I’m proud to have a bird brain.

As a kid, I used my mom’s Peterson Field Guide to sketch birds. They fascinated me. Later in life, I started to pay attention to the birds around me - their songs, their habits, their shapes and and their colouring. I’m generally at my happiest when I’m traipsing around our farm property with my binoculars on the trail of a new bird. So when it was time to come up with a name for our little soap company, I knew it needed to be bird-related. But there are so many amazing birds - what would be the perfect bird to represent our all-natural, farm-grown bath & body goods?

As it turned out, I didn’t have to look farther than our neighbours’ farms.

Purple martin houses are easily spotted on farms in our region and across Canada. You’ve probably seen them so often that they don’t even register in your mind! They’re usually white and boxy and made up of many units - sort of like a bird condominium. And they’re always up on top of a pole that’s at least 10 feet high. Each spring the bird condo is raised up in anticipation of the purple martin colony’s return, and each fall it’s lowered down for cleaning. Acting as landlord to a purple martin colony brings a farmer the benefit of pest control: a healthy colony of purple martins will eat a lot of insects every single day.

The purple martin is also an incredibly social bird, living in colonies as large as space will allow. And they’re closely connected to humans, so much so that some have suggested that they be renamed people martins. In fact, Ontario’s purple martins nest almost exclusively in houses maintained for them by their willing landlords; they are rarely found roosting outside of these condominiums.

So that’s how we came up with our name. The purple martin lives on the very farms where our ingredients are grown, alongside the families who produce them. Like us, they rely on the farmer for so much, and they thrive within strong communities. We hope you agree that the purple martin is the perfect ambassador for our farm grown bath & body goods!