-scaled.jpg)
It’s a Cantabrian summer’s day and the apples are ripe for the picking – that is, small and perfect enough to fit down the neck of a bottle. Linden Leaves founder Brigit Blair knows where every wild apple tree is between Christchurch and Invercargill, and with bags at the ready she heads out with her loyal team to forage for tiny wild apples. (On their return they’ll hand-prick each one to ensure the fruit won’t wrinkle during the freeze-drying process.)
If you’re a Canterbury local you’d be familiar with a sight like this. Brigit takes pride in sourcing as many of Linden Leaves’ product ingredients locally as she can.
“And if we can’t get them in Canterbury we’ll spread out around New Zealand. We will only go beyond New Zealand if you literally can’t get it here and then we’ll look for an ethical supplier overseas.”
The unique and tiny roses that feature in Linden Leaves Aromatherapy Synergy Memories body oils are grown by the dad that Brigit was on the board of trustees with when their children were at school together.
The strawberries you find in their In Love Again body oils are from a local grower in Canterbury. Up until last year Brigit took the entire first crop from an elderly gentleman from Rolleston, who handpicked the strawberries with his wife until their retirement last year. She first met them 15 years ago buying strawberries from their roadside stall.
The lavender and larkspur from the Absolute Dreams body oil, as well as the salt used in their Bathtime and Gold ranges is from suppliers in Marlborough. The tamarillos and lemons are also New Zealand-grown.
Brigit’s patriotism to New Zealand-grown and her strong ethos in knowing where every one of her ingredients comes from extends to Linden Leaves gaining NATRUE certification three years ago.
“Becoming certified is quite a mission, you need to provide a very, very detailed trail from how your ingredients are grown to how they’re extracted to the finished product. But to me it’s very important because I think in skin care there is a lot of green washing which creates confusion for customers. We’ve gone to the lengths and the cross lengths because we wanted to give our customers the confidence that what we say is true.”
For Brigit this is personal: “What we say must be true and that comes from my daughter Catherine having life-threatening allergies to shell fish and peanuts. I don’t know how many times we’ve called ambulances from restaurants because they’ve said something is fine to eat when it wasn’t.
“In skincare it might be that someone is allergic to an ingredient or they might just not like it but they should know exactly what’s in the product.”
Brigit’s attention to detail extends to ensuring that Linden Leaves products are made by hand, as well as boxed, wrapped and despatched by hand.
“We want to make sure that when we send something out it is perfect; the question we always ask is, ‘If we were to receive that would we be delighted?’”
Brigit Blair
You can’t get that kind of perfection without an invested staff: Brigit regards her staff as family and treats them with the utmost respect.
“A lot of our production team are Korean. We started out by exporting to Korea and I set up a joint venture company there with a Korean business person. I tapped into the Korean community here because at that stage they were just starting to immigrate to Christchurch. It wasn’t easy for that generation to get work because of the language barrier, so I was helping them and they were helping me and it was very fitting.
“Some of those people are still with us and now their children are grown with children of their own. They’ve married and got degrees and become architects or accountants which is really nice.”
Brigit makes a point of celebrating each staff member’s birthday with cake and a gift from the company, and the same applies at Christmas.
“I would just hate for any of them to get up and think ‘oh god I have to go to work today’. I want them to feel that they’re a part of this. This is their company as well.”
