Article featured in MOSA Certified Organic Newsletter Fall of 2025 by Joe Pedretti, Client Services Director

Brian Paulsen and Sherri Jobelius are the founders and owners of rareESSENCE, an essential oil product manufacturer committed to creating natural and organic artisan products that are made in the USA and are safe, synthetic free, responsibly sourced and beautiful. They have a line of organic essential oils, aromatherapy roll-ons and inhalers, organic perfumes, room mists, soy candles, body oils, bath salts, CBD topicals, and many other essential oil based products. “The company really grew out of Sherri’s vision, from her early work in the natural foods movement,” noted Brian. “In the early 80s, she was the assistant manager of Tao Natural Foods in Minneapolis, which was one of the early stores that carried organic and natural foods. Part of her job there was managing the Herb Loft, so she became really fascinated and started educating herself about herbs and essential oils and using them both for wellness and also for natural alternatives to perfume. She didn’t really like synthetic perfumes, but she loved having a scent to wear, so she started using different essential oils and combining them and layering them. That was really her early exposure to natural alternatives to conventional products and her first experimentation of creating natural perfumes.”

“Sherri and I met in the mid 90s. We both shared a passion for the natural world and sustainability and healthy living. I was an avid outdoors person. I mountain climbed and backpacked, downhill skied and taught cross-country skiing in college, so we both kind of shared that love for the outdoors and the natural world. I was a photographer and filmmaker and she was a graphic designer and a gifted writer. Sherri had a vision of creating greeting cards that incorporated essential oils. And so together, our first business was combining greeting cards with essential oils and macro-photography of flowers and plants,” exclaimed Brian.

“We began to create our own blends of essential oils working with an aromatherapist and over the course of about six months we created twenty-four unique synergies we used in these greeting cards that had a small vial of these oils on the outside of the card. At the time, not many people we talked to knew what aromatherapy was. There was some awareness on the east and west coasts, but being in Minneapolis, only a few people knew what we were talking about, and most retailers didn’t really have any idea of what that was so it was a struggle to gain market share. But some retailers recognized what we were trying to do so it motivated us to continue on that path.

“We were familiar with Aveda because Sherri’s best friend was a sourcing person for Aveda. We approached Aveda and they loved the greeting card and licensed our design to introduce a line of Desert Perfumes and had us execute the fulfillment when they rolled them out worldwide. (Editors Note: Aveda is a large national hair care company) This experience just gave us more knowledge about essential oils and sourcing. We started working with smaller growers and distillers to source our essential oils. It wasn’t that easy to do at the time, this was as the internet was just starting to happen. So it was more phone calls and letters and faxes back and forth to reach people, but we did end up creating some really nice relationships with people, relationships that would later help build rareESSENCE,” said Brian.

“We got a little sidetracked for a few years after I invented a fireplace product called FireCones and a spin off called AromaCones which we sold to Target, LL Bean, Smith & Hawken, Crate & Barrel and many other retailers. But that experience really gave us a solid foundation and experience on how to work with retailers and running a manufacturing business.”

“We really wanted to come back to essential oils and that really was where our heart and our passion was. When we started rareESSENCE, some of the oils that we’re using in our previous products were available organically and some were not. It took not only finding farmers and distillers at trade shows, through searching the internet, and finding different suppliers, but it was really challenging in the beginning to find organic sources for a lot of the oils that we were wanting to use. Today most of our product line is transitioned over to organic, especially in the products that are body care products. We decided that organic was going to be a point of difference with our competitors.”

“It’s really important to me that rareESSENCE honors the same commitment to the land and the plants and the community as the farmers who produce our ingredients, because I saw my grandfather’s farm in good years, and in challenging years, and realized that every day he had something at stake. While organic wasn’t really much of a term back then, I think he instinctively farmed sustainably with rotating crops and protecting the soil. I remember those conversations with him – he farmed so that he could protect the land and I think that experience really served me in the future, and informed me as we’ve created these relationships with other growers and distillers and by developing our organic product line. I think farming teaches you patience, stewardship, and responsibility. Those are really the core values of how we run rareESSENCE,” emphasized Brian.

