Founded by Hall Newbegin in 1998, Juniper Ridge is the world's only wild fragrance company. Distilling colognes and perfumes from real plants, moss, mushrooms, bark and tree trimmings, Juniper Ridge's ingredients are sourced throughout the USA's West Coast and turned into fragrances at the company's workshop in Oakland, California. Wilderness perfume is what they make around campfires and on the trail in the backcountry mountains of the West. Wilderness Perfume is both a concept, an aromatic snapshot of a wild moment, and an ingredient: all of their products contain wilderness perfume. Juniper Ridge formulates Wilderness Perfume by distilling and extracting fragrance from wildflowers, plants, bark, moss, mushrooms, and tree trimmings that they harvest on the trail. All of their products are named for the wild places they come from. Juniper Ridge is building a new fragrance grammar of the American West.

The company is built on the simple idea that nothing smells better than the forest and that the only way to bring this beauty home is to strap on your boots and go there.

HARVEST

…if it comes from nature, it is going to change… Unlike synthetic fragrances, these wilderness perfumes are extracted from real, native-plant sources.

PROCESS

Juniper Ridge team crawls around in mountain meadows. They smell the wet earth beneath fir trees and try to determine exactly what those scent notes are in the wind sweeping over a glacier. They conceive fragrances throughout the West, on dirt roads and trails, around campfires, and formulate in  Oakland, California workshop. All to capture the beauty of the Mojave Desert at sunrise, thick blanket of fog draping the wildflower gardens of Big Sur, or a late-season, sun-baked, snow carved, glacial canyon high in the Sierra Nevada.

FORMULATION

All Juniper Ridge products are 100% Natural and produced using old perfume-making techniques including distillation, tincturing, infusion and enfleurage. A hundred years ago, all perfumes were made this way. Today Juniper Ridge continues to handle every step of the process, from beginning to end. These formulas vary from year to year and harvest to harvest, based on rainfall, temperature, exact harvesting location, and season. The exact formula depends on what we find in the wind, a conversation with the living, wild ecology.

FIELD LAB

The outer-experimental edge of what we do is in the Field Lab. These extremely small-batch, trail-made fragrances are produced in numbers usually less than a hundred and are designed as aromatic snapshots, capturing the wind on a particular day in a particular wild place.

STEWARDSHIP

All of the plants are wild-harvested with the utmost sensitivity and respect for the existing wildscape. Juniper Ridge returns to the same stands year after year to carefully monitor regrowth. They never use alien or invasive species and are actively involved in native plant restoration projects from San Diego to Seattle. 10% of all of their profits are annually donated to a portfolio of Western Wilderness Defense organizations. Juniper Ridge revels in the intact forest habitats of the West and tirelessly work to promote education as to how best to protect them.