Las Mijas Botanica

Las Mijas Botanica is a community herbalism brand on Yavapai-Apache territory outside Sedona, Arizona. Madeleine Sophia, the herbalist and medicine maker behind it, grows the plants herself and turns them into small-batch apothecary goods, seasonal herb shares, and workshops for people looking to deepen their relationship to plants and the land. When she came to us, she had spent two years building the brand and trust behind it. What she lacked was the structure to sell her products and the strategy behind it.

In our first strategy session, we found out her brand name had been federally registered years earlier by another company, across the exact product categories she sells in. She was also preparing to open a regulated therapy practice alongside the apothecary, and the two were entangled in a way that could have put her clinical work at legal risk.

In our first session together, we made the call to change the name. After a consult with a lawyer and a long conversation with her mother, Mija Apothecary became Las Mijas Botanica. Though the name change was forced, it strengthened the ancestral element behind the brand. The name went from one singular daughter (”mija” in Spanish is a colloquial, endearing word for daughter) to “las mijas”, the daughters and mothers who came before her. From there we restructured her business plan, cleanly separating the apothecary from the clinical practice.

The visual direction we chose is deeply personal, dreamy, and nostalgic. The brand’s logo came from an image she was carrying years before there was a business: a serpent coiled around an ocotillo plant in the center of her back. We simplified the symbol and developed it into a full visual system with multiple variations, a color palette, and a typography system. We scanned plants from her own garden and layered them through the site. The photography treatment pairs film and digital for a warm, nostalgic register, closer to a family album than a product catalog.

Underneath the visual world, we built the infrastructure that would allow this one-woman operation to sell. The product line was very small, so it didn’t require a full e-commerce build. We set up the storefront in Readymag with Stripe processing payments, routing physical goods through the cart and workshops through standalone payment links. We connected Stripe to her email marketing system, and set up custom email flows for each buyer type.

Within three months of launch, her emails average a 65.7% open rate and a 13.6% click rate, she earned back most of her investment in the set up, and has the training to operate the entire system without us.

Madeleine did all of this while finishing a clinical mental health degree, as a new mom, on a working farm. The vision was always hers. Our job was making sure the complexity never stopped her from reaching it.