Running a witchy business is challenging in this era for numerous reasons usually most of my challenges surround being neurodivergent and disabled, but the rest surround navigating the ever shifting landscape of issues around cultural appropriation and closed practices with sensitivity, nuance, and understanding.
One of my mantras of this business is “we create products for anyone of any tradition and any skill level to use.” I stand by this firmly because -- I have clients and customers on every continent spanning numerous practices and traditions. I love having such an amazing and diverse customer base and working relations with so many folks that challenge me to create custom products for them - even if they are outside my own occult practices and traditions. That level of trust is amazing to have in this day and age. I hold that trust sacrosanct. It is a privilege not to be squandered.
As such, I try to be keenly aware and sensitive of issues of cultural appropriation and closed practices. I also firmly believe that no one person or group is a monolith and there will always be a variety of thoughts plotted along a spectrum -- I don't speak on behalf of all AuDHD disabled folks because we are a spectrum of voices and experiences. It can still be challenging to keep up with shifting margins over time and I will be the first to say that I am not perfect and I have fallen on my face a few times over the years. But I always get back up dust myself off and do better for next time. The challenge in this era of social media cancel culture and purity test witch hunts is that we stopped allowing people the ability and the chance to expound upon such nuanced things or in other cases to do better or to acknowledge that some of us actually know how to navigate cross cultural conversations with sensitivity and understanding and have done the work without need to laud ourselves for doing so on social media and know that the work is never done and that we have to continue to allow ourselves space to do better.
Sometimes I create products for my clients and customers that I don’t use in my own practices, but I create them because I have a diverse audience who does and at the end of the day, my customers trust me to create the products and even to create custom products for them even if I am outside of their cultural traditions. I’ve built that trust with my clients. I’m sure there’s a lot of people on the outside that will be critical of that, but you have to apply some nuance to situations and that it’s not all conflicting polarities in that if someone trusts me to do this for them, of course I will do it respectfully. That is a private negotiation between a business and a client.
One of the issues that I brush up against a lot in witchcraft and an occult circles is nomenclature and product names or types that overlap in different traditions. Sometimes you have to use the words that people know and that can get tricky to navigate. For instance, saying I am a "Reiki Master" is more specific than "energy worker" which sounds vague at best. In providing these clarifying experiences -- I am attempting to provide a nuanced approach and I assure you that I am not making just making excuses. Of course, I want to be sensitive or respectful of such issues without alienating the diversity of my customer base - who again are from all over the world on every continent and whom are practitioners of numerous different traditions who trust me to make things authentically and respectfully for them and I have done so for the past 6-7 years. I get a lot of questions from customers about how things are created and if they can can they use them if they are of a particular tradition etc. and always answer them honestly.
I do my best to try to course correct when necessary -- for instance I don’t use a white sage anymore in any of our products and haven't for many years. If I use anything that has 'white sage' on the label, it’s a synthetic fragrance oil used symbolically. I don't even use it in my own practice because there's hundreds of other herbs that do the same thing. That said, It takes time to re-evaluate product offerings as things new things come to light or the ethos shifts. As always, it may happen over time, but not immediately as it does take quite a bit of work to completely rebrand products. It took me almost a year when I shifted from 15ml bottles to 30ml bottles for our ritual oils to complete because it means formulation changes, new label designs, updating the products on several platforms, and then marketing them. I am planning a major overhaul on some of our older offerings as I have a new batch of baneful magick products that have been sitting in the queue for a year or so. When I made a Protection and Purification "Smudge" Spray in 2019 I ended up changing it to not include 'smudge' because of its cultural connotation specific to Indigenous practices. This is something I continue to do when I have time or if a situation necessitates it.
This is how we learn and evolve to do better.
Isn't that the point?
To change and evolve, learn from our mistakes, and do better?
If you want to know more about our creation process, I updated the video last year.