Farmer’s Son Co. turns ten this autumn, and I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly I’m supposed to say about that.
Ten years feels significant enough that there should probably be some kind of tidy reflection attached to it. Something about entrepreneurship, perseverance, following your dreams, taking risks and believing in yourself. Maybe ten lessons for ten years, neatly packaged and ready to go.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I could summarize everything into just ten lessons.
What I remember most is the work. A lot of work. Pouring candles for years on old folding tables, long days, late nights, boxes everywhere, orders that needed to go out, markets that needed to be set up, labels that needed to be applied by hand, emails that needed to be answered and products that had to be made whether I felt particularly inspired that day or not. I remember trying to figure out what I was doing while already being expected to know what I was doing, and making decisions because there was nobody else there to make them.
There’s never been a business plan. There still isn't one. There've been ideas, instincts, mistakes, pivots, stubbornness, a lot of learning and a fairly well developed ability to figure things out when there isn’t an obvious answer.
Ten years later, that remains more or less the operating system.
I grew up on a small family farm northeast of Roblin, Manitoba, in the Parkland region of the province. We had a mixed farm that kept us busy, we raised cattle, ahad a bit of grain land and, at one point, around 800 pigs. We did a bit of everything because, when you’re a small operation, that’s kind of how it goes. You use what you have, fix what breaks, find another way to make something work and keep moving.
I knew fairly early that farming wasn’t going to be my life. Rolling a grain truck backwards down a hill and tipping it into a slough probably helped confirm that. There are more graceful ways to discover you’re meant to do something else, but mine was fairly conclusive.
Still, the farm shaped me in ways I didn’t really understand until much later. We weren’t a family that stopped very often to celebrate what we’d accomplished. You finished one thing and moved on because there was always another job waiting, another season coming or another problem that needed solving. When seeding was finally finished in the spring, we head into Roblin for dinner at the China Rose restaurant. When combining wrapped in the autumn, we might do it again.
That was more or less our version of popping champagne.
Apparently, some of that stuck with me.
I wasn’t really like the other boys I grew up with either. I remember my grandpa casually referring to me as being ‘soft’ while talking with his friends. I think part of him probably wondered how exactly I was going to find my way in the world, but he and my grandma loved me fiercely and were also two of my biggest cheerleaders. Those things could exist together.
Growing up, our house was filled with old European art, history, decorating and garden books that my mom would find at garage sales and auctions. I'd just get lost on in them, soaking up everything that I could. I was a kid born in the 1980s who somehow grew up watching classic MGM musicals, old comedies and television made decades before I existed. I remember when I was 10 or so, my Grandpa once came home from a garage sale with about 25 years’ worth of National Geographic because he knew I’d love them.
I did.
Those yellow-bordered magazines were a fairly convincing argument that the world was much larger than my small town of Roblin (approximate 1995 population of 1700 folks).
Around the age of 12, I asked for subscriptions to Canadian House & Home and Car and Driver for my birthday. That combination still feels pretty accurate and kind of just sums me up. I was that kid, I'm still that guy.
I didn’t know I was collecting references or building a visual vocabulary. I just knew I liked looking at things. Buildings, rooms, cars, paintings, gardens, furniture, old houses, historical buildings, beautiful treasures, packaging. I liked trying to understand why one thing felt right and another didn’t. A sexy classic car and a beautifully furnished cottage could occupy exactly the same amount of space in my brain, and apparently they still can.
I’d wanted to build my own brand and shoppe for as long as I can remember. I used to draw them as a kid and imagine what would go where, how the spaces would look and what might sit beside what.
I just didn’t really believe that it could ever happen to a fella like me.
There wasn’t family money waiting to finance any of my ideas, a retail dynasty to inherit or anybody quietly preparing the keys.
After college, I answered an ad in the newspaper and drove to Winnipeg for an interview. I got the job the next day and, within four days, had moved to the city.
I was 23 and knew nobody.
I started as an assistant buyer and eventually moved into international buying, sourcing and product design, surrounded by enormous catalogues from factories on the other side of the world. Suddenly, all those disconnected things I had spent years noticing had somewhere practical to go. There was, apparently, a job where you could spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about why one chair, garden tool, chandelier or hardware sample was better than another.
I loved that part.
Buying taught me about sourcing, product development, packaging, margins, freight and manufacturing, but more importantly, it trained my eye. Two objects can appear almost identical on paper and one of them will have something the other doesn’t. Proportion, weight, material, finish, colour. Some small decision that makes the difference between something you walk past and something you want to pick up.