“Before there was rareESSENCE, we were first called rareEARTH. I had created a candle that was made of all natural ingredients. It was a pillar candle made with natural waxes, essential oils and earth pigments. The same kind of pigments that Renoir and all the great painters have used as bases- ochres, siennas, all those types of earth minerals. I invented a process to put those minerals on the outside of the candle, kind of artistic renditions of different blends of those minerals so nobody else could produce those except for us. That’s also part of what launched rareEssence since we were using all essential oils in those candles. But as we started to develop those candles, we realized that our customers wanted other essential oil products as well. And so we developed room mists and reed diffusers and then started to develop our essential oil line from there. Everything we had done up to that point led to creating rareESSENCE, which we officially started in 2012 under the rare-earth brand.” In 2017, we officially changed our company name to rareESSENCE.

“Initially, all of the production was done in house. For the most part, we still do almost all of our production in house. There’s one or two products that go to an outside company, but we’ve really tried to keep most of our production in house. I like seeing how things are made and to have that kind of control over the process is really important. We started with a very small facility, a very small warehouse space of about 2,000 square feet where we had everything in one little space. We grew from there, and now we’re in a 16,000 square foot facility with eight employees,” noted Brian.

“We do source our oils from the US whenever possible, but there are certain things, like sandalwood, jasmine, and zdravets that we can’t get domestically. And so, we go to suppliers in other countries. We haven’t done it quite as much since Covid, but prior to that we tried to take an annual trip where we could go and visit a number of distillers and farmers. We have taken trips to Bulgaria, the UK and France. Those are some of the most gratifying trips because those people are so passionate about their organic products and just to hear some of the history behind the farms and the growers and things is really really cool.”

“We explored doing our own distilling early on, and we took some distilling classes and workshops. What we concluded was that there’s people that are better at doing that than we would be. It would be kind of a distraction and diversion from building our business and creating the products. We like to leave the processing and distilling of oils to the people that are really best at doing it,” noted Brian.

“We focus on three different markets besides our online business. We have a very strong presence in natural grocery stores. Whole Foods, Nugget Market, Mother’s Market; lots of small regional chains and Sprouts Farmers Market is a fairly new customer for us. We’ve always been selling to natural grocers. The second segment of our market is the specialty market. Those are boutique type stores. They could be a hospital gift shop. They could be a small boutique shop in a resort town. We also work with some conventional grocers, the ones that often have gift and wellness areas.” Locally, that’s retailers like Lunds & Byerly’s and Kowalski’s.

“Our third channel, that we’re in quite significantly, is in the spa market. We supply the essential oils for all of the Massage Envy franchises around the country – about 1,200 locations. They’ve been a great customer, great partner for us for the last going on nine years now that we’ve been the exclusive supplier for essential oils that are used for massage services and then we also do our retail products for them as well.” “We have a sales manager, Janet, on staff who mostly focuses on the specialty market. Much of my own efforts are sales, outreach, meeting with customers, and exhibiting at trade shows. Sherri and I have always collaborated and created our products together. So, she and I and Heather, who is our aromatherapist, are the key members of our product development team. Heather is an amazing aromatherapist,” noted Brian.

“She not only knows the clinical side of aromatherapy, but all of us have studied natural perfumery. So, that’s kind of a very unique element that we bring to our product line. There are other companies that are selling essential oils or blending essential oils that don’t have that background. I think our products smell better, and I think that’s because of this background in natural perfumery.” “We have a few more people on our staff. They are doing production, the actual filling of the bottles, capping, labeling, all of boxing, all of the things that go into creating a finished product. Adam is our production manager and we have three other people that work in production. We’re a small, tight knit team.”

“With the passage of the Farm Bill in 2018, we became very interested in CBD and hemp derived oils and products. We were just kind of waiting for the regulations to catch up before we entered the market. Now we have a small topical CBD line. I think we’ve created some really beautiful and efficacious products that people really love. I expect in the future we’ll be doing some expansion in that area, but our main area of expansion will be further developing our spa line,” said Brian.

“Sometimes our customers ask for a particular type of product because they don’t have a natural version of it. In the case of our shower steamers, one of our key customers had that product, and it was a very popular product, but it was synthetically scented with some other not great ingredients. So they came to us and said, can you create something that will be natural? In some cases we’re looking out into the market and we’re seeing things that we could do as well or better than another company is doing. I think our focus on organic is really important. We really want to be doing organic products and we don’t want to compete in the conventional world.”

“Our relationship with MOSA has been key to our success, because it’s allowed us to put the organic seal on our products, which people of course immediately recognize. That’s something different than our competitor’s products on the shelf. I think a lot of our competitors are really big companies that they’re owned by a much bigger company that are not always committed to natural and organic. I think that’s part of what’s been our success is that people recognize that there’s two real people behind the products and that we really care about what we’re doing. We’re very, very passionate about it.”