Living The Red Life - How a Mom of Five Exposed the Beauty Industry

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Most entrepreneurs follow the rules. Jennifer Witmyer decided to question them.As the founder of Archwood Soapery and Filthy Vegan, Jennifer built a fast-growing clean beauty brand by challenging everything she thought she knew about skincare, haircare, and the products consumers trust every day. After facing thyroid cancer, chronic health issues, and years of unanswered questions, she began noticing patterns others ignored. Those discoveries led her down a path that exposed misleading marketing claims, hidden ingredients, and the surprising realities behind the beauty industry.In this episode, Jennifer shares how resilience, pattern recognition, and relentless curiosity helped her turn personal adversity into a mission-driven business focused on transparency, sustainability, and consumer trust.Key Takeaways• Why pattern recognition became Jennifer's greatest entrepreneurial advantage• How personal health challenges inspired a business mission• The truth behind common beauty industry marketing claims• Why transparency creates stronger customer trust than branding• How questioning accepted norms can uncover massive opportunitiesNotable Quotes• "Look for the patterns."• "There is a pattern to every single thing in life."• "Eco-friendly is not a measurable thing."• "Strength isn't something you're born with. You build strength one hard day at a time."• "There is a better way."Connect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

A typical liquid conditioner is 85% water, which blew me away. There are so many words out there that mean nothing. Salon tested is not a measurable thing. Eco-friendly, not a measurable thing. These are hero claims that companies make and to try to sell you a product. There's no back to that. Jennifer Whitmire is a resilient, purpose-driven, and innovative entrepreneur and the founder of Archwood Soapery,

Driven by a commitment to natural, toxin-free products, she has built a trusted brand focused on family wellness, sustainability, and quality craftsmanship. All the teachers, they want you to show your work, and they want to see your thought processes. So maybe that's how it came around,

and he's told me, Jen, look for the patterns. That was all I needed to hear. I looked for the patterns, and I was able to notice patterns everywhere, with people, with the way that the world works, with product,

with every single thing in life, there is a pattern to it. My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the Red Life, ditch the Blue Pill, take the Red Pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Welcome back to another episode of the Living Your Legacy podcast,

the Red Life Edition. We're in the midst of Mastermind Week, amongst the chaos, but that does not stop our production plans for the inside success. me today is another amazing, powerful woman. Jennifer Whitmire, she is the founder and CEO of Archwood Sofery and Filthy Vegan. Thank you so much for that. How are you? You know, I'm just here in the chaos. I'm doing pretty good. As I'm drowning, you just threw me a lifeline there. Thank you so much. We even have a cheat sheet that is absolutely not necessary. Jen, how are you?

Welcome. I'm great. How are you doing? hanging in there. I'm hearing beautiful, super cold, my jami. Mahjami. Oh, that's the first time I've heard of Mahjami. Myjami. It's up there with Tarje. Yeah.

Jen, I've learned so many things about you. I'd like to start with the fact that you would write your ends backwards. Yeah. Yeah. So I could not figure out. I used to, so I, my mom used to make me sit in my room for, you know, like a half hour, 45 minutes. And this was fantastic for me because I, I would try to figure out how to write and end the right way.

And I probably looked like a big goofballed everybody else when I was out in public. I'd do the same thing like N, N, N, N. And I just, you know, I would stare out the window and I would imagine myself jumping to the highest points of whatever I could find, which were trees. That was it. It was the only thing out there. I like the fact that you named your company Archwood Sopery, but there is a, a backstory to this. There's lore. Talk about this backstory. Yeah.

So I, when you're making a stripper name, you have to, like, guides you, you know? So the street you grew up on was one of them. It's like the, what's your zodiac sign? You know, what color underwear do you have on?

