The Quality Makers: Alison Carroll of Wonder Valley

Alison Carroll is the co-founder of Wonder Valley along with her husband, Jay Carroll. They live between Joshua Tree, California and Maine – in a world where health is a priority and olive oil reigns supreme. They believe in the holistic power of olive oil as the foundation of a healthy diet and the key to radiant skin.

Know that their olive oil is certified extra virgin grade, their skincare ingredients are potent and plant-based, and their packaging is as sustainable as possible with a goal of minimal to no plastic. Read Alison’s story below.

Why don’t we start with the name? Wonder Valley.

The name is a real place. Wonder Valley is the name of an unincorporated small town in the high desert. The term Joshua Tree actually applies to a larger pocket of a few desert towns, including Wonder Valley, which is about 30 miles east from the town of Joshua Tree. But it's a totally different space from the usual desert. It's more sparsely populated. It's surrounded by mountain ranges. It's a beautiful expanse. It's the last stop before you're heading up through Amboy to the Mojave Preserve. It has a totally different plant life, no Joshua trees.

My husband has been coming out to Wonder Valley for 20 years now. That was our gateway to the desert. There's something magical that all desert landscapes can offer, in the absence of things obstructing your sight line, like buildings and trees. Having this open expanse really does something magical to your head space. Spending time out here, being really still and quiet, was where we got all our lightning in a bottle ideas. Jay and I would describe it as limitless sand and imagination. The light out here at sunset is so different, it's very purpley on the mountains and a totally unique experience.

How did the brand come to be?

Wonder Valley was born out of my interests and expertise in California olive oil and my husband's branding and storytelling brilliance. He was the Creative Director at Levi's. He's a brilliant photographer and  branding person in all different types of  industries, including hospitality and fashion. It was his idea. He said to me: you have these contacts. You know what you like. You know what you want to say. Let's bring it to a new audience. Let's start talking and be loud and proud about this being a product of California. Off the bat, his packaging and our approach was pretty disruptive. Our olive oil found more homes right away in spaces where it hadn't been before, like museum gift shops, home goods stores and fashion houses. That was really an exciting space to be a part of. A lot of my job has been about getting people to give the taste of oil olive a moment of their time. You’ll notice, you don't have to be an expert to distinguish the difference.

Tell me more about your expertise in olive oil.

That’s how our story began. We were living in San Francisco back in 2014. I worked as the Marketing Director for the California Olive Oil Council. I previously had a background working in kitchens and on farms. I also worked in marketing and PR agencies on the East Coast. I was always trying to find this way to merge agriculture and marketing, and that's how I came to be in that position at the council. 

It's a phenomenal non-profit started in the early 90s. Essentially, it's a collective of all the olive farmers in the state. The olive oil industry is relatively young compared to our European counterparts; we've only been doing this as a country for a couple decades. The term ‘extra virgin’ should mean something it rarely does. There's a lot of adulterated products and murky regulation, so the California Olive Oil Council was formed as a way to provide education, resources, and general advocacy. 

Primarily, its function is an annual certification program for olive oils as extra virgin grade. The only real way to do that is through a professional taste panel. So that was my role, to organize and set up the tastings for this group of about 30 professional olive oil tasters. We were the only panel of our kind in North America. It's like being an olive oil sommelier, but instead of getting together and critiquing what makes it so fabulous, you're really doing detective work. Extra virgin grade means there's no defects. To a trained professional palette, you know what each defect tastes and smells like, and you can detect why that defect has occurred. 

That's the most fascinating part to me. You're going back to a producer and telling them exactly why they failed this year, maybe because the defect was fusty, meaning they probably didn't press the fruit quick enough. You only have a couple of hours after you pick it to press it, otherwise it starts to rot, and that has a really unique flavor and scent to a trained nose. I got to learn from the best authorities on domestic olive oil. It felt like what I imagine sitting at the table in the 70s in the California wine industry must have been like - knowing this could be something magical but you’re not there yet. 

You say: olive oil reigns supreme. What does that mean?

I quickly fell into the mythology, the lore and the history of olive oil. It's truly one of the oldest industries, and its applications were always beyond culinary. It was used by pharaohs and queens, it was part of anointing ceremonies, it was early face oil. The lowest grade oil is called lamponte, which means lamp oil, so it's always had a multifacetedness to it. 

