Trust Isn't a Marketing Line

What 57 Years of Doing It Right Puts in the Bottle

Featuring Dan Coyle, President of Herbs, Etc.

There's a version of transparency that's become standard in this industry. You list the ingredients. You post the certificate of analysis. You put "third-party tested" on the label. And all of that is real. But it's also not the whole story, because the same brands doing all of that are often sourcing from whoever's cheapest this quarter or chasing whatever ingredient just got featured in a wellness newsletter.

Early in my time here, someone suggested we look at adding a couple of trending ingredients to our lineup. The suggestions weren't malicious; they came from a genuine desire to grow. But when I looked into one of them, I found it was associated with serious safety concerns and restricted in multiple states. The answer was no, immediately and without much debate. Not because the business case wasn't there, but because it wasn't us. That's a small story, but it points to something important: saying no to the wrong thing is part of how you protect the right thing.

Herbs, Etc. has been saying no to the wrong things for 57 years. That's the actual product.

Where Trust Actually Lives

Trust doesn't live in a formula document or a spreadsheet. It lives in the people who've been making these products for a long time and know, in ways that are hard to explain, when something is off.

Tim Nerich is one of those people. Tim has run our soft gel machine for 17 years. He was the first person to operate it when we brought it in, and it's been his domain ever since. What that means in practice is that Tim has a level of expertise with our soft gel products, the machine, the gelatin, the ingredients going in, that doesn't exist anywhere else. He can tell by look, by smell, by feel, when something isn't right. That's not a figure of speech. It's a real skill built over 17 years of paying close attention.

I've seen this kind of thing happen here more than once. A new lot of a raw material comes in. Someone opens it. They just know. They flag it, it gets tested, and sure enough, it isn't right. The batch doesn't go through. A consumer never knows that happened, and that's exactly the point.

Then there's Karry Jones, who has been with us for more than 15 years and is the person who actually creates our formulas on the production floor. The recipes were designed by our formulation experts, Blaire Edwards-Maschotta, who leads sourcing and formulation today, and Daniel Gagnon, who built much of our product line over four decades. But Karry is the one who brings those recipes to life, every day, batch after batch. She knows these formulas the way a chef knows a dish they've cooked a thousand times, not just the steps, but the feel of it when it's right.

The people making our products aren't rotating through. The top five people in our manufacturing operation have an average tenure of 16.3 years. Karry has been here 15 years; Jennifer Cross, who also develops formulas, has been here 25 years. That kind of continuity isn't something you can buy or replicate quickly. It shows up in the product.

When Esther Archuleta retired not long ago, she had been here for 37 years. That's not a talking point. That's what this place actually is.

The Business Decisions Behind the Product

The harder path costs more. Fresh plant extraction requires more time, greater coordination with growers, and more precise processing than buying powdered ingredients from a commodity market. And you can buy powdered versions of almost everything we use. They're cheaper, but the quality of the ingredients depends on the care that was taken during extraction, and we can't control that. So we don't go there.

We also haven't raised prices in a long time, longer than we should have, honestly. We didn't raise prices during COVID, and we've been absorbing cost increases since. That pressure is real. Osha root, for example, typically grows between 7,000 and 10,000 feet in the Rockies and is genuinely expensive to source responsibly. We could take 75% of it out of a product, leave a trace amount on the label, and most consumers would never know. The industry has a name for that: fairy dusting. We don't do it. A price increase is coming on some products because the math demands it, but people will be getting what they're paying for.

Many of our ingredients come from farms near us, including Tesuque Farms, just down the road. There are real advantages to sourcing locally. The herbs arrive fresh. We can see what we're buying. And because we're a consistent buyer, we help the farm stay viable, which matters because Tesuque Farms also grows food for the people who live on the Pueblo. We're not the reason that happens, but we're part of what makes the farm work financially. That's a relationship we take seriously.

Not every ingredient we use can be grown locally. Some come from Oregon, from the East Coast, or from other regions. When we have to source remotely, we air ship to preserve freshness rather than let herbs sit in transit. That's expensive, and it comes with an environmental cost we don't take lightly; the fuel and the footprint are real. But degraded ingredients make for degraded products, and that's not a trade we're willing to make.

When fuel surcharges go up, we feel that. When fertilizer costs go up at the farm, we feel that indirectly. We're absorbing those costs right now because the alternative is compromising the product, and we won't do that.

What This Means for the Category

A new supplement brand can build a $10 million business without ever touching a plant. I say that without judgment – the category has made that possible, and good marketing is a real skill. But there's a question worth asking: what survives when the marketing spend stops?

The brands that survive are the ones whose products do what they say, made by people who've been doing it long enough to know the difference. Whether the team making it knows what they're doing. Whether the company has a track record that can be verified by someone other than the company itself.

My advice to consumers is simple: do your research, and think carefully about who wrote what you're reading. A lot of supplement marketing is created by people whose job is to sell things, not to inform. That doesn't make it false, but it means you have to do some of the work yourself. Ask how long a company has been doing this. Ask where the ingredients come from. Ask what happens when they have to choose between the cheaper option and the right one.

I'll also say this: I think AI will be a useful filter here, maybe more than people realize. Right now, if you search for an herbal sleep product on Amazon, you get pages of results with no meaningful way to differentiate. Ask the same question to an AI, and you start getting answers that factor in a company's history, its track record, its reputation over time. Brands that have been doing the right thing for a long time will benefit from it. Brands that have been coasting on marketing copy will have a harder time.

We've been at this for 57 years. We're not worried about that filter.

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The People Behind the Product

Tim Nerich has operated our softgel machine for 17 years. He was the first person to run it when we brought it in, and he's become the resident expert on both the machine and every product that comes through it. Tim can tell when something's off before a test confirms it, by smell, by sight, by feel. He's not in any of our marketing materials. He probably should be. As he puts it: "We make a great product." After 17 years, he still means it.

Karry Jones has been creating our formulas on the production floor for more than 15 years. She works from recipes developed by our formulation experts, but she's the one who brings them to life every day. She knows when something isn't right, and she says so. That matters more than it sounds.