This autumn will mark a decade of Farmer's Son Co.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Not so much about how many candles I've crafted (many) or how many orders we’ve packed (so many), but about everything that's happened around the business while I was busy trying to build it.
A decade is a long time to do anything. Long enough to make some very good decisions alongside some spectacularly questionable ones. Long enough to meet thousands of people. Long enough to watch customers become regulars and regulars become friends. Long enough to look back at the person who started all of this and realize that, in many ways, I barely recognize him.
Over the next few months, I want to share a collection of stories with you. Not a chronological history of Farmer’s Son Co. per say, or a tidy collection of lessons from ten years in business. Just some ideas, memories and moments from the past decade. Things that happened as I was building the business, things I've learned about the business itself, and things I ended up learning about myself along the way.
This story, I suppose, is about people.
There’s a funny thing about owning a physical shoppe. You can walk through the door in the morning with every intention of knowing exactly what your day's going to look like and, within twenty minutes of unlocking it, discover that you don't have a hot clue what you're doing.
Most mornings, I arrive with a plan, or at least an idea of sorts. There's candles to label, orders to pack, emails to answer and ideas that I want to work on in my lab. There’s usually something that I should have ordered three days ago and at least one box that has been sitting somewhere long enough that it's become a part of the decor.
And then, I unlock the door.
Over the years, I’ve learnt that one of the unexpected parts of owning a shoppe is becoming a small part of other people’s lives. Sometimes I’m a confidant. Sometimes a cheerleader. Occasionally I play the role of counselor. Every so often, I’m an unlicensed therapist wandering around the shoppe, listening and trying to offer some useful (I hope?) counsel while simultaneously helping someone put together a colour palette of taper dinner candles for their dining room.
It’s a strange job.
People just feel comfortable enough to tell you things.
They tell you about new grandbabies and new houses, engagements and weddings, trips and retirement adventures. They come back a few months later and pick up a conversation almost exactly where we left it. They also tell you about illness, death, divorce, aging parents, relationships ending and all the other complicated things that come with being a human.
I kind of like this part of my job.
And if you'd told a younger version of Dan all of this, I’m not sure he'd have believed you.
I grew up in a small farm town and was bullied a lot as a kid. Relentlessly at times. For years I was the kid that'd get off the school bus each evening, coming into the house crying. I was sensitive and a little soft, and my bullies just knew that. A lot of it was verbal, but sometimes it became physical. When that’s your experience of other people during the years when you’re supposed to be learning how friendships work and figuring out where you fit, you learn other things instead.
You learn how to put up walls. You learn that being noticed isn’t necessarily a good thing. You learn to be careful about what you say and who you say it to. You learn to keep parts of yourself tucked away because anything visible can potentially become something someone will eventually use against you.
Mostly, you learn how to protect yourself. Or, at least you try.
I left that little town for the last time at 23, but unfortunately nobody hands you a new personality along with your change-of-address form.
To be honest with you, I was scared of people.
I didn’t have many close friends and, for a long time, I didn’t really know how to make them. Through much of my twenties and into my thirties, hiding was simply easier. Keep the circle small. Keep people at a comfortable distance. Keep yourself safe. Try to seek out anything that resembles peace.
It's taken a lot of time, work and many hours of therapy to understand which of those walls were still protecting me and which ones I simply hadn’t realized I could take down.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I kind of accidentally started Farmer’s Son Co.
Looking back, there’s something mildly ridiculous about it. A guy who was afraid of people decided to start a business that would eventually require him to stand in a room and talk to them all day.
Thankfully, it didn’t start that way. I bought myself a bit of time.
In the beginning there were my candles. There were photographs. There were my words, my stories and my messy social media posts. Farmer’s Son Co. could have a personality before I necessarily had to put myself at the centre of it.
People knew the candles. They knew the photographs and the things I wrote. Eventually, though, they started wondering who the guy behind all of it was.
The problem was, I was still trying to figure that out myself.
Who was Dan?
For a long time, Dan was a really lost guy.
I was trying to figure out who I was, what I wanted my life to look like and, probably most importantly, what I thought I deserved from it. At the same time, I was trying to build this business.
Those two things have happened alongside one another for the past ten years.
