For the first eight years of running Republic of Vermont, Ethan West spent late winter in the sugar bush. He trudged through snow on a Goshen hillside in a race to tap maple trees before the sap started running, then he boiled away for weeks in the sugarhouse, often well into the night.
At the beginning of February this year, West hadn’t started. This winter’s long cold snap made for a more traditional early March start to sugaring season, which has crept earlier and earlier due to the climate crisis. But the sense of seasonal calm he and his wife and co-owner, Annina Seiler, have now in their Vermont business is the result of an internal shift they made two years ago, from small-scale maple and honey farm to “lifestyle brand.”
“We really cringe at that term,” West said, sipping coffee from an Addison County Independent “Addy All-Stars” mug alongside Seiler in the living room-like photo studio and packing facility now attached to their sugarhouse. Good Food Awards hung on the wall next to minimalist shelves displaying Republic of Vermont jars of raw honey and bottles of organic amber and dark syrup. Also: the company’s branded candles, soaps, hats and home goods.
Intense googling didn’t reveal a less obnoxious term for their business model, West said. So “lifestyle brand” will have to do for the wide array of products Republic of Vermont now sells online and at stores in all 50 states.
Vermont has more to say than what we’ve been stereotyped as.
Annina Seiler
As unpredictable weather and rising costs wreak havoc on the maple industry, many Vermont producers have sought to bolster their bottom lines with everything from agritourism to value-added products such as maple-infused cocktail mixers. While maple and honey still make up the bulk of Republic of Vermont’s business, the company now buys the majority of what it sells from other local producers. And as its array of candles, apparel and greeting cards grows, the sweet stuff has become a driver for what West and Seiler are really selling: Vermont itself.
Customers from coast to coast are eating it up. Republic of Vermont’s success represents a new way of building an agricultural business that delivers the goods. It also suggests the state has a new story to sell beyond its borders.
As Seiler put it, “Vermont has more to say than what we’ve been stereotyped as.”
Sure, corduroy hats embroidered with loons ($40) and cozy “hibernation” candles ($34) are less obviously of the woods and hives than maple syrup ($25) and honey ($22). But Republic of Vermont is still tied to a certain Vermont way of life — one that’s well designed and immensely marketable, especially out of state, where the majority of the company’s customers have always been. Through its website and social media, the operation sells an idealized version of Green Mountain living that’s both rooted in rustic tradition and updated for modern tastes.
West and Seiler aren’t the first to evoke the aura of Vermont’s rolling hills and working lands in their marketing. Vermonters and businesses from Ben & Jerry’s to Stowe Mountain Resort have been promoting their version to out-of-staters since the original “Republic of Vermont” in the 1770s — often to encourage a visit.
“Vermont’s image has always been powerful,” Vermont Chamber of Commerce president Amy Spear said. “But what’s different now is that it’s not just tourism marketing.”
Spear called the Vermont brand an “economic multiplier.” Translation: Putting “Vermont” on the label “allows a small producer in a rural town to compete in national markets,” she said.
The state’s image has shifted over the years, Spear added, from “scenery and syrup” to one associated with storytelling and craftsmanship that’s steeped in values and a sense of place. At the nearly 200 stores selling Republic of Vermont products around the country, those associations do some heavy lifting.
How else to explain why the company’s largest account is now a luxury organic grocery chain in Southern California? Erewhon, known for its viral, celeb-endorsed $20 smoothies, represents both a significant chunk of West and Seiler’s mid-six-figures annual sales and evidence that their bold strategic pivot is working.
The Vermont brand, Spear said, “carries meaning before the product is even opened.”
For how much we represent Vermont out of Vermont, Vermont has no idea who we are.
Ethan west
Out-of-state customers unwrapping Republic of Vermont’s tea tree and bergamot-scented beekeeper’s bar soap ($8) or setting out a forest bathing reed diffuser ($42) might hope to feel whisked away to a snowy wonderland. The company’s offerings and aesthetic all seem designed to conjure a cozy weekend in a tiny maple-walled cabin surrounded by the Green Mountain National Forest. (For those seeking the full Vermont experience, West and Seiler have one of those to rent, too.)
As Republic of Vermont spreads the Green Mountain gospel across the country, though, it ironically remains largely unknown in its home state.
“For how much we represent Vermont out of Vermont, Vermont has no idea who we are,” West said.
Having introduced themselves to the nation, now he and Seiler are looking to introduce themselves to their neighbors.
Drop in the Bucket
West and Seiler are intimately familiar with the Vermont they’re selling. They grew up in Addison County, met at Middlebury Union High School and went to the University of Vermont. He’s on the Brandon Fire Department; she’s served on the planning commission in Goshen, population 168.
