Nature’s Secret, Perfected
One woman’s journey from homemade balm to a booming business
A few years ago, when Maycie Trapp was training to become a midwife, a friend recommended she swap her regular skin care routine for tallow. That simple switch did more for Maycie than just even out her skin tone and stop her occasional breakouts. It sent her down the path to starting her own business.
Maycie is the founder of Naturally Montana, a Billings-based company that makes skincare products primarily from tallow. All the products she sells, she makes and packages herself.
The story of Naturally Montana started with a two-pound chunk of tallow, rendered from the raw fat trimmings off beef kidneys — the most nutrient dense and purest fat on an animal. After some online research, Maycie went to work experimenting with the tallow and a few recipes. The balm she whipped up was a success and Maycie made far more creamy, rich moisturizer than she needed, so she decided to sell it on Facebook Marketplace. All six jars leftover from her experiment were snapped up in less than 20 minutes, and she still had tallow left over. She knew she was onto something.
She discovered tallow is trending, especially among women who want simple, effective, all-natural skin care products. Tallow is naturally anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial and anti-bacterial, and it’s loaded with vitamins A, D, E, K and B12, as well as collagen. Tallow’s fatty acid profile is very similar to the oils our skin produces, making it highly bioavailable. It doesn’t clog pores and it’s not heavy. When the right quantity is used — a surprisingly small amount — tallow is not greasy. It has even been praised for helping skin conditions ranging from fine lines and wrinkles and an uneven skin tone to more serious conditions like psoriasis and eczema.
“It’s even been called nature’s Botox,” Maycie says.
What followed for Maycie was a lengthy experimentation and product development phase. Tallow can be tricky.
“If a product isn’t melted and cooled and whipped at just the right temperature, it can turn out grainy,” Maycie says.
Tallow rendering is a days-long process that starts with grinding the fat and slowly melting it, filtering it and purifying it and then cooling it. During those first few renderings, there seemed to be no end to the slippery patches of tallow on her kitchen counters and floors.
“My husband quickly got irritated with tallow everywhere in our kitchen, and honestly I did, too,” Maycie says.
If the tallow is rendered at too high a temperature, it changes the fatty acid profile, and the beneficial nutrients are burned off. The goal, Maycie says, is to preserve the healing properties in an odorless product. Poor quality tallow to start and missed steps in the purification process can cause the product to smell more like dinner than skincare. With lots of trial and error, she perfected an odorless, smooth tallow base.
With purity and quality in mind, Maycie uses only USDA Certified Organic and grass-fed and finished beef tallow. She sources the tallow from a ranch in Lavina and a ranch in Big Timber.
“Sourcing makes all the difference,” Maycie says.
Choosing grass-fed and finished organic beef ensures that no heavy metals or pesticides from the animal’s feed is trapped in the fat. Additionally, there are no industry standards for tallow, and with no quality control, it’s buyer beware when it comes to online sourcing.
As the demand for Maycie’s tallow products continued to rise, the next challenge came in scaling the rendering process. In the early days, Maycie rendered a couple of pounds of tallow at a time in a crock pot. Now, she renders 150-pound batches. The techniques remained basically the same, but scaling up required even more trial and error.
Along the way, Maycie continued to develop the Naturally Montana brand and experiment with new recipes for products. She now offers 17 tallow-based products in her line, including the Rejuvenating Tallow Balm, Healing Tallow Balm, tallow-based mineral sunscreen, deodorant, soaps, lip balm, lotion sticks and masks. The Rejuvenating Tallow Balm is a bestseller.
“It’s my daily face moisturizer and hand lotion,” Maycie says.
While Naturally Montana offers unscented tallow products, many of Maycie’s customers like a lightly scented skin care routine. For those products, she adds only therapeutic-grade essential oils to her products.
Maycie’s decision to go all-natural in her skin care routine became even more important to her when she and her husband, Hayden, found out they were having a baby, roughly a year into starting her tallow business. Now, she has even more uses for tallow. When her infant son has a diaper rash, she uses tallow, and when he has a scrape, scratch, or occasional bug bite, it’s her pick to soothe his skin.
“It’s a great thing to have in your home for almost everything,” Maycie says.
Macie juggled her growing business, and motherhood, as well as midwife training. While earning her professional midwife license, she attended more than 100 births along with countless prenatal, postnatal and well-infant exams. Becoming a midwife was Maycie’s lifelong dream.
Just when she was starting to hit her stride, disaster struck. A housefire destroyed the Trapp family home only a few weeks before Maycie and Haydan’s son was born. It’s been more than a year of demolition and reconstruction, and the Trapp family is still waiting to return home. During the time the family has been displaced, Maycie has used her parents’ kitchen to keep up with the demand for Naturally Montana tallow products. It’s a demand that has stretched beyond Billings all across the United States.
“It’s surprising to me to learn that there was such a market for skin care with ingredients you can pronounce,” she says.
Maycie is quick to mention all the help she’s received along the way. When she’s rendering, she has help from Hayden and from her parents, and at events, Hayden and her father always help set up and tear down her booth. Hayden’s parents are always happy to watch the baby during events, as well as anytime Maycie needs to get ahead on orders or package a big batch of product.
Throughout the growth of her company, Maycie’s customers have shared testimonials about how her tallow products have healed their skin when over-the-counter drugstore remedies and even prescription products have failed. She often hears from women who are grateful to have replaced their complicated skin care routines with just one product — tallow.
“It all started with a decision for me to use all-natural products on me and my family,” Maycie says.
