Eleven Years - A founder's reflection — and the customers who made every batch day worth it
Eleven years ago this month I registered an LLC.
It was not a dramatic moment. There was no ribbon cutting, no celebration, no sense that something significant had begun. There was a form, a fee, and the particular mixture of terror and conviction that accompanies every decision to bet on yourself. The Lovely Rose Apothecary existed, officially, on paper. Everything else was still ahead.
What was ahead, as it turned out, was more than I could have imagined from the kitchen where I was still scheduling batch time around dinner.
I want to tell you what eleven years looks like from the inside — what has changed, what has stayed exactly the same, and what the customers who found their way to this building on Victor's main street have meant to the person who makes everything in the back of it.
What Has Changed
The kitchen became a studio. The studio moved into the Tatlow Building — built in 1899, housed Victor's original pharmacy through the 1940s, now home to The Lovely Rose Apothecary's shop at the front and my making space at the back. The product range grew from one Cold Cream formula developed for my own skin into three complete collections, two Dead Sea Mud Masks, a Tissue Cream based on a 1901 recipe, an Overnight Cream, and the Limited Edition Summer Beauty Set that I am sharing with you this month.
The labels became what they are now — the Art Deco illustrated woman, the botanical artwork specific to each collection, the amber glass that catches the light on the shop shelves the way I always imagined it would when I was still making everything on my parents' kitchen counter.
The customers became — this is the part I could not have anticipated — the reason for all of it.
What Has Stayed the Same
The formula philosophy has not changed. Every product is still built on the same botanical principle that cleared my own cystic acne eleven years ago: that skin responds to consistent, gentle, intelligent botanical care rather than to aggressive intervention. That a toner should restore rather than strip. That a cream should nourish rather than coat. That three products, practiced with intention twice daily, deliver more than ten products applied without it.
Every product is still made by hand. In small batches. In this building. With the best botanical ingredients I can source from anywhere in the world. I test every batch. I use every product. The standard has not moved.
And the recipes — the authentic 1920s and 1930s formulas that I researched in the years before the first batch and have refined carefully in the eleven years since — are still the foundation of everything. Because the women of Hollywood's golden age understood something about botanical skincare that the modern industry has spent decades trying to improve upon and has not yet managed to surpass.
The Customers Who Made Eleven Years Matter
I want to share something with you that I rarely share publicly — the messages and reviews that I have returned to on the difficult days. The batch days when a formula behaved unexpectedly. The winter weeks in Victor when the roads are impassable and the shop is quiet and the conviction that what I am doing matters needs to be found somewhere outside of myself.
These are the voices that found it for me.
Laura moved from Illinois to the Colorado mountains and arrived at almost 10,000 feet with skin that, in her own words, had been reduced to a "dry leather bag." She found The Lovely Rose Apothecary on Victor's main street and wrote something that I have thought about many times since:
"I could see changes even after the first time using it. It's also neat that the building used to be a pharmacy where they would have made similar products for skincare and mixed them there on the spot.”
She understood, without being told, that the continuity between what was made in this building a century ago and what is made here now is not a marketing story. It is a genuine thread — botanical care, crafted in this space, for the skin of the people who live here. That she saw it and named it in a review meant more than I can adequately express.
Megan had been battling painful cystic acne since she was thirteen years old. By the time she found the Geranium Collection she was thirty-eight and had tried, in her own words, everything — antibiotics, prescription creams, steroids, chemical peels, Proactive. Her husband found the brand and told her she had nothing to lose.
"I'm no longer in daily pain from deep cystic acne. The redness in my cheeks is completely gone. My skin is absolutely glowing according to my loving husband. I used to use so much makeup to hide my scars and redness but I haven't put any makeup on in days. Please don't ever change anything.”
Twenty-five years of pain. Two weeks of the ritual. I read this email on a Tuesday morning in my studio and I did not go back to work for a while.
Steph — @steph_holser on Instagram — posted her Cold Cream routine after a performance with a warmth and specificity that made me laugh and then made me genuinely moved:
"Step 1: be Tanya. Step 2: apply The Lovely Rose Apothecary Cold Cream liberally to face. Step 3: gently wipe off cold cream with a clean washcloth dipped in hot water. Step 4: massage remaining cream into skin.”
She followed it a few weeks later with this: "Today I decided to go without foundation and just play up my eyes and throw on some blush.”
This is what the ritual does when it works. Not dramatic before-and-after photographs. A woman deciding, on an ordinary morning, that her skin is beautiful enough to go out without hiding it. That is the result I have always been trying to make possible.
@the_eclecticheart wrote simply: "Thank you for making such an amazing skincare system. It seriously saved my skin.”
And another customer whose Geranium Travel Set review contains the line I return to most often when I need to remember why this work matters: "It is nothing short of a miracle."
These are not exceptional customers. They are ordinary people whose skin was not being served by what was available to them — and who found, in this building on the main street of a small Colorado mining town, something that actually worked.
Eleven years of those moments. Eleven years of emails and messages and reviews that remind me, on every difficult day, that the philosophy I believed in enough to bet everything on in 2015 was worth believing in.
What Comes Next
The Lovely Rose Apothecary is eleven years old this month. It is, by any reasonable measure, just beginning.
The collections are complete. The philosophy is clear. The building is beautiful. And the customers — the ones who have been here since the early batches and the ones who found the brand last week — are the community that everything was built for and around and because of.
What comes next is more of the same. More handmade batches in this studio. More authentic vintage recipes developed with the care they deserve. More emails on Tuesday mornings that make it impossible to go back to work for a while.
And more of you — finding the ritual that was always waiting for your skin, and writing to tell me about the morning you decided to go without foundation.
Thank you for eleven years. From the borrowed kitchen to the Tatlow Building — every jar of it.
With love,
Ashley Black
Founder, The Lovely Rose Apothecary