As Farmer’s Son Co. grew, hiding behind it all became harder. There were markets and events. There were clients who became regulars. There were people who'd followed along online for years and eventually walked through my door. There were conversations that started with a candle and somehow ended an hour later somewhere completely different.
Slowly, being seen became less frightening.
So did being known.
There’s something special about the little glimmers people give you into their lives when you do what I do. You might only see someone for 15 minutes every few months, but over enough years you end up watching bits and pieces of their life unfold.
Someone tells you about the house they’re hoping to buy. Months later, they come back and they got it. Someone is planning a trip and the next time you see them, you hear how it went and get to see the photos. Someone is worried about a friend and, eventually, you learn what happened there too.
There are people whose kids I’ve watched grow up through visits to the shoppe. People who've moved away and make Farmer’s Son Co. one of their stops when they come home to Winnipeg. People who remember candles I barely remember making. People who first came through the door as customers and, somewhere along the way, became close personal friends.
We’ve all grown a decade older together.
None of this was particularly intentional.
I didn’t start Farmer’s Son Co. because I wanted to “build community.” I wanted to make things. I wanted to build a business. I wanted to create something that felt like mine. I wanted to forge my own path.
The community seems to have happened around it.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped assuming that letting people know me was inherently dangerous.
I think that took longer than I’d probably like to actually admit.
I still like my privacy. I still have a very small personal circle. I still enjoy closing the door at the end of the day and having some quiet and room to just be. But I’m not scared of people in the way I once was.
That’s a fairly remarkable thing for me to be able to write.
Of course, becoming more comfortable with folks doesn’t mean every person who walks through the door arrives with a story you were expecting to hear.
Every once in a while, someone else’s story turns out to contain a piece of your own.
A few years ago, during one of our big factory sales, I was ringing through someone who announced themselves as a distant cousin. There were probably a dozen people waiting behind them, so naturally this was the perfect moment to fill me in on some previously undisclosed family history.
Apparently, as the story goes, when my great-grandpa got older, his driver’s license was pulled from him.
Great-Grandpa, however, still occasionally had places to be and things to do.
At some point, he decided the perfectly reasonable solution was to drive a tractor into town. And, as the story goes, it involved picking up a case of beer. As one does.
Somewhere along the way, he got pulled over.
On the tractor.
I’m standing there with a lineup of people waiting to buy candles thinking, "how am I only finding this out now? This is just one more thing that these people swept under the rug."
Families are funny that way. The adults spend years carefully editing the family history so everyone comes out looking and smelling fresh. Then you become an adult and some random distant relative casually drops a story at the till that makes you think, "well, actually, a few things make considerably more sense now..."
Then you hand them their receipt and carry on with your day. Because what else are you supposed to do?
Other encounters with the past have been much quieter.
One of my favourites happened when one of my mom’s childhood friends found my shoppe. She'd left our hometown when they were both young, long before I would have known her, and one day she walked through the door and introduced herself.
She was just so kind. I tried to play it cool, but I just had a million questions I wanted to ask her.
There was something so special about meeting someone who knew my mom as a kid. She carried this tiny glimpse of a version of my mom that existed long before I did. For a few moments, I got to see my mom through somebody else’s eyes.
I loved that.
Those are the stories I’m grateful to have walk through my door. They don’t ask anything of me. They just give me another little piece of where I came from.
Others are well, much more complicated.
A few years ago, I made the decision to go no contact with my immediate family. This wasn’t a decision I made quickly or lightly. It came after years of extensive therapy, conversations and trying to understand what moving forward needed to look like for me.
Eventually I understood that I didn’t need everyone involved to agree with my lived experiences for those experiences to be real. I didn’t need anyone’s permission to step away. And I didn’t need to keep relationships in my life simply because they had always been there.
Sometimes protecting yourself means closing a door.
The funny thing about owning a shoppe is that every morning, I unlock another door.
This summer, someone walked through it whom I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. A distant relative on my stepdad's side, someone I probably hadn’t seen in 25 years. Even back then, I didn’t know them. They were one of those people who appeared at those few times a year extended-family gatherings where I was more interested in eating as quickly as I could so that I could get back to my game of Tag, or back to looking for kittens in the old farm buildings.
