About Sage & Thistle

Sage & Thistle Handmade Goods is a small, Toronto-based soap, skincare, home goods, apothecary & gift shop business.

We are located at 2A Rogers Rd, Toronto ON M6E1N4. 

Est. 2019

Our name: Sage & Thistle Handmade Goods

Back in my days in Brooklyn, I dreamed about one day having a company that would be about community. My lifelong love of plants helped me come up with Sage & Thistle, which has had many meanings for me throughout the years between dreaming & manifesting this business I love so much. Sage has always been my favorite plant to grow since before I can remember, and to me represents learning, wisdom, thoughtfulness, caregiving & grounding; Thistle symbolizes many things including the determination to meet challenges that life brings you. Together, these form the bedrock of S&T Handmade Goods, a company that is always learning, growing, connecting, and striving to bring the best to our community.

When I was pregnant with our first child in 2016, and frustrated at the lack of affordable natural baby & pregnancy products, I started researching ingredients & combining that with my small but expanding knowledge of herbalism & natural skincare. From there, I developed relaxing bath soaks and body scrubs, eventually gifting them to friends and family. Ultimately my partner decided to try making soap: we waited six weeks for the soaps to cure and when we tried them we found that our own rustic soap worked better than anything we had purchased in a store. It left our skin feeling soft and moisturized, and soon, requests for our soaps and other products began pouring in from friends and family. As word spread, we were invited to do our very first market which was mostly spent chasing our energetic toddler and soothing our newborn, but we were proud to offer our small selection of quality, handmade & 100% natural goods, each infused with botanicals from our small organic garden. Though we had to leave early to put our babies to bed, the spark was lit and Sage & Thistle Handmade Goods began to grow.

 

We've come a long way since that first market in 2018, though we do sometimes still have children running around our market tables! As we grow our product line, creating more artisanal products, natural soaps and other natural skincare and home goods, our commitment to quality remains the bedrock of Sage & Thistle: our products are concentrated and long-lasting, and made to nourish your skin & body. We still make each and every product by hand in small batches using the best natural ingredients, right in our little Toronto studio, using organic botanicals from our expanding urban garden. Our line of natural, nourishing soaps, skincare and other products are made with quality ingredients, including organic and Fair Trade-Certified oils and plant butters. Our clays, salts and essential oils are pure and unadulterated (with many sourced right here in Canada!), while many of our botanicals are responsibly wildcrafted, foraged and grown in the heart of Toronto! Keeping our chain of supply as clean and local as possible will always be important to us. Each of our products is completely natural and free of synthetic dyes or fragrances, preservatives, unnecessary chemicals, phthalates, fillers or detergents and are always palm oil-free and cruelty-free. We consciously choose packaging that is reusable, recyclable, post-consumer recycled, and biodegradable, and encourage our customers to return their containers to our studio so we can sanitize, repurpose and reuse them to prevent waste and over-consumption.

We believe in giving back to the communities that support us. One way we do that is by providing donations in the form of our natural bar soaps and other natural products to Toronto organizations that care for and provide essential services to our city's more vulnerable & marginalized populations. We also host a Personal Care Bank at our studio, where folks donate what personal care items they can, and take what they need, whenever they need it. Our goal is to provide our communities with the same essential products we want for our own family: natural skincare, nourishing bar soaps, and body and home goods that are beautiful, functional and made with real ingredients we can trust.