I spent most of my twenties moving through different roles, trying to find my place in what could be a pretty solid ol’ boys club. At one point, I was sourcing and designing patio furniture and garden tools. By my final corporate role, I was buying brake controllers, cargo straps and winches.
Somebody’s dream job.
Just not mine.
Then my mom died very suddenly after being misdiagnosed with cancer twice, and it changed my relationship with time.
I don’t really like turning her death into a convenient entrepreneurial origin story. Grief doesn’t arrive with a branding strategy. But losing her did make the concept of ‘someday’ feel considerably less reliable.
Meanwhile, I’d been making candles as a hobby. I'd started an Instagram account for them and, little by little, local stores began asking if they could carry them. There was a small amount of momentum. Not enough to support an especially persuasive business case, but apparently enough.
Rory could see how unhappy I was before I was quite ready to admit what I wanted to do about it. Eventually, he told me to quit.
Christmas was coming. We’d make some money. We’d figure it out.
An airtight financial plan.
So in early November after less than a year of trying to figure out if my hobby had legs, with limited funds, no investors, no business plan and no particular safety net, I left my job and started Farmer’s Son Co.
For close to five years, almost everything was made on folding tables.
I poured candles, stickered wicks, labelled jars, packed boxes, photographed products, edited photographs, designed packaging, built websites, answered emails, figured out shipping, learned wholesale, worked markets and dealt with whatever fresh logistical puzzle had appeared that day. If I couldn’t afford to hire somebody, I learned how to do it. If I couldn’t afford the proper equipment, I made do until I could.
There was an enormous amount of ‘fake it until you make it,’ although I remain unclear on when the "making-it" portion officially begins.
Farmer’s Son Co. may have had my name on the paperwork, but it was never entirely mine.
Rory had a career of his own, and for years he would finish a full day at work, come home and immediately be recruited into whatever situation I'd created for myself. There were labels to design, wicks to be placed in candle glasses, wax to stir, emails to answer and orders I'd absolutely promised would be ready despite all available evidence suggesting otherwise.
He helped design our first labels, helped build our website, dealt with paperwork and was there for every deadline, mental breakdown, panicked moment, big win and overly ambitious idea.
There were many overly ambitious ideas.
Farmer's Son Co. grew because I kept saying yes. Markets, events, wholesale accounts, collaborations, custom projects, ridiculous timelines and opportunities I thought might lead to other opportunities.
Sometimes they did. Sometimes they were terrible. Sometimes I knew they were terrible while I was doing them and still managed to convince myself there was probably a strategic reason for why I was saying yes.
When you’re trying to turn something you make into something that can actually pay the bills, almost anything can be made to sound strategic.
At one point, Farmer’s Son Co. candles were sold in over 150 independent stores across Canada and Mexico. We moved into larger spaces, brought people on as we built out our team, expanded production and turned the thing I'd started on a little enamel table in my Osborne Village apartment into an actual operation.
It was exciting. It was also occasionally (let's be honest, daily) accompanied by the thought: "what the hell have I done? What am I doing? How is this happening?"
Eventually, I realized bigger isn’t automatically better. Saying yes got Farmer’s Son Co. moving, but learning to say no probably kept it interesting. I’ve turned down national retailers because their terms didn't make sense and the asks were too big, walked away from projects that didn’t make sense or where I felt like my business ethics were being compromised and become much less impressed by opportunities simply because they promised something that I knew would never come to fruition.
Some mistakes taught me something.
Some were just mistakes.
I’m comfortable leaving a few of them there.
For all the business talk, it's been my ability to explore fragrance and tell a story with it that's the true reason why I started Farmer's Son Co.
I didn't start any of this as trained fragrance designer. I came through product, memory and storytelling. I tend to design visually. Before I know what something smells like, I can usually see it: a field in the spring, a cozy room, a cabin in the woods, the edge of a lake on a rainy morning, dry grasses in an August pasture, light coming through trees in northern Manitoba.
Then I start trying to translate what I'm seeing.
Looking back, those earliest candles were really attempts to reconstruct pieces of my family's farm. Smoke, wild ditch grasses, the smell of damp earth in my mom's garden, the big birch tree that's stood along the edge of the field south of our yard for as long as anyone could remember, the old wood smells coming from the old sheds and grain bins, the familiar air of the places I grew up around. My relationship with the farm is complicated, but it was still the landscape that shaped me.
Fragrance gave me a way of going back without actually going back.