So I went with street name because it kind of put together why my company is the way that it is and you know it gave me a name so well there you go so you decided to start making soaps and skincare products

not performing on strip clubs yeah yeah thankfully because I had five kids yeah right on yeah there's one goal every father has is just keep them off the pole so you're not stripping

but you're a mom and you're making skin care products now holy moly and stripping and stripping only on Thursdays. Currently it's Wednesday, so that's tomorrow. In my jummy. Yeah, in my jobmy. So I... But you're a chemist. I went to school for dermatology. Right? So I always just had a natural knack for certain things. And the only things that ever kept my interest was science. That's it. You know, science chemistry, any kind of science discipline always stuck with me. So science and discipline two very boring things but you really really really enjoy it uh talk about how discipline

kind of essentially paved the way for your resilience and who you are today you know i didn't want to do certain things when i was little and i always heard from my parents who were of uh obviously a different generation than me and you kids don't have any discipline nowadays you can look at this camera too you got you know you know so you know always there's no discipline in you kids and You have to do things, you know, even if you don't want to do them. And while I didn't listen to a lot that anybody or my parents especially really told me when I was little, those things were always mulling around back there. You know, it just took me like a good 35 years to figure it out. And you know, there is a guy whose name escapes me right now, but he's a famous philosopher.

And if I remembered his name, everybody would be like, oh, yeah, Carl Jung. Oh, I was going to say, Rangutier's his name. So Carl Jung says that you are not actually an adult until you hit 40. And in my case, that is totally, totally right. I can kind of feel that, too. Even though I'm very juvenile, but I'm 42. So I'm like, I guess this is what adulting feels like. Right.

I still feel like I'm 12 inside. But, you know. It's like, look at me. I'm wearing a skirt, man, a piano keys. This is 42. well talk about being who we are we're obviously very eccentrically weird like our brain patterns and our brains aren't designed like normal folks or the normies your dad was also very gifted talk about the similarities and how he essentially recognized your gift and enhanced you

i really have no idea the only thing i could think of is that he saw because i can do it in my kids too I can see things that they did where I'm like, oh, I did that or I still do that. You know, I guess that they call it stimming now, you know. Don't hate. Yeah, I know, right? Look at it go. Sorry. So you have one.

I have none. So that's why I'm like. It's a game changer. My partner in studio two handed this to me. She's like, it's going to change it. It definitely works. Yeah, that's nice. Would you like to try?

And now they have fidget spinners and stuff. Here you go. You know, it's good. Look at how worn down this thing is. My God. It's got some weight. to it too. Oh, it's good. It's nice. It's purple too. It matches you. It is purple. So your legacy, your children, but before we get onto your children, let's talk about your dad and how he had his superpower.

He ate a lot like my hero. He separated his meals. He did all sorts of really quirky things. Can you expand on that? Yeah, I am totally like my dad. So my dad, I remember growing up, and it didn't use to bother me until it was pointed out, you know? And I think maybe all it took was just one time of saying, like don't slurp, don't chew with your mouth open. Get your elbows off the table. Well, that doesn't bother me, but it's the sounds. You know, there are certain sounds. Smacking your lips drives me insane.

There is, you know, other ones, the slurping up a wall, and then I'm going to jump off that wall. Triggers all of them. Right. And chewing with your mouth open, and I was notorious for this stuff in high school, I assume, because my husband hired somebody I went to high school with. Actually, I had gone to like preschool with this guy. And he's like, oh, yeah, Jen used to like go off on people if they were chewing with their mouth open.

I don't remember doing that. Apparently, I did. But so my dad had that going on, which I guess they called misophonia. There weren't words back then for all of this stuff. There aren't words either for it. You just made it up. Misophonia is actually a term. That's actually a word.

Yeah. Okay. That sounds like a stripper name. Oh, man, I did the thing. Now we're going to completely veer off the topic. What were you talking about? Oh, strippers. Oh, strippers.

