In many ways, the Kettle Care® story is about rekindling our love for handmade goods. Our customers choose handcrafted over mass-produced, all-natural ingredients over flashy advertising schemes. Kettle Care® products are made with love, care, and attention to detail. It’s this mission that drew Klaus and I to purchase Kettle Care® a decade ago. And it’s this same passion for all things handmade that drew me to discover a bygone craft: broom-making.

On my recent trip to Germany, I was walking through the old city center of Naumburg to visit the famous Naumburger Dom when a shop window caught my eye. The quaint little shop was full of handmade brooms and brushes, more beautiful and unique than I ever imagined brushes could be. I was mesmerized. I decided the Naumburger Dom could wait while I did some unplanned exploring.

In the back corner of the store, the shopkeeper was making a broom meant to clean radiators. We chatted for a while, and she showed me how she handcrafts her brooms and brushes:

She starts with a flat piece of wood, punctured with holes. She fills the holes with fibers and weaves a thin copper wire through the holes to hold the fibers in place. Then she nails on a top plate to cover the copper wire loops — and voila! She can add a handle of any length to create a brush, long-handle broom, or short-handle broom.

You can watch this video to see these steps in action.

Broom-making is an old craft. People made brooms and brushes at home for thousands of years. Although machines have made the broom-making trade largely obsolete, in some corners of the world, people still make their brooms by hand. The owner of this particular shop in Naumburg inherited the trade from her father and grandfather and wants to keep the art alive — although she’s likely the last generation in her family to craft brooms for the shop.

She took great pride in her craft and enthusiastically showed me the different fibers she uses for her brooms and brushes — the colorful split horse hair, the ultra-soft goat hair all the way from China, and the coarse cactus fiber from Mexico to name just a few.

I watched her hand-weave every knot of the brush, a task that seemed both meditative and artful, and I began to wonder whether this could be the next trendy craft for city dwellers. This could be a perfect opportunity for someone to crowdfund and begin a new business. Everyone needs good brushes, and many people would jump at the chance to make their own.

Brushes aren’t just for the ashes from your fireplace or that pesky pet fur. Brushes are an essential tool for exfoliation. To learn more about how we use brushes in skincare, check out our Exfoliation blog post.