Welcome to WildTend

Dreams can only be achieved if you work toward them.

My name is Zoe Crimmel, and I am the founder of WildTend.

Ever since my eyes were opened by the passing of my mother in 2024, I have not been able to look at a label the same way. She was the healthiest person I knew, rarely eating anything but whole foods and indulging only in the occasional ice cream, and she still got sick and still died of cancer. The scariest thing to me is picking up a product and seeing an essay of ingredients, half of which I couldn’t even name, and realizing all of it was going into my body. That’s the simple story you hear from everyone, but it goes deeper than that.

I have lived in different countries, states and communities, and no matter where I went, there was always one truth: the health of the people was only as good as their access to healthy choices. Read that again. When I lived in Europe, good food was accessible on every corner, good skin care was within reach at every store, and chemicals weren’t so widely used. Now, living in the South, it is the complete opposite, and the people are suffering for it.

Growing up, if it wasn’t organic we couldn’t eat it, and if it wasn’t “clean” we couldn’t use it. What we didn’t know was that “clean” was never actually clean. So I started changing one thing at a time: a plastic-free toothbrush, hairbrush and razor, and eventually pure coconut oil as my lotion, because I knew it didn’t have any “extras” in it.

Then my social media feeds caught up to what I was doing, and it turned into mixing baking soda and washing soda in my dorm room to wash my clothes, melting beeswax into candles in my plug-in pot, and even making my own lipstick, because seeing plastic tubs had started giving me anxiety. I went crazy replacing one thing after another. It became my identity: cardboard chapstick tubes and reused jar lotions. Soon people started asking where I bought them and where they could find them, and whenever I told them I made it all myself, they couldn’t believe it.

Those were the easy swaps. Then came my big jump. I started watching what people were making online, like lotions, moisturizers, perfumes and candles, but it wasn’t until recently that I took the next “dangerous” step into soaps and detergents. Since then, my home has never been cleaner. What started as experimenting for myself, from coconut oil to beef tallow, has grown into mascaras, lotion bars, lipsticks and soap bars, with much more to come.

Why WildTend?

It’s a question I get quite often and one I love to talk about. WildTend comes from the phrase “wild tending,” which means “actively caring for undomesticated lands to increase life, abundance, and biodiversity while giving back more than you take.”

When I started WildTend, I knew one thing for sure: I was not going to make anything that harms the people who use it or the planet that provides me with the resources. Every product I make has a short ingredient list you can easily read out loud, and you’ll know what each one is.

It started in my dorm room with a plug-in pot and a few jars, and I still make everything in small batches today. That keeps my waste low, my ingredients fresh, and every product something I’ve personally made and stand behind.

Thank you for being part of what we’re building, one small batch at a time.