Anyways. So, you know, there were things, I guess, that he saw on me when I was doing homework or the way that I was trying to figure out. So when you're doing homework, all the teachers, they want you to show your work. Can they want to see your thought processes? So maybe that's how it came around. And he's told me, Jen, look for the patterns. And that was all I needed to hear, you know? So I looked for the patterns.

and I was able to notice patterns everywhere with people, with the way that the world works with product, with every single thing in life, there is a pattern to it. So, you know, I don't know, I feel like my mom really instilled some kind of an OCD in me too because she's like, I remember helping her fold, you know, wash claws and stuff and I was just like, ooh, there it's done, you know.

there's done, you know. No, no, no. Muscle memory. No, no, you make sure that those corners match up. And I don't know if she was that stern with me when I was, you know, I must have been like three or four when she told me that. But does it just trigger every time you just see two corners like that? Yes. Now, now if somebody folds, if somebody, now when I had twins, I had people coming over and helping, you know, I have a really good group of friends.

And I had my mom coming over. I had my dad flying out from California. I had people everywhere. I had my husband's parents there. And I remember I'm not going to even say who it was. It was very many multiple people. But there's one person that understands me. And the only person that understands that they better do.

The corner matching up thing is Tara. My friend Tara. So if any, I remember people were folding my towels and they would just willy-nilly fold them. Now, I had to take them all out of the closet and refold them. And my life takes dramatically. more time than it possibly should to do the simplest of things. Because there's such a high standard that I have.

Oh, no question. Oh, yeah. I'm the same way. You come to interview here. I'm like, oh, great, you know, everything about cameras and lenses, but can you coil cable correctly? And I'll just handle them with cable. I'm like, and I'm like, nope, you can't coil cables.

If somebody can tell me the way or why they do the things that they do, then I could be like, oh, okay, you know what? That makes sense. And I like that thinking, and I'm going to maybe possibly start doing something similar. Right on. But if they can't tell me, well, I'm just kind of, I just got the cord out of the way. Like, how do you sleep at night? What is it wrong with you?

So talking about sleepless nights and figuring out what's wrong with you, you recognized the pattern early on, which is kind of the lore to the original question of where the name came from. You noticed that people were getting sick around you. Yes. So I am still friends with a very large amount of people that I went to preschool with. I am an extremely loyal person. it was the only compliment that I ever got as a kid growing up.

You're loyal. You're like the Golden Retriever. I mean, it wasn't like, hey, Jen, you're so pretty. It was like, you're loyal. Well, okay, that's fine. So, you know. The pattern. Sick people.

Yeah. So there was a bunch of girls. There was Maggie across the street. There was Beth and Lisa. There was Nikki. behind me and then there was Janelle. Not Janelle. Yeah, Janelle too. God Janelle. Get it together.

I noticed that every single one of us had problems conceiving or keeping the pregnancy. Wow. Or most of the girls couldn't even have kids. Oh, Heidi up there too, up on the hill. So, you know, why? There had to have been something. There's just no way that you live. out in the middle of nowhere in, you know, an old, I guess that they had built the house,

they had bought a piece of land off of a farmer and then they had stuck these houses there. Oh boy. Well, what's in, you know, is it something that the houses were made with? Is it something that was maybe spilled on the ground before they built the houses? I don't know. I mean, I... Old Native American Reservation Graveyard Cemetery? Right, yeah.

Some kind of a curse. So there was quite literally maybe something in the air and the water that you're like, I've got to fix this. Right. Yeah. So I just that was always, you know, burning around up there and never did anything with it. There was no dots to connect yet. So then I had the thyroid cancer in 2018 after I had my daughter, Caitlin, and I was so sick.

Nobody can tell anything what's wrong with me. They had no idea. They were telling me acid reflux and then they stuck me on all this weird stuff. and there was one doctor that looked at me and she didn't have to do blood work. I mean, she actually did to confirm, but she's like, you need to go to the hospital right now. So I did. And then I went to different, I did continue going to different doctors, you know, because I was those, that thyroid, it controls everything. Oh, yeah.

No. Everything. And was it the thyroid that was acting up? Is it because of my liver? Like, I don't know. So they found out that I had Epstein Barr. I had MS. I had the thyroid cancer.

