By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University
“Homemade.” Homemade meals and products always seem to be the best. Today we’ll meet two young women who are creating and marketing healthy, all-natural products across the country.
And the best part? These products are literally made in their homes.
Ashley Bean and Bailey Tucker are the founders and owners of Humble Homestead, a business built on holistic health and natural healing. Both women are nurses who grew up in rural northeast Kansas.
Ashley Bean hails from the rural community of Havensville, population 119 people. Now, that’s rural. She attended nursing school at Washburn University and currently works as a critical access nurse at Onaga’s hospital, which is part of the Community HealthCare System. She lives near Blaine with her husband and young children.
Tucker grew up in Lillis, which is even smaller than Havensville. She earned her nursing degree from the University of South Dakota and also works as a critical access nurse at the Onaga hospital. She now lives with her family on her childhood farm.
As co-workers, Ashley and Bailey discovered a mutual passion for natural healing and holistic health. As a hobby, they began mixing ingredients to create their own healthy products and shared their research on natural remedies with each other.
“We enjoy learning new things and challenging ourselves,” Bean said.
Then COVID-19 hit, causing immense stress on health care workers everywhere. “We were feeling burnt out,” Bean said. ”As nurses in the midst of a pandemic, we were searching for an outlet – something to help us find joy again.”
That outlet turned out to be making their own health products. “We thought, ‘What if others could find joy in our products, too?’”
In November 2021, they launched their online business, Humble Homestead. “We wanted our business to feel like a little piece of home,” Tucker said.
After making a magnesium rub lotion that helped with sleep and restless legs, they asked themselves, “What do we use regularly that we could make with clean, natural ingredients?”
That question led to the creation of their beauty product line.
Their focus has always been on using healthy, natural ingredients. “We want a product so safe you could eat it – something we would feel good about using on ourselves and our kids,” Tucker said.
Today, Humble Homestead offers a wide range of products, including household items, creams, salves, skin care, self-care products, and herbal teas. The company sells directly online and produces items wholesale for other businesses.
When it comes to being truly homemade, Humble Homestead takes it seriously.
“Every single item that we sell is made in our kitchens,” Tucker said. “Since everything is done at home, it is easy to customize our products and labels for other businesses.”
For instance, during the holidays, some businesses order customized products as gifts for their employees. While the products benefit the user, the process of creating them also brings a sense of fulfillment to Tucker and Bailey.
“I love the creative side of things,” Tucker said. “There’s something therapeutic about mixing raw, natural ingredients and turning them into something uniquely yours.”
They’ve spent countless hours experimenting in their kitchens. “We’ve tried different recipes and made adjustments along the way,” Tucker said. “Now we have hand-written recipes on index cards covered in oil.”
“Humble Homestead takes pride in being able to pronounce the entire ingredient list of each of our products,” Bean said.
The commitment to healthy, natural products is resonating with consumers across the country. Humble Homestead has shipped products from Oregon to Florida to Rhode Island and as far away as Canada. “Sales have doubled every year, which reflects the growing interest in natural, healthy products,” Tucker said.
For more information, visit www.humblehomesteadks.com.
Homemade is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but in the case of Humble Homestead, it’s 100% accurate. We salute Ashley Bean and Bailey Tucker for making a difference with creativity and commitment to natural, healthy products.
Their work allows customers to bring a little bit of home into their lives.
Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at https://www.huckboydinstitute.org/kansas-profiles/. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit http://www.huckboydinstitute.org.