Later, I'd study perfumery formally so I could understand formally what I’d largely been doing instinctively. Materials, structure, balance. I also had to learn to stop treating fragrance exclusively like a buyer.
The buyer wants to know our costs, the margins and how many candles are sitting on my shelves.
The artist and creative in me wants to know what a gravel road smells like after that first big spring rain.
Both are useful. I’ve finally stopped pretending one is more legitimate than the other.
Farmer’s Son Co. also gave me access to a much larger world than I used to look at in those National Geographics.
Travel's become a huge part of the way I see things, and my love of Mexico City in particular has had an enormous influence on me. I could spend days there soaking in the colours, the stunning architecture, old tiles, hidden gardens, modernism, artisan markets, shoppes filled with tableware, the love and appreciation of food and the way the city layers different periods and ideas on top of one another without feeling the need to ever explain itself.
Lisbon gave me historical storefronts, patterned pavement, tiled façades and spaces that feel as though they’ve accumulated rather than been decorated. Barcelona reinforced my love of colour, form and the idea that useful things don’t have to be visually quiet. Buenos Aires gave me grand old buildings with a little decay around the edges (I love their old Harrods store), cafés and sidewalk patios that feel as though nobodies been in much of a hurry and antique shops I could happily disappear into for days on end.
But the things I remember most are rarely the landmarks.
I remember food halls.
I remember a particular shade of green on an old wall, a stack of beautiful linens in a shop, a restaurant floor, colourful pink flowers spilling over a brick wall, packaging, the smell of cologne bottles lined up in a department store, a antique filled with stacks of old leatherbound books, another massive carved door that I need to stop and take a photo of.
My favourite part of travelling is often simply sitting somewhere with a coffee and watching how a city works.
I'm a very visual guy, and I think I’ve spent most of my life filing these images away without really meaning to. Roblin, Mexico City, Lisbon, Barcelona, Shanghai, Buenos Aires and Bogotá all end up in the same mental filing cabinet. Prairie grass beside old European art. A modernist chair beside dusty backroads. Old Hollywood beside a garden after rain.
I don’t see much reason they shouldn’t all live together.
Farmer’s Son Co. has never really been built from one aesthetic. It has been built from a lifetime of noticing things.
One of the best surprises of the last ten years has been what happened once all of this left my hands.
Over the years, the things we make have quietly found their way into other people’s lives. Someone will tell us a fragrance reminds them of their dad, or of a summer they haven’t thought about in years. Someone else comes back looking for a candle they bought long ago because, somehow, it became attached to a place or a moment. We’ve watched customers move, marry, have babies, start over and come back through the shoppe in completely different chapters of their lives. Those interactions are easy to overlook in the middle of a busy day, but over ten years they accumulate. At some point, you realize the work has gone much further than the shelf it started on.
Those little interactions accumulate.
Eventually, you realize the things you make have quietly wandered off into other people’s lives.
In some ways, that still feels a little strange to me, but in the best way.
Over the past year and a half, a lot of different pieces have started fitting together in a way they hadn’t before.
Rory joined Farmer’s Son Co. full time. In many ways, it was a major change for us. But in so many other ways, it's felt like we've finally given him the title for a role that he's been doing for years.
Working together every day has taken some adjustment. Rory and I have different strengths, different ways of approaching problems and, occasionally, very different opinions about how something should be done. We’ve had to learn when to push, when to let the other person take the lead and when a conversation is probably better finished after lunch.
But there’s something pretty remarkable about getting to build this with the person who has been beside me since the beginning. Rory has seen every version of Farmer’s Son Co.: the folding tables, the markets, the giant wholesale orders, the genuinely good ideas and the ones we now discuss mainly for entertainment. He knows where the business came from, what it has taken to get here and what we want it to become. There’s a shorthand and a trust in that history that makes the harder days easier, and the good ones a lot more fun.
As Farmer’s Son Co. changed, so did my role in it. For a while, I’d become more removed from the lab and more focused on managing the business around it. Then, almost without planning it, I found myself back in production again.
It turned out to be exactly where I needed to be.
Being back in the lab has changed the way I think about the work. I’m less interested in how much we can make and more interested in what we’re actually making. The fragrance, the composition, the story, the small decisions that give something its character.
I think I understand now that this part of Farmer’s Son Co. is art, and it deserves to be treated that way.
Farmer’s Son Co.'s changed and evolved around us too.
Candles started all of this, but somewhere along the way we stopped being a candle company in any particularly useful sense of the term. Fragrance is still at the heart of what we do, but now it sits beside chocolate, pantry goods, linens, our collection of garden tools, barware and whatever else Rory and I drag in because we’ve convinced ourselves it belongs.