They’re now pushing 90, so it’s not exactly like I could be a dick towards them.
They arrived around 10:30 one Tuesday morning. I was getting started on the day, thinking about whatever needed to be figured out that morning, and suddenly we'd launched into an unsolicited episode of Dan Mitchell, This Is Your Life.
There were updates about people I hadn’t seen in decades. Stories about people I didn't know. Names I hadn’t thought about since last leaving my hometown.
And then we arrived at the family trauma and grievances.
There are very few circumstances in which I am prepared to unpack decades-old family trauma at 10:30 on a weekday morning. Standing in my shoppe with a pile of work waiting for me is not one of them.
Something similar happened around Christmas. Someone I don’t know at all came into the shoppe and ended up crying while talking to me about our family.
I listened. I tried to be kind. I really did. While also trying to hunt down a felted squirrel ornament for another patient client (if that was you, I appreciate your understanding).
And I also realized that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with what they were giving me.
I understand that people carry grief, regret and their own versions of events for a very long time. I understand that getting older can make people look backwards. Maybe they want to reconnect (or connect for the first time?). Maybe there are things they wish had happened differently. Maybe they simply want somebody else to remember with them.
I can have empathy for all of that.
One of the things I’ve learnt over the years is that understanding someone’s pain doesn’t make it mine.
I can listen. I can understand why someone might need to tell a story. I can wish them well. But I’m not responsible for resolving somebody else’s relationship with people who happened to once be part of my life. I don't need that weight. I don't deserve that weight.
Sometimes people arrive with the very best intentions and still find themselves knocking on a door I deliberately closed long ago.
Years ago, my solution would probably have been another wall.
Now, I feel like I understand safety a little differently.
Feeling safe isn’t about never letting anyone close enough to hurt you. It isn’t about keeping the walls high enough that nobody can get over them. For me, it's become much more about knowing that I get a say in who enters my life, how far they come in and what I’m willing to carry for them.
In a strange way, the FSCo. shoppe has helped teach me that.
Farmer’s Son Co. is a public place, but it is also something I built. I have the keys. I decide what happens here. I decide what we craft, what it looks like, what it smells like and the kind of place I want it to be. It's part lab, part studio, part shoppe, part clubhouse.
Then every morning I unlock the front door and invite folks in.
For someone who spent a lot of years trying very hard not to be seen, I still find something remarkable about that.
Over the past ten years, thousands of people have come into my life because of Farmer’s Son Co. Most stay for a few minutes. Some have stayed for years. A handful have become people I couldn’t imagine my life without.
They’ve brought good news and terrible news. They’ve made me laugh. They’ve cried at the counter. They’ve told me things I’m fairly certain they hadn’t planned on telling the candle guy when they left the house that morning.
And sometimes, they’ve brought little pieces of my own story back to me.
A childhood friend of my mom. A distant cousin. A nearly 90y year-old relative. A great-grandfather on a tractor who, several decades after the fact, managed to cause a bit more trouble while I was trying to run a factory sale.
People remain unpredictable.
But, I think I’m (maybe?) finally content with that.
This autumn, Farmer’s Son Co. turns ten. Between now and the end of the year, I’ll be sharing more stories from my first ten years. Some about the business, some about the people who have moved through it, some about things that went right, some about things that very much did not, and some about what I've learnt about myself while I was busy trying to keep the whole thing moving forward.
This feels like a good place to start.
I’m still figuring out who Dan is. I'm guessing that part never really ends. But I know him considerably better than I did when this started this whole mess.
He has more friends now. He trusts people more. He’s less interested in hiding (although he likes being elusive). He’s learnt that being known can actually be quite nice (and weird when you're looking at Jell-o in the grocery store and people are pointing towards you but don't want to acknowledge you). He’s also learnt that kindness and boundaries can exist at the same time, and that protecting yourself doesn’t always require building another wall.
Sometimes it means opening the door.
Sometimes it means listening to whatever happens to walk through it.
Sometimes it means learning a completely unnecessary story about your great-grandfather and a tractor (which also explains that much more about that side of the family).
And sometimes it simply means knowing which doors are yours to open, and which ones you’re allowed to leave closed.
D-
