You want to buy a product we make, but you cannot because it is out of stock.
Why is it that, just when you are ready to buy one of our products, we don’t have it available?
The well-known economic phrase “Demand determines supply” simply does not work for us. The number of products we can make is finite. Behind every single product made by Heliantheae there is no chemical or pharmaceutical factory churning out more whenever demand arises. Every food supplement we make is produced from medicinal plants or minerals obtained from Nature. Whenever a medicinal plant grows wild in Bulgaria, we use wild plants gathered here, from Bulgarian Nature. Only plants that do not naturally grow in Bulgaria have to be sourced from elsewhere. And especially in recent years, Nature has simply not been providing enough high-quality wild medicinal plants. There is hardly any non-urbanised land left in Bulgaria. There are fewer and fewer wild herbs — and fewer trained people who know how to gather them.
Gathering medicinal plants is not easy work. Do not imagine that just anyone can gather herbs. No. It takes particular people — people who can identify medicinal plants and who also have a specific set of values closely connected with the very act of gathering them.
These are not random, unskilled people roaming the countryside and gathering whatever they can find in order to earn a little money. Nor are they poorly educated individuals who simply happen to have found an easy way to make a living. Quite the opposite — these people are idealists. Each of them has a profound spiritual connection with Nature and understands that there are certain rules when taking something from Nature.
Do not picture people wandering through hills and forests, pulling up every plant they happen to see just to make some money. Picture instead people who have spent years learning about medicinal plants; people who know exactly which part of a plant may be gathered, when it may be gathered and under what circumstances. Before they even set out to gather herbs, they know precisely which plant they are looking for, where they will look for it, how they will take it from Nature, and what they must leave behind in Nature as a gift.
They prepare throughout the year for each herb-gathering season. They fast according to particular calendars, and each of them has complex personal religious beliefs and traditions which they observe so that what they take from Nature may be a blessing rather than a curse.
Do you personally know even one person who professionally gathers medicinal plants?!
Most probably, you do not.
Such people still exist, but there are fewer and fewer of them every day. Because the very thing they know and understand is steadily disappearing. Global pollution is one reason. The second, and more significant one, is the staggering pace at which land that until recently was wild is being developed. Nobody seems particularly concerned about destroying a natural habitat of medicinal plants when deciding to build a guest house there.
Tourism in the Balkan Mountains is another painful subject. The way people behave when they go out into Nature is appalling. Picnics that leave the ground scattered with cups, plates and plastic bags; barbecues and open fires wherever someone happens to fancy having one; walking, walking, walking… while being careful not to step into what somebody else has left behind while “walking”.
Our production depends on professional wild-herb gatherers here in Bulgaria. There are extremely few of them, and even they are limited by the decreasing availability of wild medicinal plants. Cultivated medicinal plants do not do the same job. They may look like their wild counterparts and smell like them, but their medicinal properties may be greatly diminished or, in some cases, effectively absent for the purposes for which we use them.
At Heliantheae, we understand that we will not be able to continue producing our herbal tinctures for many more years. At some point, there will simply be no medicinal plants left for this purpose. Nature will no longer be able to provide us with the plants we need, because Nature itself will have to struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile environment.
We understand that you may want to buy a particular herbal food supplement right now, but your money cannot make medicinal plants exist. We cannot buy them when they simply are not there.
Nature does not care what exactly we are looking for or how badly we need it. The laws of Nature do not operate according to economic principles, and there is little point in worrying that we may lose customers because we cannot immediately provide them with what they need.
At some point, we will indeed lose our customers when it comes to herbal food supplements, because we will never manufacture anything that has come out of a chemical or pharmaceutical factory.
We will make nothing!
The market is full of every conceivable kind of extract and other imitations of natural products. If it makes no difference to you what kind of herbal product you use, we strongly recommend that you buy a product NOT made by us.
If, however, it matters to you that you are using a genuinely herbal product made from the wild medicinal plants themselves, then you will have to accommodate Nature.
We do so every day, knowing that we are only a tiny part of that Nature — and feeling profoundly grateful that we have received the very best from it.
