Herb Girl

In March 2019, Eileen Schaeffer Brantley, C’13, and her business partner, Amy Saleh, arrived at Studio 225 on the University of Georgia campus for a Shark Tank-like competition against seven other teams of budding entrepreneurs. The studio was home to UGA’s Entrepreneurship Program, and the women immediately felt intimidated. The space was sleek and ultramodern, and the competition were mostly guys in business suits pitching ideas with a decided man-cave-meets-tailgate vibe to them. One team was presenting a Yeti-like beverage cooler. Another was pushing the latest, greatest barbecue sauce. In short, it was bro heaven. Brantley and Saleh, meanwhile, wore flower-print dresses, a hint that they preferred digging in the garden to schmoozing in shiny venues like this. And the product they were pitching was, well, choose your adjective: “alternative,” “hippie,” “crunchy.” The women are certified clinical herbalists and the product they would present that day was called Rally, a coffee additive designed to prevent the post-caffeine crash many people experience come mid-afternoon. The powder features adaptogens, a class of herbs said to interact with the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems to reduce stress levels and maintain energy. 

Brantley and Saleh’s anxiety was unwarranted. Among the eight competing teams, they were the only ones with an actual business, a wellness company called Herb Girls, and Rally was already selling well in Athens, where they lived. More broadly, by 2019, adaptogens were starting to get noticed in the United States. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal were publishing articles about them, social media influencers were raving about them, and the herbs were appearing in trendy smoothie bars in Los Angeles and boutique apothecaries in New York City. The fact that adaptogens—like all herbal remedies in this country—haven’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration or otherwise embraced by Western science didn’t concern Brantley, at least not on that day. The role, perception, and legitimacy of herbal medicine in the United States was a long-term issue she hoped to spend the rest of her career trying to shape and influence. But on that day in Studio 225, the important thing was simply being there and putting Rally to the test in the marketplace of ideas.

Things quickly seemed to go sideways not long into her five-minute presentation when one of the judges, Keith Kelly, said, “That sounds awful!” after Brantley detailed the ingredients in Rally (chicory root extract, dandelion root extract, lucuma powder, reishi extract, ashwagandha extract, cinnamon powder, cardamom powder). But Brantley was prepared for this. She and Saleh simply offered the three judges frothy, Rally-infused lattes on the spot. The judges loved them. They also loved the overall idea of Rally, so much so they declared Brantley and Saleh the winners of the competition and handed them an oversized check for $2.500. Kelly, who owns numerous agribusiness brands and manufacturing businesses, was so taken with the pitch that the three decided to go into business together. Brantley and Saleh joined Kelly Products and have since worked alongside the team there to build the brand. “Our whole goal is to promote the proper use and understanding of adaptogens and herbs more generally,” Brantley says. “Now we had this exciting new platform to do that.”

Since the competition—and since many delays triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic—Brantley and Saleh have been have been working at Kelly with manufacturing, safety and compliance, and brand marketing teams, and Kelly has started building out a production facility in Covington, Georgia. Meanwhile, UGA’s Food Production and Innovation Center has been providing research and development services for the energy bars. This summer they will launch two energy bar brands: ILA (short for “I Love Adaptogens”) and REV Life. Both will come in chocolate and cinnamon pecan flavors, with the former designed to destress your typical overstressed person, and the latter aimed at energizing weekend-warrior athletes. This fall they will launch MYCA (“Make Your Coffee Amazing”), a rebranded and reformulated version of Rally. “You can’t always change the amount of stress in your life,” Brantley says, “but you can change how you handle it. Adaptogens improve the resiliency of your stress response system.”

The fact that Brantley ended up in the medicinal herb world comes as no surprise. She grew up on a 40-acre farm in Franklin, Tennessee, outside of Nashville. The farm was mostly a hobby for her father, a structural engineer, and her mother, a former nurse. But they had goats and pigs and grew fruits and vegetables, and Brantley spent most of her childhood romping in the dirt and having adventures. Her other obsession was her mother’s medical books, within which—with her mother’s blessing—she liberally doodled and drew pictures.