I had a huge goiter, you know, on that, a huge tumor on that thyroid. And it sounded to me like sand. Every time I would take a step, I just heard sand like in my ears. So I was mind fucked real bad. Yeah, quite literally, yeah. And then I had frustration from family and like,

what's wrong with you, you know? I don't fucking know. Yeah. So if folks watch your episode, they'll know that you went on a, not a sabbatical, but on a journey. You jumped around a lot.

And then you discovered that because of your undiagnosed OCD or ADHD, whatever you want to call it, and your superpowers, you've created a brand, products that are skincare, that you're revolutionizing things. You've completely,

what's the word that I just learned? Greenwashing? You've removed greenwashing. Can you explain to people what greenwashing? There are so many words out there that mean nothing. Salon tested is not a measurable thing. You know, eco-friendly, not a measurable thing.

These are hero claims that companies make and, you know, to try to sell you a product. There's no sign. There's no back to that. My favorite one is child tested mother approved or some random shit. Dermatologist tested. Some random guy that happens to know something about skin tested at once. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So you're against all of this because you are the real deal. I explain to people 100%, hey, listen, salon tested doesn't mean anything, you know. My products are salon tested. It just means that I have handed my products off to a salon and they have tested them. That's it. It doesn't mean anything else other than that. It's not something that makes anything better.

It's not, it's just words. Right on. So give me some extra words of specifically what you do. We've left this sort of mysterious for folks to kind of figure it out. But give us, talk to me like a three-year-old. What do you do for a living? What is your day-to-day hustle today? My day-to-day, I am in the kitchen all the time making food for my kids because they don't ever stop eating.

Yes, but your kids don't spit it up into bottles and put it on people's skin, do they? No. No, at least not yet. That's a completely different line. So what do you do? Like you bottle, you went on this whole montage of your products, your shipping, your packaging. I'd love to hear some of this for the podcast. So, okay, I started my business in February of 2025, very, very new to business.

But I had immediate and continued great successes without marketing, without doing anything. I just talk to people, tell them what's, you know, what's what? And then, you know, just kind of let them decide. Right on. So I would, I remember, I would get up. at like five or six, you know, and I already have a hard time sleeping because I have kids and they're noisy as shit. So I would get up and if they weren't up yet or if I didn't have to wake up yet, I would be on that laptop designing my website, you know, or I would be designing labels or I would

be out in the lab, you know, putting together things and seeing if what works and what I liked and, you know, then testing it. And I love that stuff. That is where I was. want to be. Right on. A lot of folks have giving you feedback that you're, I want to say confrontation. You're just in people's faces. I completely agree, but I admire it. I'm the same way. Talk about folks that that are watching and listening that happen to be women or men, since you are a woman in power. There's a lot of folks out there, especially women that don't know how to speak up. They don't know how to be authentic. They are essentially, they've created an avatar that isn't really helping them or favoring them. They're just surviving. Talk about surviving versus thriving.

I think that, you know, it's going to take some years for women to be like, oh, I don't have to be quiet. You know, I learned that early on. I actually probably didn't even learn it. I just came out like the loudest shit. But the, you know, like my mom, her generation, you couldn't, she couldn't even have a bank account when she was little. You know, there was no woman voting. There wasn't anything like that. And my grandparents, even more so, you know, the things that they.

had to do and the things that they weren't allowed to do were so great and that stuff just kind of trickles down because you have those parents who were not used to being able to have a bank account and now like their daughter is but they haven't learned enough throughout the time but really there is no need to feel oppressed anymore I feel like that's just something in an excuse I'm oppressed I'm you know I'm this I'm that there is a different between a reason and an excuse. And I think that people use excuses way too freely. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. That's a different podcast. I don't want to dive into that because it's going to completely derail us. But Jen, we just finished film in the episode. I'm sorry, Jennifer. Or Jenny, what was all your nicknames again? Jenny, Nenny. Nenny, that's the one.

