The Kara Goldin Show - Episode 876 Catherine Hunziker

The Kara Goldin Show, Episode 876
Featuring Catherine Hunziker, Founder & Chief Formulator, WishGarden Herbs

[00:00] Kara Goldin: "I am unwilling to give up — that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be: go focus on what you can control."

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go.

What if plants held more answers than most of us were taught to believe? Today I'm joined by Catherine Hunziker, founder and chief formulator of an incredible company, WishGarden Herbs — America's number one selling liquid herbal formulas brand. Catherine is a pioneering herbalist, educator, entrepreneur, and longtime advocate for environmental and women's health. She has spent more than four decades helping make herbal medicine more accessible, understandable, and trusted by mainstream consumers.

WishGarden Herbs began in 1979 with a mission to empower people to take control of their health naturally. Today, the company is women-owned, family-run, B Corp–certified, and known for fast-acting liquid herbal formulas made with USDA organic and ethically wild-harvested herbs — no fillers, preservatives, or hidden extras.

I cannot wait to get into it with Catherine about how she built an incredible wellness brand long before wellness was as mainstream as it's become today, and how she's turned activism into entrepreneurship. More than anything, she has helped so many people understand why herbal medicine is having such a resurgence. So Catherine, welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. So excited that you're here today.

[02:27] Catherine Hunziker: Thank you very much for having me.

[02:30] Kara Goldin: Absolutely. So for listeners who may not be familiar with the brand WishGarden Herbs yet, how do you describe the brand and what makes it unique?

[02:43] Catherine Hunziker: What's unique about it is that we have stayed committed to our mission and our values. Of course, we need to make money — we all need to make a living — but this is all about reintroducing and helping people experience and discover what whole herbs have to offer. I spent a lot of my career traveling around and doing trainings for store staff, thinking about how to talk about this in a way that lands. So I came up with an expression: "paleo health," or "paleo medicine" — plant medicine. For 99.9999% of our time as human beings on this planet, that was our primary medicine. For one reason or another, which I won't dive into here, herbs in the U.S. got kind of pushed out, or disappeared, for about 50 or 60 years in the early 1900s. And they have so much to offer — let's bring them back. That's a big piece of what we're doing.

My job is to put herbs together in teams to work together — what I call whole plant medicine. What is that plant? What is its constituent profile? What does it do? I often use the word "body-friendly" as well, because we came from the midwifery movement to begin with. Midwives were also missing for 50 or 60 years, and they were starting to come back along with natural foods. Midwives couldn't carry pharmaceuticals early on, and so WishGarden actually started with herbs for the midwives, so they'd have something to bring to their work. Because that was a very delicate population, the formulas had to be very body-safe, but they also had to work — which is one of the things we brought to the channel.

A lot of people didn't know that herbs could bring five-minute relief from acute discomfort. I'll jump forward — our Kick-Ass Allergy formula, with the lead herb Yerba Santa, is now the number one best-selling allergy tincture formula. I can talk about tinctures at some point, and why they're important, but it works as fast and effectively as it does, and it's very body-safe: non-stimulating, non-sedating. All of those things, and it works right away, helping people with their allergy discomfort.

[05:48] Kara Goldin: Take us back to right before 1979. What was happening in your life when WishGarden was just an idea?

[06:03] Catherine Hunziker: Well, actually, the story goes a little differently than that. I'm an old hippie and an activist — from the Vietnam War era, and also around pollution and things like that. As a hippie, you know, there was this whole psychedelic side to the movement; I was on the other side of it, which was about getting closer back to nature, moving away from chemical, industrial lifestyles. I went to the Ozarks during the Back to the Land movement — this was actually in the early '80s. I didn't start WishGarden in the '70s; that was a local midwife who was making some of these formulas, because here in Colorado, the Front Range around Boulder was kind of a hot spot for a lot of things happening. One was the midwifery movement. Another was natural foods, and also herbalism.

But I was in the Ozarks during the Back to the Land movement, living as a naturalist, making my own bread. My kids were little, and one early morning I went out for a walk in nature, and there was this meadow with deer and wild turkeys grazing. It was like a painting — so beautiful. And I should mention, it was January, the middle of winter.

