Today we’d like to introduce you to Vanessa Roers.
Hi Vanessa, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
The story behind Miel begins many years ago. Beekeeping has been in the Walters family for several generations. Great-Great-Grandpa Albert Walters had bees in southwest Wisconsin in the early 1900s. His son, Orville, continued the tradition by harvesting honey from wild bees in Madagascar. Mark, Orville’s son, started beekeeping in 1976. The young family moved to Madagascar in 1982. Of course, the Walters took hive bodies and equipment with them to begin beekeeping in Tolognaro, a coastal city in southern Madagascar. Later, they moved to the capital city and continued beekeeping. All of our experience in beekeeping has been in urban settings. We were without bees for some time after returning to the US in 1993. Then in 2007, the story behind Miel expanded. Mark’s son, Zach, the fourth generation, wanted to start them up again.
Zach was a professional boxer at the time. The amount of money he spent on honey for his diet caused him to remember the days of beekeeping with his dad in Madagascar. Zach thought it would be fun to start keeping some bees again. We could keep bees for the amount he’d spent on honey that year. At the end of the year, he wasn’t off by much! The season started with four bee hives. Later that summer, honey started coming in strong, and we had a ton of it! We started giving it away and selling it here and there to recoup the start-up costs. We quickly found out that other folks liked our honey as much as we did! The following summer, we learned of the Duluth Farmers’ Market on 3rd Street and 14th Avenue East. On our first day there, we sold over 100 bottles of honey! The demand was so great we could not keep up. We saved up for ten more hives. Now we could have enough honey to keep up with the demand at the market! Since 2013 we have maintained 25-30 hives each year at four locations, all urban. After the expansion, we found that having as many as 30 hives produced a lot of beeswaxes. Sharilyn, allergic to bee venom, wanted to get involved in the honey business. It only seemed logical to give her the beeswax. At first, she made beeswax candles. That would soon change.
One day, Zach’s boxing trainer brought him an empty tube of beeswax-based lotion. Jack asked if we could make this kind of lotion. Zach said, “I’ll ask my mom what she thinks and get back to you.” Wouldn’t you know, she found lots of information on making beeswax-based lotions. Sharilyn developed her formula, tested it on family and friends, and started to produce a lavender lotion for sale alongside the honey at the Duluth Farmer’s Market. Now, we consistently have five scents of lotion and a new featured scent each quarter of the year. Not long after the lotion was launched, Sharilyn found recipes for a lip balm made from beeswax and lanolin. Once again, she developed her all-natural formula. Lip balm sales took off like a brush fire! Responding to customer inquiries, Sharilyn turned her attention to researching recipes for beeswax-based soap. As a result, soap sales were added to the mix.
In late 2010, a friend approached Zach about turning our hobby into a business. He and his business partner saw the potential in Miel and offered their business expertise. On November 19, 2010, Miel, LLC was born. Over the next 4-6 years, we began to get our products into storefronts across the Northland of Minnesota. We developed our first website and e-commerce store. Our customers enjoy the inside look at our business and easy access to Miel products online! Orders come in from literally all over the world.
Currently, we have honeycomb, plastic squeeze bottles, and vintage glass Muth jars. We make our honey sticks from our delicious Duluth honey; Miel has gift baskets, bags, and sachets of our honey and beeswax products. Mark mentors many people one on one each year. In 2022, we will launch our new online video education course, “Miel Urban Beekeeping Fundamentals.”
In 2020, I moved back to town and quickly got into the production side. I enjoyed the creative side of our honey business. I love working with my hands, so it was a great fit for me to help that way.
In January of 2022, Sharilyn passed away unexpectedly, leaving me to pick up where she had left off in our business office. My mom was my best friend, and she taught me everything from making all of our products, and shortly before she passed, she showed me the basics of bookkeeping and accounting. I would have struggled more if she hadn’t shown me that little tidbit. I continue to work with the production side of things, but more of my focus is now on the business, bookkeeping, and advertising aspect. It’s been a huge learning curve and one that I never thought I’d have to handle so early in life. I have found a lot of joy in the day-to-day bookkeeping, advertising, and managing parts of our website. It keeps me connected to my mom even though she is gone. I will be going back to school this Fall to pursue a degree in Accounting so that I can better support our family’s business. I want to continue to see it succeed with my being at the helm. Our family is doing what we can to help spread the fun of beekeeping. It is an element that has kept us close as a family! After all, bees are super important to our existence. Ultimately, it’s amazing how a simple hobby has grown into a small family business.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not really. My mom passing in January, rocked our boats in a big way. We knew she did “all of the things,” but we quickly realized how much she did. Learning to navigate Quickbooks Online and manage parts of the website was tricky. But, I am so proud of myself for not giving up. I love what our business stands for and having a bigger role in keeping our business going.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Miel LLC?
We are primarily a honey company but also offer all-natural beeswax-based products: Lip Balm, lotion, soap, and beeswax wraps. We are proud of the fact that we are urban beekeepers. All of our hives are within the city limits of Duluth in four locations. Our honey is a taste of Duluth. We extract honey throughout the season, so as the flowers change, the flavor of our honey changes. People try our honey and other products and are pleased with the quality of it all.
We want your readers to know that we are a family-run business and genuinely love what we do! We love working with the bees and creating great products from the beeswax. We enjoy giving tours, showing people the hives we keep in our “headquarters” backyard, and showing them where we create all our products. We thoroughly enjoy visiting people when they visit the Duluth Farmer’s Market and inquire about our products. We have a lot of loyal customers. We also have a beautiful website that you can order from. Redid it last Fall, and it has helped our business grow nicely. We pride ourselves on being able to offer a fast turnaround time on our orders.
We also have a wholesale side to our company. We provide local and regional businesses with our honey and our beeswax products. We have vendors all over Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota even a couple in Michigan and Illinois. We are also launching an online Urban Beekeeping Fundamentals class this Fall. It was the brainchild of my brother, and he wanted to use the 43 years of knowledge our dad had to teach others how to keep bees in a city or town. We are very excited about it.
We love surprises, fun facts, and incredible stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
I am new to the business side of our company. I started working with my parents in 2020 and focused on the production side of things. I learned how to make all of our great products from my mom. She had been juggling the business, advertising, and production and was so glad when I told her I wanted to learn! I found that lotion and lip balms were a forgiving process, but the soap was not. I initially got very discouraged from making soap. It is a very detailed process, and there are a lot of moving parts. But, my mom was encouraging and told me it was okay to make mistakes and that I would eventually grow to like making soap. I wasn’t sure about her proclamation, but as the saying goes, “mother knows best,” and she ended up being right. Soap is now my favorite thing to make! I love the process of mixing all the ingredients and doing my best to make sure that our soap turns out as beautiful as I can make it. My mom passed away suddenly in January, so I took over the business side and advertising. She had been showing me little bits and pieces of how to do the basics of completing orders and bookkeeping, but since January, I have found my way through and managed to keep our business going. Not without the help from my family and a host of other key players! I have had so many people be so kind in helping me navigate this business world. I’m returning to school this Fall for bookkeeping and accounting to learn more about the behind-the-scenes and help our business thrive!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mielduluth.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mielduluth/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mielduluth
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeRWNuFKt4GIbm-n75W6Ppg
