Local Ancestral Skincare Company Hearth & Homestead’s Inspiring Journey From Kitchen Counter to Thriving Amazon Storefront
By: Emily Mook | Photos by: Ashlee Glen
As the famous proverb states, necessity is often the mother of invention—and one local mother whose skin struggles inspired her to start a skincare business can emphatically attest to that general truth.
When Lily Wilmoth was pregnant with her first child about 10 years ago, she began experiencing skin issues she had never experienced before.
“As soon as I got pregnant with my first, my skin was just reacting to everything,” she said. “I had never experienced that before! I had always been the person who could eat anything and put anything on my skin without a problem. Then, all of the sudden, my skin was itchy, itchy, itchy all the time! It was terrible.”
Upon looking into the ingredients in her skincare products, Wilmoth was dismayed by the amount of fragrances, dyes, and disruptors they contained.
But that dismay quickly gave way to determination, and Wilmoth decided to take matters into her own hands—literally—to create her own clean skincare products.
“I just realized I was going to have to do it myself!” she exclaimed. “And as someone who grew up learning to cook—and with a mom who was a really good cook—I love being in the kitchen. So it really wasn’t a far cry away for me to start creating skincare for myself since I already like experimenting with food, herbs, and things like that.
I even did a little bit of amateur foraging in college. There’s actually a lot of cool and useful stuff that just grows wild.”
Supplementing her intuition for and interest in creating natural products with ample research into ancestral skincare practices—largely gleaned from library books—Wilmoth started making soap, herbal infusions, salves, body butters, lip balms, diaper cream, and even tooth powder. It soon became apparent that this born-of-necessity venture was not only an enjoyable hobby, but also a profitable passion. As such, Wilmoth decided to establish Hearth & Homestead, LLC and to set up a booth at a local farmers market in Albemarle, North Carolina (where her family lived at that time) in 2016. The family ultimately moved to the Lynchburg area and participated in the Forest Farmers Market.
As Hearth & Homestead’s popularity and product line grew, so too did the Wilmoth family. After having her fourth child in May 2022, Wilmoth said that she had “started to feel like it was just a lot” and that she and her husband knew “it was time to make a decision”: either invest more fully in the business and take it a step further while outsourcing and delegating some homestead tasks or “quit and I could just homeschool our kids and worry about our sheep and goats.”
The main impetus for this increase in popularity—and reason for the Wilmoths’ ultimate decision to invest in and grow the business—was the addition of tallow balm to their product lineup in 2021. Specifically, the success of Hearth & Homestead’s Herb-Infused Tallow Balm, which became their bestselling product in 2022 and which remains their bestseller to this day, encouraged the couple to take a chance on their burgeoning business.
“That summer [of 2022], I was talking to my husband, and I was like, ‘We have this product, this tallow balm, and I think there’s something we could do with this,’” Wilmoth recalled. “‘It’s the best margin process that we have, we’re different from others, we do it really well, and we have excellent sources for all of our ingredients.’”
A stroke of serendipity followed this conviction—and opened the door to the widespread national-scale success Hearth & Homestead enjoys today—when Wilmoth’s husband came across an ad for Amazon Handmade on Facebook and, according to Wilmoth, asked, “‘Why don’t we do this?’” Wilmoth agreed, and an exciting—and extremely demanding—new e-commerce era for the business began.
After hiring a marketing specialist to assist with logo art and branding, the couple took on the multi-step process of setting up an Amazon Storefront. After the Wilmoths completed an interview, a great deal of paperwork, a legal process to attain a trademark, and detailed product listings, Hearth & Homestead made its Amazon debut and sales started to steadily trickle in—but the growth didn’t stop there.
When Amazon reached out to see if the Wilmoths would like to enroll their business in Amazon Prime, the couple leaned in once again with faith and enthusiasm. Sales picked up significantly, and as the couple adjusted to shipping large batches of tallow balms to Amazon warehouses rather than personally fulfilling individual orders—which they had also been labeling themselves—it became very clear that they would need to add staff and space to keep up.
By the end of 2023, the Wilmoths had hired a few part-time workers to assist with labeling, packing, and processing suet into tallow so that they could focus
on making the balm and piping it into jars. By the end of 2024, the Wilmoths had moved into a new home in Rustburg that boasts a large basement for production, and Hearth & Homestead sales had experienced astronomical growth. When 2025 arrived, it became apparent that even more staff, space, and delegation were needed. To keep pace with sales, the Wilmoths moved operations to their new production studio and warehouse on Waterlick Road and hired additional staff members to make the tallow balm.
Today, Hearth & Homestead boasts a staff of about 25, and a plan to move to a 30,000-square-foot facility is in the works. To further convey the enormity of Hearth & Homestead’s growth over the past decade, Wilmoth offered the following data: “When we were working in our basement, we were able to make maybe 400 balms a day or so, and now, we’re making 2,400 to 3,000 balms a day at full capacity. When we started Hearth & Homestead, it was just a side business for us, but last year we did $15 million in sales. Our goal for this year is $22 million!”
And yet, the incredible success of Hearth & Homestead comes down to so much more than these impressive figures. Throughout this venture, the Wilmoths have remained committed to working tirelessly, cultivating a sense of community among their staff and customer base, crafting exciting new products (such as fermented cod liver oil solutions for cystic acne; a wide variety of seasonal balms, soaps, and gift sets; and their Pearl Serum, their latest launch that uses Akoya sea pearl sourced from Japan), and remaining a handmade manufacturer to ensure consistency and quality.
“In general, in the U.S., the majority of skincare businesses that are at our level, you’ll see a lot of them are using third-party labs and third-party manufacturing for all of their products,” Wilmoth said. “But as soon as you bring a third party into that process, you are compromising your ingredients. The majority of skincare brands scale up and product quality goes down. Our goal is always to remain handmade, and I think that’s what sets us apart. We choose to scale up and keep our handmade process.”
As the Wilmoths envision further growth by working toward GMP certification and retail placements, they remain grateful for the journey that brought them here and will continue to honor Hearth & Homestead’s humble beginnings by prioritizing consistency and community amidst any and all changes.
“We’re not about building up something that’s so external and corporatized,” said Wilmoth. “We wanted to build something that still feels like it’s from us, like it’s part of our family. That’s how we want it to feel to work at Hearth & Homestead and to be amongst us. We want it to feel like a true community of people who are working together to handcraft products that we love and that our customers can trust.”
