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Brittany and Nick Zwart are the couple behind Z & Bee, a carbon-conscious and eco-friendly duo who make and sell everything from hand-crocheted woolly hats, to home-made honey and jams. While their range of products can seem vast, it is all woven together with a philosophy of up-cycling and avoiding any wastefulness. By studying their bees, they have been inspired to follow in their footsteps, working together with their community by sourcing materials from local independent vendors, and even reaching out to help a charity in Nicaragua.
Casa London: How did you get started with Z and Bee?
Brittany: So a couple of years ago Strathroy started a farmer’s market on the downtown strip, so it became a part of the Saturday morning culture in Strathroy. We went to the first one, and Nick was just getting into the bees and our garden was doing pretty well that year, so we thought “why not sell at the farmer’s market, that could be fun!” We originally called ourselves Z’s Farm Fresh, because Nick’s roommates in college called him ‘Z’, and after four weeks we started to build a following, then it just exploded from there.
Somewhere along the way I decided I wanted to start sewing, so I taught myself how to sew. And I have also known how to crochet my whole life, so we were selling things like wash-cloths. I don’t really remember how we got into doing scrubs. I was just on Pinterest one day and thought “O, I want to make those!”. The trick with the scrubs was finding natural ingredients. Because Nick keeps bees, being as eco-friendly as possible has always been part of who we are. Bee culture can be hard to do sometimes because you are guaranteed to lose hives every year, we are not exempt from the amount of hives that farmers around here lose to pesticides and stuff like that.
Nick: At the market we started with the honey and the jams, and then we had a whole bunch of wax leftover so that’s why you looked into doing the scrubs. That got us into the essential oils and we did lots of stuff with the essential oils. Next we thought, well we are at a farmer’s market, so we started selling wash-cloths.