[07:45] Kara Goldin: Crazy.

[07:46] Catherine Hunziker: I just stood there in awe until the animals started to drift away, and then I heard this funny sound — a buzzing. I followed my ear across the meadow, over by the creek, and there was this bush in full bloom in the middle of winter, with bees all over it. And I thought, "What the heck?" The life force of that was incredible. That's what turned everything for me — that experience.

I was amazed, so I went and found my field guide, which I always have handy because I'm all about plants, and looked it up. It turned out to be a bush called witch hazel, one of the few herbs that survived from the era when herbs had largely disappeared — it was in an oil-based preparation that was still on pharmacy shelves at the time. But that moment turned my attention from plants in general to medicinal herbs specifically.

There was a grower in the Ozarks who was cultivating medicinal herbs, and I started studying and learning about them there. Then, when I moved back to Boulder, I had also been trained as a midwife with the Emma Goldman Clinic — I did that right after college. But since I had little kids, I wasn't practicing; I taught childbirth education instead. That's how I was involved with the midwifery group in Boulder, and that's how I got to know the woman who was making those original formulas. She wanted to move out of the country with her partner, so I took over — step by step, starting in my own kitchen. That was around the beginning of the herbal movement, and I just kind of jumped in with both feet.

One thing led to another. I did springtime field trips in the desert with Michael Moore — he's gone now, unfortunately, but he was a pioneering herbalist, particularly focused on Southwestern bioregional herbalism, and I learned a lot from him. Feather Jones was another teacher I studied with. Long story short, I just have a thing for plants, and it turned out I had a real talent for formulation — which is where all of this came from, because people started asking me to formulate things. "Would you make this for my husband?" Some ideas came from my own kids; there are stories there too.

There were still granny midwives in Appalachia, and in the African American diaspora in the South, keeping folk herbalism alive, which is partly where these traditions came from. Being able to bring those formulas to women during childbirth, and having them say, "Oh, that was really helpful" — that experiential response, I don't want to call it marketing, but that experience is what led people to start asking me to formulate for them. A natural foods store here locally, the Waldorf school, people calling from Minnesota, from New York City — one thing led to another. It was all step by step.

My original motivation was not to start a business and get rich. My intention was to contribute as much as I could to a healthy, sustainable future. Then, a few years in, I thought, "Ooh, I've got to start paying attention to the money side."

[12:14] Kara Goldin: In those early days, how many SKUs — how many different formulations did you actually have?

[12:24] Catherine Hunziker: I'd say we probably started with about a dozen, specific to childbearing — what midwives could bring to a birth, what women needed right before delivery for their various discomforts, and even things for the baby right afterward. Just a handful at first. But then, as women experienced them, they'd start asking, "Could you do this?" or "Could you do that?" So the mail-order side started expanding.

I'd say we've had three life cycles. The first was practitioners and mail order, going out to people within the childbearing world. As word spread, I started going to the Boulder County Farmers Market, which was just being established at the time, and because a lot of people like to vacation in Colorado in the summer, that gave us an even wider following. There were Amish communities, and midwives in Appalachia who really valued what we were doing — not just for childbearing, but for wellness more broadly: mood, stress, sleep, children's formulas, women's formulas beyond childbearing (very hormonally based), and men's hormone balancing as well. We cover a wide range of functionality for people's lives, and we've even brought forward formulas where you don't need a problem to justify using them — they're just fun and make you feel better, like my Liquid Bliss. I could go on about that. But that was our first life cycle: mail order, practitioners, word of mouth, the farmers market, and so on.

The next step — we were actually kind of late to retail shelves, even though we were one of the original herbal-renaissance companies. We started coming out at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Vitamin Cottage, and independent stores in the early 2000s. I could speak more about that, but that's the second life cycle.

[15:08] Kara Goldin: What were some of the challenges of building an herbal medicine company — whether in those early days, or later, when you moved into the natural channel and retailers?