One thing I love about olive oil is that it's so elemental. We all have dietary restrictions of some sort, but salt and olive oil are common denominators across the world. That's always been my lens for formulating new products. We all wash our face, we all moisturize, we all wash our hair, we all hydrate, we all use soap. How can we make everyday touchstones extraordinary? The truth is that we're producing a key ingredient. What better vitality, transparency and health benefits can you have than formulating with something you have total control over? 

What led you from the celebration of the holistic powers of olive oil, to incorporating it into so many different products?

When we moved to the desert, our skin went through radical changes being in such an arid climate, and oil became absolutely essential. I remember being really emboldened by reading interviews back in the day on Linda Rodin about her origin story with making her face oil, how she would mix them in a mug in her bathroom and give it to models on photo shoots. I thought: ok, I'm not an esthetician, I'm not a trained chemist, but I'm a trained olive oil expert, so let me just start playing around. I made the Face Oil ($85) which is still the same, original formula, and it was selfishly for my skin and my own needs. I was dealing with acne, I was dealing with sun intensity and dry skin issues, and I created this really inflammation-reducing, balancing oil. 

For about four years, we had a shop in Joshua Tree, and honestly, it was a great testing ground. There was no pressure to launch something to the market to see how it's received. I just made small batch productions and got to see how my audience, in real time, received it. There weren't a lot of brands applying a culinary product to a topical product. I was always afraid that would alienate an audience. But instead, we found ourselves at the start of people really understanding the internal health - external beauty tie. I was paying attention to what I was feeling about my health, creating products that I felt were needed in the market, and trying to hone in on a simplistic, universally beneficial approach. 

Something that I really like about your brand is the tutorials and tips that you offer, this kind of educational approach, even in terms of culinary inspiration. Tell me what your intention with that is.

That's a really special part, just teaching people how to use our products. It's still a small population that really understands what an oil cleanser is and why it's beneficial. Our Japanese-inspired facial exfoliant is a manual powder that you add to the cleanser. Some of our products just aren't obvious, you need a little hand holding in understanding how they work. 

A lot of thought and intention goes into how we design these products. Our shampoo is made so you can hopefully lengthen the time between washes. But why is that important? My goal is always to inform the customer and hopefully empower their discernment, so they can pick products that are uniquely helpful for their skin types. I don't subscribe to the shelf full of a million products. I don't think that's good for the individual’s skin, wallet, or the environment. I’d love for people to rethink the why of what they're doing when using our products.

What is your creation and design process, also in relation to sustainability?

I'm fortunate to have a brilliant partner and husband who's the creative brains behind a lot of our branding. If you zoom out and look at our collection, it's not a homogeneous line, meaning it's not all one color, one label, one consistent packaging. Each product takes so much time because it's its own entity. The goal is that they all still feel like they're part of the same family. That might be our siren, which is the female behind the sun in our logo. She shows up in a lot of places. There's a warm desert palette that flows throughout the product collection. It's always a marriage of form and function. 

For the shampoo and conditioner bottles, we were exploring plastics. It's my personal mission to not use plastic whenever possible. The olive oil has been 100% plastic free since its origin. We're putting 1000s of units out in the world, and those have short life cycles, which means 1000s of pieces of plastic on the earth. Recyclability and using materials that have long post-use shelf lifes, glass and aluminum in particular, are absolutely my key methods. There's limitations, because there's not a lot of dispensing options for pumps, reducers and caps - they always have some form of plastic. But we decided to go through aluminum instead. 

Roughly 60% of aluminum has been in reuse in perpetuity. We used a mono plastic for the pump just so it could be curbside recycled, and then it's just a matter of tweaking the formula to make sure it dispenses okay out of this bottle that's not plastic. That’s where the design process really comes in: how can we make this shape, do these colors, and manipulate this so it functions like that. We do everything in house, we don’t have design agencies or third parties we work with, so I got to be really involved in this process. 

What’s next for you?

We’ve never been able to keep up with the demand for olive oil. It's a once a year harvest, and we've expanded considerably, but it's still a fruit off of a tree. We press each November in the groves in Northern California since we started. For me, it begs the question of: what does success look like when you’re self funded? There's limitations to how fast we can run. We’re taking hard looks at what's possible, what's necessary, what's good for a company of our size? We're pretty much an online business, so how do we get more ‘in real life’ in the coming years? We are rounding out our amenities offerings, so working with hotel partners feels like a good way to know that people are really using our products out in the world. Sustainable growth has always been at the forefront of Wonder Valley and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.  

Become an expert in everything olive oil with Wonder Valley’s guidance.