From the outside, that may look like a fairly loose business model.
To me, it’s completely coherent.
Maybe it’s 12 year old with his Canadian House & Home and Car and Driver magazines all over again.
The shoppe itself has grown in much the same way. We've never had the resources to design and outfit the our space in one beautiful sweep, which honestly has been a gift. It accumulated instead. Auction finds, estate sale pieces, treasures pulled out of old barns, the heaviest of antique fixtures, things we've repaired, painted or hauled across the city because one of us had decided they were exactly what the space needed.
Some pieces have moved around so many times they probably deserve workers’ compensation.
It’s part shoppe, part studio, part lab, part clubhouse and part ongoing experiment, tucked into a gritty old warehouse on a side street in Winnipeg. It isn’t glamorous on the outside, and I kind of love that. The space feels a little like our city itself: maybe a little rough around the edges, resourceful, sometimes underestimated and full of character and heart.
The fact that it wasn’t built all at once gave it something I’m not sure we could have purchased.
What I want now is a shoppe that encourages and rewards curiosity.
I think a lot about what I want a shoppe to feel like. So much of retail is built around efficiency now: park, find the thing, buy the thing, leave. There’s a place for that, but the shops I’ve always loved ask a little more of you. They give you a reason to wander, to touch something, smell something, pick up a book, find a chocolate bar you’ve never seen before or simply spend some time looking around without needing to accomplish anything.
Window shopping’s an art too.
That sense of discovery has become a big part of Farmer’s Son Co. We’re not interested in filling a room with things simply because we can sell them. I obviously like things. I’ve built an entire business around finding and making them. But I think the good ones should earn their place. A candle can completely change the feeling of a room. A beautiful towel can be the one you reach for every morning. A serving piece might make you want to have people over, and a chocolate bar can make a fairly ordinary Tuesday night considerably better.
None of it has to be precious. It just has to bring something to your life. Beauty, quality and usefulness all matter, but so do humour and pleasure. Joy is useful too.
Maybe that’s why the shoppe makes sense to me even though it doesn’t fit particularly neatly into a category. Fragrance sits beside chocolate, books, linens, garden tools and things for the table because I don’t really see those things as unrelated. They’re all part of how we make a home, mark a season, entertain somebody, remember a place or make an ordinary day feel a little better.
The fragrance lab is right in the middle of it all. I can be pouring candles while somebody is twenty feet away smelling one of them, and I love that connection. What we make doesn’t disappear behind a warehouse door and reappear on a shelf. The making and the shoppe share the same space, and over time I’ve realized that’s a pretty good expression of what Farmer’s Son Co. has become.
For years, I said it would be more than candles without being entirely sure what I meant. I think I was trying to describe a point of view before we had built the place to contain it.
Now we have.
Ten years also makes me look around that place a little differently. Usually there’s another shipment arriving, a fragrance to test, an order to make, a fixture to move or some object Rory and I have decided the shoppe absolutely cannot continue without. There isn’t much time spent standing around admiring our own handiwork.
That probably comes from the farm. You finished harvest, went for Chinese food and got on with whatever came next.
But ten years feels like a reasonable excuse to stop for a minute.
When I do, I see all the earlier versions of Farmer’s Son Co. layered into the one we have now: the cramped studios, markets, boxes (oh so many boxes), wholesale orders, fragrances that came and went, very good ideas and some fairly questionable ones. I see clients who remember candles we haven’t offered in years, and I see a side street space full of things Rory and I found, fixed, built, sourced, made, repainted or somehow convinced each other we needed.
Every once in a while, I manage to look at all of it and think, this is actually pretty cool.
Especially for the kid on the farm who used to look through old magazines and draw shops he didn’t really believe he’d ever own.
There are things I’d do differently, of course. There’s money I’d happily take back, projects I should have declined (oh so many of them) and decisions that made perfect sense at the time and would be completely ridiculous now. I don’t feel much need to turn every one of them into wisdom.
They’re simply part of how we got here.
What matters to me is that somewhere along the way, Farmer’s Son Co. became more itself.
I think I did too.
Rory and I still have more ideas than time, money or square footage, which is probably a healthy condition for the business to remain in. There are fragrances I want to make, objects I want to find, places I want to see and corners of the shoppe I’m already thinking about changing.
I still don’t have a business plan.
At this point, I think we can safely stop waiting for one.
Farmer’s Son Co. is ten.
We built something.
I’m going to let myself enjoy that.
