Our Story

Handcrafted lavender & essential oil remedies, made the old way.

It started with one woman and one plant

More than forty years ago, Nancy Engel came back to Boston from Costa Rica as a single mother, looking for a way to build a life and a livelihood on her own terms. She found it in an unlikely place: a small brown bottle of lavender.

What began as curiosity became a calling. Nancy traveled through Europe and studied the French approach to essential oils — where, unlike here, they are woven into the pharmacy and into everyday medicine. She learned lavender not as a pleasant scent but as a genuine remedy: a universal healing oil, good for both body and mind, with real research now standing behind what tradition always knew. And she learned to make things properly — pure ingredients, careful blends, small batches, no shortcuts.

Most importantly, she traveled alongside her suppliers — an Australian naturopath and a German chemist, each running their own house, who to this day roam Europe in search of the purest oils. Not from a factory or a high-tech plant, but from farms that have distilled by hand for generations, the Old-World way. Those relationships became the quiet backbone of Goodness Remedies.

A reputation built by hand

Over the years, Nancy's remedies earned a name. Her products won recognition for their quality. She grew the work into a six-figure business — one woman, showing up at artisan festivals season after season, supplying wholesale accounts, and earning the loyalty of customers who could tell the difference between something made to sell and something made to heal.

Life eventually asked her to slow the pace. Health and circumstances narrowed the business, but never the standard. Even a smaller Goodness Remedies was still made the same careful way.

Passing the torch

When Nancy decided to retire — to return, full circle, to Costa Rica, where her daughter now lives, to spend her days with her granddaughter and a gentler rhythm of life — the tradition needed a steward. The timing found me.

How it came to me

My name is Christina Meta Sutter. I spent years as a Montessori Head of School, and my own life has long been shaped by meditation, mindfulness, and a belief in gentler alternatives — in education and in health.

I came to lavender through my own healing. While teaching, I was running and playing soccer with my students when I tripped and dislocated my shoulder — sixteen hours, a surgery to put it back in place, and a second surgery to set a screw into a broken humerus, one of the worst breaks my surgeon had seen. My right arm was paralyzed for six months. It was a year before I could write again for more than a few minutes at a time.

I could still make things with my hands. I could still do the slow, deliberate work of blending and bottling. And of everything I might have chosen, I chose lavender — one plant to know deeply rather than a hundred to know a little. I loved the science behind the remedy and the calm it gave back to me. (It doesn't hurt that purple has been my favorite color for as long as I can remember.)

So when Nancy's chapter was closing and this one was opening, it wasn't a transaction. It was a handing-on. The same recipes, the same standards, the same devotion to real ingredients and real craft — now carried forward by someone who needed exactly what these remedies offer.

How they're made — by hand, one at a time

There is no assembly line here. Each spray is pure water and essential oils delivered drop by counted drop, following a unique formula Nancy passed down to me — nothing rounded off, nothing rushed. The flaxseed-and-lavender pieces are made in small batches, filled and finished by hand. It's slower this way. That's the point: you can feel the difference between something poured by a machine and something made by a person who cares how it turns out.

What's actually in the bottle

The heart of our remedies is Lavandula angustifolia — true lavender, the variety used for healing both body and mind. The grade we use sits just one step below the lavender the high-end perfume houses reserve for themselves. That is a deliberate choice: the same purity, poured into something you'll actually use every day.

Our bulk lavender and dried bunches come through a trusted importer of Provence lavender — the kind with a deep, woody scent that holds for years, and a color in the bunches that doesn't fade the way ordinary lavender does.

This curated circle of suppliers is the thing that truly sets us apart. Anyone can make a lavender product. Not everyone has traveled Europe alongside the people who personally verify the purest, most carefully distilled oils — and can still pick up the phone and call them. Those relationships were earned over decades, and they came at real cost. They're the reason a Goodness Remedies bottle is what it is.

Why our remedies cost what they cost

We are not the cheapest lavender you can buy, and we're not trying to be. Mass-market bottles are made to hit a price. Ours are made to work — pure, higher-grade ingredients from Old-World farms, blended by hand one bottle at a time, sourced through relationships four decades in the making. When you hold a Goodness Remedies bottle, you're holding a supply chain most brands can only imagine, and forty years of knowing exactly how it should be done.

The bigger why

For me, lavender is where calm becomes something you can hold. It's the concrete, sensory start of a larger practice I care about deeply — helping people return to center and find their way back to the light within. These remedies are the simplest, most tangible doorway to that: a moment of calm you can carry in your pocket.

Thank you for being here. You're now part of a story that started with one woman, one plant, and the belief that the natural way is worth doing well.

— Christina