we’d love to see this become more mainstream. Does this habit carry over into your personal life and how you raise your family? Have you faced any challenges with this?
Thank you, yes, absolutely. There are so many challenges with sustainability. My family has a conversation about sustainability and the ways we can continue to improve our mindfulness daily. In some ways the most sustainable thing to do would be nothing at all, because everything has some environmental cost. So, we have this philosophy that if we are going to have the audacity to create a product and ask for humans to purchase it, we need to make absolutely sure that it’s worth it. And that gives us two things to work on: minimizing the negative impact and maximizing the positive.
As for our personal and family life, we have a very holistic view of all this. If our minds and bodies are fueled by, for example, yogurt packaged in plastic, and then we use the energy from that yogurt to go out and distill organically grown lavender, there’s a little bit of a disconnect. But at the same time, we are part of a society and an economy that is built more around convenience, affordability and profit than around environmental sustainability, and so being the perfect consumer is really difficult. So we try to disrupt this flow of consumption through limiting consumption, an awareness of what we are purchasing, making things by hand, and employing the same philosophy of trying to only consume things where the positive impact outweighs the negative.
You have been a regular artisan at Firefly Handmade and will be present at their upcoming Spring Market in Wash Park on Old South Gaylord Street. Where else can we find your products when it’s not market season?
The easiest place to find Rootfoot is probably online at Rootfoot.com. We currently offer free shipping and you can see our full line along with lots of supporting information. Aside from that, we are currently accepting applications for stockists as we rebuild that side of the business post-pandemic.
What can we expect from Rootfoot in the future?
Well, we are now living in the remote high desert of Colorado. We are having an intimate, quiet experience with the wild. There is so much that we are learning. The tone of our experience here is guiding us with Rootfoot and the products that come forth. There is resilience, and slow intuitive wisdom of all things here. We are syncing to the rhythms of the land. The tone and our experience is guiding us in our journey with Rootfoot and it is from this place we are creating, so Rootfoot’s work will emanate this experience. We are looking forward to new releases, new collaborations, and small single-batch releases. You can stay tuned through our newsletters and social media engagement.
When you’re not harvesting plants with your family, how do you spend your free time?
We are learning and exploring together. We are also doing homeschooling – which we’re realizing basically means continuing to do Rootfoot as a family, since it has all the subjects baked in. We are constantly discovering things on the land which lead us into lessons. After a rain we may look for Western Spadefoot toads, or on sunny days lay on giant rocks and warm ourselves like lizards, and some days we search for ancient fossils and tracks or learn how to make things. We take care of our gardens and animals. And, of course, each other. Currently have baby chicks ready to cheep and peck their way out of their shells, so this should be a pretty cute unit in biology.
Thank you so much for this glimpse into the thoughtful process behind Rootfoot, Laura. If you would like to experience these products first hand, come out and meet Laura at Firefly Handmade on Old South Gaylord Street April 29 + 30 for their Spring Market! Or you can learn more at rootfoot.com.