7 minute read
Cultivating a healthy business: Belle Tige
With help from her family and her Castle Valley garden, an entrepreneur creates line of natural skincare products
Written by Sharon Sullivan Photography by Murice D. Miller
From a small glass vial, Castle Valley resident Katrina Gillette squirts a dime-sized amount of Honey Balm Serum onto the palm of a woman who spreads the moisturizer evenly across her face. She says she likes its smooth, clean, non-greasy feel and ends up purchasing the product. It’s October, and Gillette is touting her line of natural skincare products at the Palisade Farmers Market in western Colorado.
Katrina Gillette selling her Castle Valley-based skincare line, Belle Tige, at a farmers market in Palisade, Colorado. [Photo by Sharon Sullivan]
Gillette commutes weekly from her Utah home to Colorado’s Grand Valley to set up a booth at the Sunday market that runs from June to October. She has found a thriving customer base here for her organic Bella Tige Artisan Skin Care products.
The vendor next to her, Sydney Garvey, owner of Garvey’s Gardens, sells the flowers she grows on her East Orchard Mesa flower farm. The two female entrepreneurs say it was a serendipitous stroke of good luck that their two businesses ended up being side-by-side. “All her products are handmade, some infused from her roses,” Garvey explains about Gillette.
“Her products work amazingly well for my very dry farmer’s hands,” says Garvey.
In Moab, the Moonflower Community Cooperative, a natural foods store, and Moab Made, a shop that specializes in locally-crafted items, also sell Belle Tige skincare products. Moonflower’s personal care department manager, Janis Adkins, says Gillette’s creations “sell like crazy,” and that she doesn’t have to try and sell them, because they sell themselves. “People love it; it works; it makes people feel beautiful,” Adkins says. An Aleut descendent
Gillette, 40, was raised by a great-aunt and great-uncle on a 35-acre farm in Ontario, Oregon after her then-17-year-old mother dropped her off and didn’t return for two years. Though Gillette spent six months with her mother when she was 5, she ended up going back to her great-aunt and great-uncle’s home where she lived until she was 16. After her aunt suffered a stroke, Gillette moved to Seattle.
Her great-aunt and great-uncle, who passed away when she was a teenager, had always encouraged their adopted daughter to get an education, telling her that “it will take you places in the world.” In Seattle, Gillette earned her GED, and attended community college before moving to Ft. Collins, Colorado to
Katrina Gillette with husband Franz Tassilo Thoma, son Chauncey and daughter Jo.
attend Colorado State University, where she completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural science, and eventually a Ph.D. in horticulture.
Gillette is a descendant of the Aleut Native Alaskan tribe. Her mother’s grandparents met each other at an Alaskan boarding school for Native American children. Gillette attended graduate school with the help of a scholarship from The Aleut Foundation, a private foundation that helps Aleut people and their descendants to “further their education, career, and cultural connectedness.” She was also awarded a scholarship from Native Women in Science to pursue her Ph.D. program.
Shortly after giving birth to her son, Gillette began her post-doctorate work as a scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Iowa. Her husband, Franz Tassilo Thoma – whom she met in college – took care of their son while she worked. “I was career-oriented; my husband was a stay-at-home dad,” she says. “I’d always worked. I planned to be a working mom.”
For two years Gillette labored measuring greenhouse gas emissions from golf courses for the USDA, and had a second job leading a Native American Women’s Circle, a student outreach program at the college.
While she excelled at her government job, publishing five scholarly papers, Gillette felt something was missing. Across the street from her workplace was a horse stable she’d visit during breaks. She recalled the horses she used to ride at her great-aunt and great-uncle’s farm. She wanted to spend more time outdoors and felt like she was missing too much of her young son’s growth by working outside the home.
A short time later, a Utah friend told Gillette and Thoma about a house for sale in Castle Valley. The property included an orchard, vineyard and a mature rose garden. “My first memory (after arriving in Castle Valley) was putting my child in one of the trees in the orchard – I felt like the tree was holding him,” Gillette recalls. The couple purchased the property; she quit her job; and the family moved to Castle Valley a year later, in 2016.
Gillette had begun searching for good, pure skincare products after moving from Oregon to Colorado’s more arid climate. In Iowa, she began researching ingredients and experimenting with making her own skincare items. Finding that most skincare moisturizers contain chemicals like paraben and sulfites – fossil fuel-derived preservatives that prolong a product’s shelf life – Gillette began experimenting with herbs, aloe vera, essential oils, and honey. Honey is known for its probiotic properties that are good for the skin – “It’s food for the skin,” Gillette says. She also uses rose petals and rosehips, calendula, and elderberry grown at her Castle Valley property.
When water tops the list of ingredients in a cosmetic product, Gillette says that’s a sign there are “cheap fillers, binders” that make the water and oils combine. Gillette said her education, and experience working in labs, has helped her understand the chemistry of skincare products and what they can do to the body.
In 2017, Gillette began turning her craft into a business – Belle Tige – by selling her products at Moab shops and online. She added the Palisade Farmers Market in fall 2020. The business really just started taking off this past year, she says. Gillette also teaches part-time at the Moab Charter School and also manages a rental property.
The family turned the old well-house on their Castle Valley property into a workshop where Gillette works mixing the ingredients together. She also does the bottling and labeling, and prepares the products for shipping. Her 8-year-old son Chauncey sometimes likes to help clean and label bottles.
Katrina and daughter Jo harvest mullein, a natural decongestant, from their garden in October.
While the Honey Balm Serum is the “star” product, she says, (honey is an ancient form of skincare and was used by Egyptians for healing) Gillette also makes a Sweet Rose Cream, a heavier, creamier rose-petal-infused product for the face and body. Her other products include a Green Tea Luminous Face Oil, which contains an infusion of caffeine to help tighten, firm, and nourish the skin; Green Tea cleansing balm, an oil-based cleanser with essential oils of lemon and tea tree to remove makeup and other impurities; Beauty Elixir, a hydration spray for head to toe; and Reviving Rose Oil, a rosehip-based oil rich in Vitamin A and blended with essential oils known for their healing properties.
Gillette’s 5-year-old daughter Jo helps her mother harvest rose petals in the spring, and rosehips in the fall. “Roses are some of the first to blossom in the spring,” Gillette says. “I try to leave all blossoms on for two days for the pollinators.” When the roses bloom again in autumn those petals are left unharvested to attract pollinators.
Gillette says she feels a strong kinship with nature, and is most peaceful when it’s quiet. She finds being outside in a natural setting to be grounding, and good for rebalancing.
During her Master’s degree program, Gillette completed an internship in 2009, in Switzerland for the United Nations, where she worked for the World Meteorological Organization. While living in Europe, she visited perfumeries in Grasse, France – renowned for their use of roses and lavender.
“It was eye-opening,” she recalls, learning how flower essences can be distilled. The name Belle Tige is French for “beautiful stem,” she says. “It’s why I knew I wanted a French name; I wanted to recognize the bees and flowers.” n