Hey, yo. As long as you're looking at me, I kind of, I'm like, okay. Hey, yo. What are we going to learn about you? Give us a preview of your episode. So you are going to learn why I am the way that I am and that it is all my parents' fault. And it's all like parents is widely, you know, use. It's all the people that kind of were like, oh, this is my daughter now and, you know.

Right on. She is a friend of my daughter and she is now mine. She doesn't leave. Hey, you, Zeni. How can folks learn more about you and actually buy your products? So I am going to start marketing. I'm learning how to do that right now. It's going to take me a little bit of time.

I, you know, there's all kinds of things that didn't exist when I was proficient in computers. You know, I, so I completely forgot how to use an Excel spreadsheet. I didn't even know that Excel existed anymore. I have to relearn that. It's called Google Sheets now. Get Together. Oh, my God. When you guys sent me Google Docs, I was like, what the shit is stupid thing?

I love it. I was just having kids for 10 years. That's all I did is just kid stuff, you know? Right on. All right. So let's focus before I want to wrap up. Just give me the 30 second commercial. You make products and these products are for who?

My products are for everybody who wants to treat the world a little bit better, treat your body a little bit better. it's for the people who want to gift utilitarian gifts and not just have a toy that you're going to throw away or, you know, like some chinty, whatever, sign or whatever, just throw it away. There's no, just give people stuff they're going to use. Pay a bill, buy them some shampoo or some soap, you know?

So 70% in shampoo, the 70% of water and shampoo is absolutely useless. So water is... I learned that today. Yeah. So water is listed as the first ingredient in shampoo and conditioner. Well, the FDA does not tell them that they need to list in descending order, but really that's the way that we should be doing it. So water is always the first ingredient in a liquid shampoo or a liquid conditioner. And a liquid shampoo is about 70% water.

When you have oils and waters, you need to emulsify them. And then you need to protect that water from molding. And they stick formaldehyde in those preservatives to give it a high shelf life. a typical liquid conditioner is 85% water, which blew me away. I, like, how do you sleep at night? What the shit? Like, that's so heavy. How much water are we buying here?

We don't need to buy water. We have water in the shower. Yeah, right on. So 85% of that is water. They're not using the super nice ingredients because it's not cost effective to do that, you know? and they're bound by the shareholder primacy. They have to do the, they have to make their shareholders as much money as they possibly can. So, you know, there's a better way.

I was going to say, I want you to end this with an exclamation mark. Your affirmation is that there is a better way that you don't want to answer to any shareholders. You want to keep this private. You want to keep this very much yours. What is the outlook? What is the future here for you when it comes to your lore, your brand? What's the future for my brand? Yeah.

So I just created a separate business to kind of keep things separate, like hair care and skincare. So I created filthy vegan. Hell yeah. So filthy vegan is going to take over this part. And then Archwood Soapery will always be there to take, to, you know, have one part of this. It just really helps to separate the skin and the hair. Right on.

How can people find more of filthy vegans and archwood soaperies? Look, look online. Wow. I swear it is. Just Google it. You have to turn on your computer. Log in, open your browser, Google, and then type in Archwood soapries. Right.

So when you onboard with the big retailers, they do not distribute you nationwide until you, your product is proven in their store. So if you would like to see my products where you are, then email them. You'd be like, hey, do you, why don't you guys carry Archwood-Sopery? Why don't you carry filthy vegan? You should because it's better.

End of, end of story. Exclamation point. Exclamation point, exclamation point. We're going to wrap it up there. Gosh, hey you, that was an amazing podcast. I appreciate your time energy. Are you heading back to the mastermind after this? Yes.

Yes. We're going to get, we're going to take your photo. real quick and we're going to rush you back for lunch at the mastermind. And with that, that's Hey You. I'm Hey y'all. And we are Inside Success. Podcasting. Inside Success. No, we're not strippers. We're Insight Success. We're Insight Success.