AKMA Member Spotlight: Alaskan Dream Botanicals Grew One Batch at a Time

Manufacturing growth doesn’t always begin with a factory, a large piece of equipment, or a major capital investment. Sometimes it begins with one product that needs to work.

For Alaskan Dream Botanicals, that starting point was personal. Renee Behrendt was dealing with a sulfate allergy and couldn’t find products that worked for her, so she and her husband, Jared, began making their own. What started as a solution to a very specific problem slowly became a business built around formulation, testing, production, packaging, and distribution.

Today, Alaskan Dream Botanicals has grown into a statewide brand with products in more than 100 stores and roughly 15 hotels and bed-and-breakfasts across Alaska. The company makes soaps, lotions, deodorants, salves, and other body-care products in Wasilla, and the work behind those products is a good example of what small-scale manufacturing actually looks like when it grows.

There’s a lot more happening behind the label than mixing a few ingredients and pouring them into containers. Product development takes time. Their deodorant alone took about four and a half years to formulate, which says a lot about the persistence required to turn an idea into something reliable enough to sell. A product may start with a promising recipe, but getting it to the point where it performs consistently, can be produced repeatedly, and still meets customer expectations is a different challenge entirely.

That process is manufacturing.

It’s testing one version, adjusting it, trying again, and learning from what doesn’t work. It’s figuring out how ingredients behave, how long production takes, how much can be made in a batch, and how to maintain consistency as volume grows. Then there’s packaging, labeling, inventory, sourcing, fulfillment, and the question every small manufacturer eventually faces: how do you make more without losing the quality that got people interested in the first place?

For many Alaska manufacturers, growth happens gradually rather than all at once. A recipe gets dialed in. A batch gets larger. The process becomes more repeatable. A craft fair leads to a few retail accounts, those accounts lead to more, and eventually the business starts reaching customers across the state.

That kind of scale may not come with a ribbon cutting, but it’s still scale.

Alaskan Dream Botanicals’ product line has expanded to more than 48 scents and flavors across its offerings, and managing that kind of variety adds another layer of complexity. A larger product catalog means more ingredients to track, more production planning, more packaging needs, and more decisions about what to keep in stock and when to make it. Growth becomes as much about systems as it is about creativity.

The same is true on the retail side. Jared builds the wooden displays used to merchandise their products in stores, which is such a good example of how small Alaska manufacturers often grow. When the right display, process, supplier, or piece of equipment doesn’t already exist, the business has to solve the problem itself. Over time, that problem-solving becomes part of the company’s capability.

And sometimes it creates the next opportunity.

That’s what makes the company’s plans for Alaska Dream Supply especially interesting.

Alaskan Dream Botanicals is preparing to launch a supply business that would make soapmaking and related materials more accessible to other Alaskans. On the surface, that may look like a separate venture. In practice, it’s a natural extension of everything they’ve already learned.

A manufacturer that spends years figuring out where to source ingredients, which materials work, how much to order, what shipping problems come up, and where the biggest production bottlenecks are starts accumulating knowledge that can help other businesses too.

That matters in Alaska because the manufacturing support system is still thin in many areas. Inputs can be harder to source. Shipping can be expensive. Equipment can be difficult to find. Technical knowledge may be scattered, and small businesses often have to spend a lot of time solving problems that would be easier somewhere with a denser supplier network.

When a company starts making some of those inputs more accessible to others, it moves beyond producing finished goods. It becomes part of the infrastructure that helps other people produce too.

That’s how an ecosystem starts to deepen.

One business solves a sourcing problem and becomes a supplier. Another fabricates equipment. Another handles packaging. Another provides logistics. Another brings technical expertise. The more of those capabilities exist in Alaska, the less every new manufacturer has to figure out entirely on their own.

That’s one of the reasons stories like Alaskan Dream Botanicals’ matter to AKMA. They show what manufacturing looks like on the ground, especially for companies that don’t fit the stereotype of a large industrial operation.

Manufacturing can be a couple in Wasilla learning chemistry because they need a better product. It can be years of trial and error before a formula is ready. It can be figuring out retail displays because nobody else is going to solve that problem for you. It can be building relationships with stores one at a time until the product is sold statewide.

And eventually, it can mean using what you learned to make the path a little easier for the next business.

That’s a meaningful kind of growth.

Scaling doesn’t always mean becoming enormous. It can mean becoming more consistent, more efficient, more capable, and more connected to the market. It can mean understanding your process well enough to teach it, supply it, or support somebody else doing something similar.

Alaskan Dream Botanicals didn’t begin with a plan to build a statewide manufacturing company or supply other makers. It began with a product that needed to work, then grew through years of formulation, production, retail relationships, distribution, merchandising, and sourcing.

Each step added another layer of capability.

That’s often what scaling really looks like for a small Alaska manufacturer.

Where This Moves From Conversation to Action

AKMA wants to make more of these stories visible because they help broaden the way we think about manufacturing growth in Alaska.

If you’re building products here, improving your process, expanding into new retailers, solving a sourcing problem, or creating something that makes it easier for another Alaska business to produce, that matters. Those are the steps that build a stronger manufacturing ecosystem over time.

Join AKMA and connect with other Alaska businesses that are building, making, and solving problems one step at a time:https://www.akmfg.org/join

Source

Alaska’s News Source, “‘We’ve kind of become chemists’: Wasilla couple turns skin allergy into statewide business,” August 27, 2026.https://www.alaskasnewssource.com/2026/08/27/weve-kind-become-chemists-wasilla-couple-turns-skin-allergy-into-statewide-business/