Well this business like so many others had a very grassroots beginning .
Back in 1989 I had answered the typical ad in a paper ' Paying cash for pine cones ' . I found I had developed a unique ability at harvest . Soon my skills came to notice and demand grew to the point that I had to employ several of my friends to keep up . Needless to say , it still was still quite overwhelming especially when we got into fresh greens . I soon took note that much of the boxwood ( at that time ) that we were harvesting was being preserved . Once it was preserved it has a far superior shelf life thus not as rapid of delivery required.
They did it OK , but I knew I could do better . So I spent the next couple years refining the systemic preserving process for boxwood till we had developed a superior product from the local native boxwood . This new product was rapidly picked up by many of our fresh buyers . We re-located to a small piece of acreage in North Idaho and slowly grew our production .
In September of 2001 all our clients got nervous and orders cancelled , so we quickly retooled from dealing tonnage to ounces . After several thousand miles over the next 3 months we had picked up our first 300 retail clients with our sleeved preserved boxwood . Those first customers had requests for so many different variations of our product we had no choice put to evolve . From picking up pine cones to the wreath manufacturer that you have found on the web today .
And to this day our business is still constantly evolving . We are re-introducing bulk this year to the public and have cold weather processing for 25% of our product line capacity which eliminates winter close downs . In the winters though boxwoods inventories are un-able to be re-stocked till spring . We do accept requests for the first boxwood of spring to be held . Gold products in both salal and boxwood are not available into late spring or early summer because they require sun for bleaching as well as selling out fast from pre-orders .
Wil Henderson 12/21/07