Shop’s in-house natural soaps and body care products target skin health

Meg DiMercurio was working at Microsoft when her daughter was born with a severe skin condition. It was right after the 2008 financial crisis, and after being reorganized several times at her job, she decided to stay home and start looking into what would help her daughter.

What she formulated led to the creation of ModernRoots, an all-natural body care business, with one of the latest locations opening in Evergreen. The shop sells candles, body butters, lip and teeth care, face products, sun care and bar soaps, among 400 plus products.

DiMercurio developed her first products by scraping her daughter’s skin cells and seeing what would work best on her condition. She started writing in Mother Earth News and Grit Magazine about her process, developing recipes and searching for ingredients that could be foraged or grown locally.

“I would write about it, how I made it, and many people would write in and say, ‘oh, that's so fantastic, that's great, but I just want to buy it.’ And that was never really my model, I was just trying to help people,” DiMercurio said.

She opened her first online store and soon found herself at farmers' markets, as well as teaching fermentation classes. As her reputation and product line grew, she had less and less elbow room in her market tents as customers fought over balms and soaps. So, she opened her flagship store in Buffalo, Minnesota.

After opening two other stores in Minnesota, DiMercurio got interested in having a store in the northwest part of the country. It’s an area that her family enjoys, and after she had a store manager move to the area, she asked if she was interested in running another ModernRoots store in Kalispell.

It’s not just the views that drew her to the area, she also looks at what kind of ingredients can be found locally.

“For me, it's really important to look at those natural resources, and what we can use in those natural resources like the huckleberries. We do huckleberry extractions and we do lots of stuff with pine sap from the area. We look at what in that area benefits skin and why,” DiMercurio said.

The ModernRoots location in Evergreen is also a production facility, where customers can watch products being made from the retail space. DiMercurio likes that her customers can see every part of the process, harkening back to the days when she would write her recipes out for all to learn.

“We micrometer everything to the gram, you know, everything is looked at from the perspective of handmade or hand-forged or homegrown. So I think it's a unique feature that people in Kalispell are really loving,” DiMercuio said.

The location will also supply products to her new store in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which is set to open soon. It’s a new market for ModernRoots, so DiMercurio said she is spending a lot of time in the area and is looking forward to meeting more people who could benefit from her products.

She develops products around a specific ingredient, like chaga, a mushroom that grows on birch trees and is native to northern Minnesota. She forages ingredients like these and has a farm for others like goat milk, which she uses in creams, lotions and soaps.

Currently, the annual 12 Days of Christmas line is being developed. The process takes about three months, because every day during the first 12 days of December features a new, limited-run product. It’s a promotion that gets customers excited every year, coming into the store to get their hands on the small batch products.

“People are really excited about getting those items. Because if you get them and you get them gifted to you, you're kind of special, you know — somebody went out of their way to find that product to get it to you from one of the stores,” DiMercurio said.

With the new stores in the northwest and plans to establish a market in Texas, DiMercurio said her main goal is to help people with her products. She wants to help people, exposing them to all-natural products and remedies that can alleviate symptoms like she did for her daughter’s skin condition.

“It's really important to me at ModernRoots to develop and create products that somebody who is very wealthy can use … they've never had anything like it and doesn't compare to their $400 bottle of cream that they've been using. And also, people who have skin conditions can use it because it's not priced at a ridiculous amount,” DiMercurio said.

ModernRoots is open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and is located at 2593 U.S. 2 in Evergreen.

Reporter Taylor Inman can be reached at 406-758-4433 or by emailing tinman@dailyinterlake.com.

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