Our Kunzea Tasmania story
We're quite happy working hard behind the scenes to develop, produce and offer our Kunzea products for you. However people often want to know more about us and where this all came from. So here's some background...
Kunzea Tasmania IS Kacey and Michael! We're a part-time, team of two, and to date have done everything ourselves. We are proud to call Northern Tasmania our home and have lived in other parts of our beautiful state as well.
Pain unfortunately is a part of many people's lives, and we understand first-hand what impact this can have on quality of life. Using heat to help soothe pain was one strategy that we used regularly ourselves. And this is where things started.
Michael decided to take over a market stall selling instant, reusable, medical grade heat packs.
Kacey has a health science background and loves investigating things! We wanted to explore what Tasmania had to offer - was there anything in 'our backyard' that we could add to our stall that might also help provide relief?
We experimented with a range of beautiful Tasmanian grown and distilled essential oils, and the more we learnt, we quickly realised that Tasmanian Kunzea oil had properties like no other.
Our first product was our Kunzea bath flakes, and we started selling these while we formulated, trialled, and tested some of our other products.
The roll on liniment was the first topical product we developed and sold, and the feedback we got was extraordinary! This is still one of our most popular products.
We were only making very small batches initially to sell at the markets along with the heat packs, to see how they'd go.
Next came the cream in a pot, and of course we were selling the Kunzea oil itself as well. These four products are offered in our Original set as they were the first (original) products we developed.
Interest grew quickly, and we had some allied health practitioners wanting to stock and use our products too. Great customer feedback was also being received, with many repeat buyers.
There were plenty of challenges and interruptions along the way, but we'd started something now, we had to see what might happen next!
It has been an amazing learning experience – with lots of hard work and an enormous amount of time put in! We knew however that Kunzea was something special, something Tasmanian, and clearly something that people wanted.
Our aim was and still is, to deliver excellent customer service, and for us to remain as a very small Tassie business. It is not our intention to mass produce and be in every store and pharmacy on every corner. Like us, most people value and want to support small businesses.
Our early tests and trials, along with advice from our Kunzea grower, suggested we should offer strong products. So from the very start our plan was to develop products that were consistently strong across all our topical range. This means that no matter which of our topical products a customer prefers, they’re getting an ‘extra strength’ concentration of Kunzea oil.
This is a major point of difference for us compared to other brands, and one that we’re very proud of.
While continuing to juggle our other jobs and lives, Kunzea Tasmania has steadily grown and developed.
We’ve expanded our product range over time in response to customer feedback and ideas and have a wonderful following of loyal customers who value our products and our small business.
We now get help to make our cream as it was getting too much to keep doing it all ourselves, but Michael and Kacey continue to hand make all other products. Our intention is to keep being the primary product makers.
We are humbled and surprised every day with the wonderful feedback we continue to receive through website reviews, phone calls, emails, visits to our stall and many repeat purchases.
We look forward to updating you more as our little business continues to evolve.