Our Story

Apiarist began with a simple practice: making lotions by hand using ingredients gathered from nature—shea butter from the shea nut tree; oils cold-pressed from baobab, moringa, marula, avocado, and coconut; raw honey straight from the hive; and much more. These ingredients carry generations of history, drawn from the rich botanical diversity of West Africa where they have provided nourishment, medicine, and beauty care for centuries.

Steeped in the rich traditions of her Ghanaian homeland, founder Catherine Bruce Konuah Faddis began handcrafting lotions just for fun in five gallon buckets in her bathtub while getting her MBA at Harvard Business School. Though she continued on to have a distinguished career in finance, a piece of her heart—and creativity—always remained in beauty and experimenting with new botanical combinations using the world's most luxurious ingredients from her native shore.

Catherine's experiments took on new heights when she became an apiarist, harvesting raw honey on a farm in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and then stirring that honey into her already rich lotions and hair products. Today, every Apiarist product is still made by hand in small batches, using cold-pressed, unrefined oils wherever possible to preserve the full nutritional profile of each ingredient—its vitamins, fatty acids, antioxidants, and lipid structure. Formulated without synthetic preservatives, parabens, sulfates, phthalates, or fillers, our ingredient lists are short, intentional, and built around what the body actually needs.

To bring the Apiarist product line to market, Catherine brought on long time friend Jocelyn Jones, a social scientist whose love of research pairs artisan tradition with an evidence-based approach and who remembers those five gallon buckets in the bathtub! Catherine befriended Jocelyn through their church in Boston where both were studying. Long and lanky, both girls had modeled and could regal with stories of runways and beauty care in their early years. (Pictured below, Jocelyn and Catherine playing around on a shoot in Martha's Vineyard).

Both women have carried a love of beauty and of faith through their lives, impacting their vision for a company grounded in integrity both to nature and to science. Together they study the history of each botanical oil and select ingredients not for trends, but for their measurable contribution to skin health: barrier reinforcement, elasticity support, hydration retention, and antioxidant defense. The result is body care that is luxurious but grounded, indulgent but never excessive—products you can trust because you can read the ingredients on the label and understand exactly why it’s there.

Our Name

An apiarist is a beekeeper—someone who tends hives with patience, knowledge, and care. It’s a word that captures how we approach everything we make: with reverence for the raw materials and respect for process. We learn from the ancient, sacred, and beautiful lives of the bees whose honey we rely on: that the best things in life are those that are closest to nature.