Uncles and cousins had attended Sewanee, but Brantley figured the school was too small and too close to home, and besides, she dreamed of studying marine biology in California. But during a campus tour that included a hike along the Perimeter Trail, she fell in love with the place. “There was something about the Cumberland Plateau,” she says. “I’m not sure if it was the landscape or the biodiversity or what, but it felt like I had been there before.” She majored in ecology and biodiversity, and minored in religion. In Bran Potter’s Walk the Land class, she and classmates would read transcendentalism, go hiking off-trail on the Domain, get lost, do a bit of journaling, and end up engrossed in some riveting discussion about nature. She took all of Gerald Smith’s religion classes. She spent time on St. Catherines Island off the Georgia coast as part of Sewanee’s Island Ecology Program. “Most of my classes at Sewanee were outside,” she says. “I didn’t realize how special that was until later when I learned about other people’s college experiences.” Her junior year, Brantley was president of the Earth Keepers Club, an organization focused on religion and nature. Club members would read some Thoreau or Emerson, or maybe a poem, and then discuss it. Sometimes they took silent, meditative walks in the woods. As president, Brantley quickly grew the club from five members to about 50. “I talk a lot, and I’m enthusiastic, so I just told everyone what we’re doing,” she says. “If you’re doing cool stuff and talking about interesting things, the word will spread.”

After graduating, Brantley accepted an internship in the Organic Prayer Project at the Community of St. Mary, a Benedictine convent in Sewanee. She spent the next year praying and working in the convent’s herb and vegetable gardens. It was her first significant exposure to herbs. She learned a lot growing and harvesting lavender, much of which ended up in the bath products of Thistle Farms in Nashville, a nonprofit that employs survivors of sexual abuse; but she also read every herb book she could get her hands on. She was so enamored with these plants and their potential that when, a year later, she secured an assistantship in the soil science Ph.D. program at UGA, she turned it down. There was another factor in that decision. All her life she had suffered from gastrointestinal pain that doctors never could diagnose. The pain worsened with the academic stress she experienced in college and ultimately led to an eating disorder. “My year at the convent was a sharp contrast to the busy world of academics,” she says. “There was a lot of time to reflect and heal. I realized academia really wasn’t that healthy for me.”

 Instead, she did a certification program in permaculture design at the Urban Farm School, part of the Asheville Institute in North Carolina. “I worried I would disappoint my parents, turning down a Ph.D. program for hippie school,” Brantley says. “I was like, ‘Is this stupid?’ But they were totally supportive.” After working on a medicinal herb farm for seven months during the program, she realized “the beast had been fed.” Herbs were now her life.

“My ultimate goal is for herbalism to receive the respect it deserves in this country,” Brantley says. “It has been misrepresented.”

Over the next few years, she worked a series of herb-related jobs and completed more certifications. She landed an AmeriCorps position in Nashville with the Urban Green Lab, an 18-wheeler converted into an environmental science lab that travels from school to school, educating kids on everything from composting to green energy. She attended the Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine in Asheville, where she processed herbs and learned how to make tinctures in the apothecary. She worked at the only herb shop in Athens. She completed an online degree from the Nutritional Therapy Association, and she banged out a master’s degree in agribusiness from UGA, writing her capstone on medicinal herb production in the United States. Along the way she met her husband, Andrew Brantley, an Athens-based musician, as well as Saleh, with whom she founded Herb Girls. The company’s mission was primarily educational. It offered plant walks, classes on making tinctures, and lessons in detoxification. It also sold a line of adaptogen-infused products like Rally and various teas.

There have been a handful of scientific studies suggesting that adaptogens can lower stress. But Western science is a long way from declaring that adaptogens can do what practitioners claim. Brantley wants to change that. “My ultimate goal is for herbalism to receive the respect it deserves in this country,” she says. “It has been misrepresented.” She means misrepresented at both ends. While some scientists call herbalism voodoo, some practitioners are selling snake oil because they can, because herbal products aren’t regulated by the FDA. Brantley’s master’s research revealed that roughly 90 percent of herbs used in herbal remedies are grown in China and India, two countries with centuries-old experience with herbalism and with populations that know and respect what medicinal herbs can do. Those same herbs could all be grown in the United States, Brantley says, but that won’t happen until this country respects the practice. “I understand the skepticism,” she says. “But if you take a closer look and open your mind and try an herbal protocol, if you consistently work with the right person, if you use the right doses, you’re going to feel something really, really positive.”