Turning Trees Into Lasting Smiles

Mar 30, 2025

What is your name, where are you from?

Kathleen Smith from Lamberton, Minnesota on the rural prairie.

What do you like most about where you live?

I love the quiet, open spaces, and slower pace of life. We live on 13 acres, about 7 miles from the nearest town (of 800 people).

What’s your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Smiling Tree Toys was born in late 2010 when we - Justin and Kathleen (world-traveling, nature-loving, bike-riding, kids-at-heart, husband-wife duo) - returned to the States after serving two years with the Peace Corps in West Africa.

We looked at one another, and said “Now what?”

After living in a small, tightly-knit community in West Africa, we knew we wanted the same for our new home in the US. We chose Kathleen’s family roots in rural southwestern Minnesota as our little place to call home.

Justin has always been passionate about working with wood. And Kathleen has been in love with all things handmade for as long as she can remember. Add parenthood to the mix (big-blue-eyed Amana was born during this same time), and the epiphany came almost immediately: creating handmade, organic wooden toys is what we were meant to do.

Since then, we've scaled our small Etsy shop to an ecommerce brand to employ a team of seven and added a second line, Smiling Tree Gifts - sustainable corporate gifts - to the mix. Today we operate a near 7-figure business, doing it all as sustainably as absolutely possible.

Currently, what are your income streams?

We sell exclusively online.

How have you attracted new customers?

Our search engine optimization efforts (getting found in organic search results), while a long game, have proven to be a sizable, reliable, and affordable (free!) source of growth.

Beyond that, we find brand collaborations and Google Ads to be effective in getting found by the right people.

What is your favorite product?

Most definitely our picture alphabet block set. It reminds me of the letter blocks I loved as a kid. I spent so many hours stacking, designing buildings, stacking towers in hopes of reaching the ceiling,

If you could go back, would you do anything differently?

I would have prioritized growing our email list (and very frequently emailing that list) much sooner.

What are your goals?

Our systems and processes are pretty well established right now; and we've got a great team of employees. Our current goals are to increase traffic to our websites. Grow our email list, and ultimately our sales.

We're also working towards additional ways we can make our business more environmentally friendly by way of decreasing our carbon emissions and offering our customers ways they can make their purchase "greener" (for example, planting extra trees for every purchase, upgrading to carbon neutral shipping, etc).

What platform and tools do you use?

Our online store is hosted on Shopify. A few other apps we can't live without include Gorgias (inbox management and customer service), Klaviyo (email and SMS marketing), Asana (project management), Gusto (payroll), and Slack (internal team chat).