With more than half a million social media followers, Pretty Farm Girl shows up in your feed like a heavy hitter in the ultra-competitive skincare industry. The brand walks and talks with the poise of internationally recognized names like Acure Beauty, Dr. Hauschka, or Tata Harper, and boasts an even bigger reach. Earlier this summer, its products caught the eye of Women’s Health magazine.
But you know what really makes Pretty Farm Girl an irresistible luxury for Sarasotans seeking clean beauty solutions? It’s made right here, so we get direct access.
Created in 2017 in her farmhouse kitchen by mother-of-three Jennifer Keel, Pretty Farm Girl has grown from a humble cottage business into a bustling enterprise headquartered in a 12,000-square-foot facility off Palmer Boulevard. Keel and her husband, Micah, relocated to Sarasota after Hurricane Katrina devastated their home-town in Louisiana. As their young family grew and rooted on this side of the Gulf Coast, Keel realized their children were total animal lovers who needed room to roam. After her second baby’s birth, she also started to notice serious signs that her current environment no longer suited her—signals on her very skin, in the form of severe, painful eczema and psoriasis that left open wounds.
“I felt like we already lived a pretty healthy life,” Keel says, “but my skin health changed how I looked at all of it. I couldn’t put anything on my skin without irritation, and I had to start eliminating toxins everywhere, even in the cleaning products I used. I had to change everything.”
In 2017, the Keel family traded their manicured (read: heavily sprayed) golf course community for five acres of sun-dappled land in rural Myakka. By this time, Keel had made a game-changing discovery while tinkering with homemade treatments for her distressed skin: Inside a book on gut healing, she picked up a tip about beef tallow. After going so far as adopting a vegan diet in pursuit of a cure, at first she viewed the topical application of animal fat as bizarre.
“It sounded terrible,” Keel admits, “but all the guidance I’d followed on going harder, detoxing more, was having the opposite effect. So I figured out how to make a tallow balm, and for the very first time I could put something on my skin and get relief. It wasn’t just the balm that healed the psoriasis and everything, because that, of course, was an inside job—it was my inside that I needed to repair. However, my skincare was part of the equation.”
Keel began handcrafting tallow soaps and balms at her kitchen counter, using beef tallow she rendered herself, farm-fresh goat milk, local honey, and homegrown botanicals like lavender, calendula, and chamomile. Because traditional soap cannot easily be made one bar at a time, a beautiful excess accumulated. She began gifting her surplus to teachers at her children’s school, and soon those grateful recipients were asking how to buy them regularly.
When the COVID pandemic forced schoolkids to take classes at home, Keel’s devoted community of early adopters panicked, wondering how they would secure their beloved soaps. Keel opened an Etsy shop to keep customers safely supplied. When an order came in from a name she didn’t recognize, she thought there must have been some kind of mistake.
“I had this mentality that people were just humoring me, that each order would surely be the last one, because I really didn’t know that what we were doing was going to make a significant impact,” Keel says. But orders flooded in from across the country as people increasingly turned to online shopping for their necessities, which definitely included nourishing soap in those dark days of obsessive hand-washing.
Pretty Farm Girl rapidly outgrew the kitchen, transitioning first to the farm’s pole barn, then to a dedicated offsite warehouse, and finally to its current digs. Open for nearly a year, this expansive space houses the company’s full manufacturing and shipping operations, a media studio, two serene spa treatment rooms, and a storefront fragrant enough to induce automatic closed-eyed sighs upon crossing the threshold. The company’s growth also brought a chemist to the team to assist Keel in safely and efficiently developing new formulas.
“We’re coming out with new things and trying to stay on top of what people want right now,” Keel says. “I’m always looking into the latest in skincare, like copper peptides or GHK—these are things in the anti-aging game that I want to bring to people. But I want to make them beautiful and clean, without the preservatives, fragrance, and funky chemicals, so that you’re happy to use it on your skin.”
Scaling up to Pretty Farm Girl’s current size necessitated a cosmetic manufacturer’s permit from the State, and the license’s strict protocols required Keel to transition away from her home-grown ingredients. She has not treated that shift as permission to loosen her standards, however, and is fiercely selective in sourcing organic and food-grade materials, adding fragrance and color exclusively with essential oils, botanicals, and minerals that offer their own therapeutic benefits.
Beyond Pretty Farm Girl’s best-selling bottles of Rose Glow serum and tubs of Fresh Face Cream, the brand’s online spaces offer DIY recipes, skincare guides, and loving advice for an altogether glowing, dewy, and slowed-down lifestyle.
“I can’t just give people skincare and say, ‘Buy our product, it’s gonna solve all your problems.’ That doesn’t sit well with me. There is more to wellness. I want to encourage people to take care of their nervous systems, get outside, work on their gut health—dig deeper into whole well-being. That’s really been the brand’s message from the beginning.”
Pretty Farm Girl’s definition of beauty isn’t some promise locked up in a bottle; pretty means being comfortable, content, and thriving in your skin.