[15:24] Catherine Hunziker: I think, as is probably true for most companies, it was finding enough of the right people to cover all the different departments and aspects of the business. We've been lucky, and we're still lucky for the most part — people have wanted to come work on this. We do a nice balance between our company culture and the fact that we're regulated by the FDA, which is a whole other story about how that came about — the "vitamin wars" of the early '90s, and then DSHEA, and all that. I think we also do a good job balancing what I'd call the left and right sides of the brain — the science and the culture.

Having enough money took a long time — it took a while before we could afford the upper-level payroll we needed. Part of that is because, in the early 2000s, I was on the board of a trade organization called Naturally Boulder. Boulder was also a hot spot for the natural foods movement generally, and through that board I saw what happened to several friends of mine who had started natural foods companies with a lot of mission and values in mind. They needed capital to grow, and they thought they had it locked in — a contract, an investor — and then two years later, they'd lose it. They'd lose their mission, lose control. It was heartbreaking. I'm mentioning that because I was primarily motivated by the mission and the values — trying to build a better future. We never took that kind of money; we never took big outside capital. I like the metaphor of the tortoise and the hare — we were definitely the tortoise. There were challenges to that, like never having quite enough money, although we did pretty well overall. It all happened step by step, and we kept our values along the way.

We're now nationally recognized as what you'd call a conscious business, where it's not just about profit — although we do profit quite well. In accounting terms, you might call it the triple bottom line, and that's becoming a bigger part of what matters to people: recognizing that companies built this way could be a big part of the answer for our planet and a sustainable wellness future going forward.

So, what makes a high-quality herbal formula effective? That's a really good question, and it's something I teach about often — I don't know if it's talked about that much elsewhere. Let me start with whole-plant herbalism, where you're combining herbs based on their full constituent profile — all the natural molecules that have always been in the plant. That's what I call whole-plant herbalism, or a whole-plant formulation, and my job is not to try to improve on the plants, but to put them together in teams.

I want to distinguish that from what I'd call phytopharmaceuticals, where you take a particular constituent in a plant, isolate it, and concentrate it — essential oils, CBD from cannabis, that sort of thing. More recently, a particular constituent called berberine has been getting a lot of attention. These have a role, and they are natural molecules, but they're different — they act more like a single, concentrated compound in the body, more like a pharmaceutical.

[20:47] Catherine Hunziker: And then you have pharmaceuticals, which aren't natural molecules at all — they're replacing something that's apparently missing in the body, or similar. They all have their roles; we're complicated. But I'd say we start with whole-plant medicine, because it has so much to offer, and our bodies recognize it — our culture may have forgotten, but our bodies, our genealogies, remember. I can't tell you how many calls we've gotten where a formula did even more than what it was intended to do, and someone will say, "It went beyond what the label said." I love hearing that.

That's one side of it — we want, if possible, the whole range of what a plant has to offer, and whole-plant medicine is about combining them in teams. I like the metaphor of a basketball team: you have the center, the forwards, the guards, all working together to make it happen.

And this is the other really important part, one of the things that distinguishes us — you have to go beyond blanket descriptions of what an herb does. "It's a hormone balancer." "It's a lymphatic." Okay, but how is it working? What's the physiology? Where is it actually acting in the body? Just roughly speaking, there are about seven different ways lymphatics work in the body. You have to understand both the physiology of what you're working with — which body systems are involved — and where the underlying issue is actually coming from.

For example, say a woman has PMS with emotional mood swings — or a teenager, or anyone experiencing that kind of emotional intensity. People don't realize it's often not really about hormonal messaging or endocrine function directly; it's because the liver is congested and isn't breaking down hormones the body no longer needs. Those hormones keep circulating and create problems. That's the physiology. But where does that come from? If you're stressed, the body goes into that historic fight-or-flight response, which pulls energy away from metabolic functions and puts it into the muscles so you can run or fight. But that slows everything else down.

So I'm just giving you a quick example — you have to understand the physiology, where it's coming from and why, and then match that with the functionality of a particular herb, along with the demographic you're working with. If you're formulating for children, you want especially gentle, body-friendly ingredients, because children are so much more sensitive. I could go on and on, but that's the thing that's unique about what we do — we formulate on a deep level with what whole plants have to offer, and how to combine them to get the job done. Depending on the formula, that might mean addressing something in the moment.

