Creating Rewards Programs

Howdy there from our little farm! My name is CeAnne and I own Farmhouse Teas with my husband. We run our six-figure organic loose leaf tea business from our small farm where we also home-school and homestead. When I was growing up I always loved learning, especially about how to make things from scratch. Thanks to the influence of my grandmother, mother, and father I was always super crafty. Not much has changed and my husband often refers to me as a mad scientist. There is always something brewing around these parts.

After high school, I met my handsome husband, whom I refer to as my Farmer. While he actually grew up on a cattle ranch, I still count that as a farm, but that's another story for another time. During our first 10 years of marriage, we adopted our 4 children from around the world. Two boys from Russia, a daughter from Bulgaria, and our youngest daughter who was our only newborn and US adoption. The older children came home with some unique disabilities and required some extra care and attention. As time went on my Farmer and I saw that two of them would probably require lifelong care.

Since we first got married we not only dreamed of having a family but also that we would own our own business. The freedom that entrepreneurship brings along with building something that we both loved was always on our bucket list. Plus with our special needs children, we had even more reason to work from home so we could help them more and so that they could be part of the business. We had many attempts over the years that started from fundraising efforts for the adoptions to house painting business to selling used books, to selling new books, and homeschooling websites.

While a couple of those were able to provide us a part-time income, we found that they weren’t our ideal businesses for one reason or another. Shortly after the adoption of our youngest, we moved to our farm in NW Oregon on the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. My husband’s ranch experience and my newfound love of all things homesteading lead us to purchase our almost 2-acre farm. We were determined to grow most of our own food along with a good portion of our own natural medicine.

My childhood was full of lots of doctor visits for an illness that was never found. I spent many days off school sick almost monthly in the wintertime. My mom used to tease me that I just wanted to see the new decorations in the doctor's office for every holiday. As I got older the sickness never left, just changed. Later on, I found that eating whole, real food, an organic diet free from white things (sugar, flour, processed foods) was helping to maintain my health and avoid the number of sick days. I also discovered that herbal medicine was great at supporting my body naturally and cut back on the number of pharmaceuticals that I needed. Eventually, we switched everything over to clean and natural: diet, medicine, cleaning supplies, etc. I started making my own salves to replace store-bought ointments for bumps and bruises or scrapes. I purchased herbal tinctures to replace pain meds, cold and flu meds, and others. Eventually, I found that making them myself was not only more affordable but a lot more fun. The Farmer will tell you that I can’t just do a “ little bit” of anything. I’m either all in or not in at all. That translated into too many salves for our family, too many lotion bars, too many lip balms, and too much herbal tea that I just had to share. So guess what friends and family got for Christmas? Easter? Birthdays? Yep, herbal creations from yours truly. Eventually, I went from gifting to selling extras on Etsy, to setting up a table at Christmas booths, then the Farmer’s market then to grocery stores and online.

We eventually found that those local events were really hard on our family and our children who needed that bit of extra care. Along with my health not putting up with 8-10 hours prepping for a market or a show. The work of selling at grocery stores became too much time away from home for too little money. So we moved our business all online along with some wholesale to smaller retailers like natural food stores and gift shops. During the Covid shutdown of 2020, our business grew by leaps and bounds (some of that to do with so many people at home behind their computers), but a major part of our growth came from our affiliate program (which I’ll talk about later).

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