[25:48] Catherine Hunziker: Or maybe you have a respiratory issue and want to move through it quickly, or you don't want to get sick in the first place, or you want to get over something you already have. Where "in the moment" is more about volume in a short amount of time, "getting better faster" is more about frequency — pushing consistently. But then there are deep, stuck, chronic issues, which is one area where standard-practice medicine doesn't always have a lot to offer. That's one place herbs can be especially valuable, because they help improve the function of the organs themselves. Where food, or plants as food, is about nutrition, plants from a wellness point of view help the organs actually work better — it's not just replacing something; it helps the body function better on its own.

[26:47] Kara Goldin: So when you look at all the different formulations you've created — in addition to being a founder, you're also the chief formulator — is there one that stands out? I hate to use the word "bestseller," but the one everyone keeps coming back for, over the years, or more recently?

[27:11] Catherine Hunziker: Clearly, to your point, our best-known one is Kick-Ass Immune. That's the one we usually hear about first. Part of that goes back to when we first came out in retail — merchandising and getting attention — and that's actually how it got the name Kick-Ass. There's a whole story about that. I was standing in Whole Foods when we were on the shelf there for the first time. I had originally formulated it for a local naturopath, and she'd called it "Basic Immune Formula." But I knew what it could do, and I was standing there thinking, "Basic Immune — yeah, this isn't going to cut it." It needed a name, because I knew it could do something more — something like "kick-ass." I mentioned it to the team, and they said, "Yeah, let's do that." So we put the name on it, they put it by the cash register, and darned if it didn't take off.

It's one thing to be cheeky with a fun name, but it also had to work. We took immune support to the next level — people didn't know that if you catch it early, you might have about eight hours before you actually get sick, and if you act on it right away, you can knock it out before it takes hold. Not for certain, every time, but you can really clean things up early. I could go on about that, but I don't think we have time. And if you're already sick, the formula helps push it through faster — get better faster — or if it's a stuck, lingering thing, it helps move it along.

So with that name, even though we were small at the time, we brought something to the category that moved the whole space forward, because we took immune support to a new level. Our Kick-Ass Allergy did the same thing from an allergy standpoint, which I mentioned earlier. We kept that same approach and that name, and I think it also appealed to a wider demographic — even farmers down in Texas would say, "Oh, I've got my Kick-Ass."

[29:42] Kara Goldin: I love that. Well, Catherine, thank you so much — I love all the stories behind the brand. You've done such a nice job growing this incredible brand, and it's clearly here to stay. WishGarden Herbs is such a great example of what happens when deep plant wisdom, activism, education, and entrepreneurship come together. You should be very proud of what you've accomplished, and I'm sure there are so many people grateful for everything you've brought to the world.

So for everyone listening, be sure to check out WishGarden Herbs — and definitely try the Kick-Ass products. We'll have all the information in the show notes about where to purchase. I'll see everyone next time on the Kara Goldin Show. And again, Catherine, thank you so much for joining us today — founder of WishGarden Herbs.

[30:53] Catherine Hunziker: Could I make one more comment?

[30:55] Kara Goldin: Oh, sure, go for it.

[30:57] Catherine Hunziker: You were asking about what stands out, and I want to mention — on the other end of the spectrum from Kick-Ass Immune — our whole wellness and sleep, stress lineup. Our sleep formula has no sedatives in it at all. And our women's line is very unique — there's probably nothing quite like it on the shelf or available online. Then there are the lifestyle formulas as well. So I just want to say: yes, Kick-Ass Immune is what most people hear about first, but we have really special things across a number of categories.

[31:41] Kara Goldin: Definitely — everyone should check out the entire selection. Catherine, you've done such a wonderful job describing all of this, and I'm sure everyone listening will want to learn more. WishGarden Herbs — thank you again, Catherine, and thanks everyone for listening.

Catherine Hunziker: Thank you.

Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin Show.