The couple and their two young children live in a cabin just up the hill from their sugarhouse. West’s parents bought the property in the 1970s as a summer retreat and built the cabin with help from the late Tony Clark of nearby Blueberry Hill Inn.
Seiler was raised on a 55-cow dairy farm in Cornwall, so the couple understood that farming was hard when they started Republic of Vermont in 2015 as a backyard maple hobby. Indeed, they encountered the same challenges as many of the state’s small agricultural operations.
At the beginning, Seiler, 37, worked in grant management for the State of Vermont. West, 38, was in the music industry, touring and running a recording studio. Before long, they quit their day jobs to go all in on sugaring and beekeeping, learning the latter as apprentices with local beekeepers. As West explained their decision, “We wanted to change our lives before we had kids, before it was too late and the walls closed in on us.”
Over the first seven years, they grew maple production to 7,000 taps on their 70 acres and several leased properties nearby; the apiary reached 100 colonies of bees. But even at that scale — and successfully selling out of a couple thousand gallons of syrup per year — it’s hard to make money, West said. Sugaring is expensive, and the investment required to be profitable would have involved “a huge amount of debt.”
They’d looked at the numbers they needed to hit, with guidance from University of Vermont maple business expert Mark Cannella. They weren’t anywhere close to a scale that would make economic sense, Seiler said, and the goalposts were moving.
When Republic of Vermont started, the sweet spot for commercial maple producers was around 10,000 taps. Today, it’s more like 25,000, West said.
According to a recent study from the University of Vermont’s Maple Sustainability Indicators Initiative, only 25 percent of maple business owners reported their economic status as “economically viable.” Of the rest, 15 percent were considered “vulnerable” and facing economic instability. Sixty percent were “sustainable,” though those operations may “lack sufficient probability, growth potential or long-term financial resilience,” the report said.
West and Seiler had seen industry friends throw in the towel and didn’t want to do the same. Instead, at the end of 2023, the couple decided to focus on the business side of their business — its branding and marketing — while buying maple and honey from other Vermont farms to meet their existing demand.
That decision enabled them to grow their biz and flex creative skills not often associated with the daily labors of farming in Vermont.
“We get to be small, organic farmers and raise our kids on the land but in a more thoughtful, business-centric way,” Seiler said. The fact that the family’s livelihood doesn’t hinge only on what they’re producing themselves has taken some pressure off, she added: “Not spending our days panicking about a frozen pipe gives us the bandwidth to ask bigger questions.”
We get to be small, organic farmers and raise our kids on the land but in a more thoughtful, business-centric way.
Annina Seiler
Business advice from the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board’s Farm & Forest Viability Program has been “game-changing,” West said. It’s helped him and Seiler professionalize aspects of the business such as inventory systems and sourcing guidelines.
Through the program, Center for an Agricultural Economy farm and food business specialist Daniel Keeney has “ridden shotgun” with Seiler and West since fall 2024, Keeney said. He’s helped them navigate “the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns” of their new model.
“They have really amazing skill sets in making value-added products,” Keeney said, “but also, they’re artists.”
West and Seiler sometimes share photos of themselves bottling in the sugarhouse or out in the woods on a snowmobile with Republic of Vermont’s nearly 11,000 Instagram followers. But the company’s feed is dominated by local models frolicking in knee-deep snow or horizontal on a couch in front of a panoramic mountain view — maple bottle present but not the point. On its website, candles gently flicker and professionally shot products pop against bright backgrounds. One aspirationally large stack of pancakes dares you not to add more syrup. In a very Gen Z design move, all the text is lowercase.
High-level visual and marketing know-how isn’t a typical farming skill, Keeney said. Republic of Vermont’s out-of-state customers with disposable income both demand and appreciate those elements. By implementing them in a range of appealing goods, the maple farmers ended up tapping into affluent markets.
‘It Comes From Trees’
Within Vermont, the notion of a business sourcing and selling someone else’s maple syrup instead of making its own can feel, appropriately, sticky. “Like a sin, almost,” West said. “But there’s not just one model.”
While maple and honey still account for more than half of its revenue, Republic of Vermont now sources 75 percent of what it sells from other farmers. The maple it buys is all organic and produced in Vermont, and the honey — from the Champlain Valley — is raw and minimally treated.
The company’s maple lineup is simple, even old-school. Year-round, it’s 16-ounce bottles of amber or dark and 2-ounce minis to carry with you for emergencies, like finding yourself in a diner that only serves the fake stuff. During the holiday season, the rum barrel-aged solstice maple hits the online shop.
The couple’s experience as beekeepers and sugar makers has helped as they’ve navigated the switch to purchasing from others, West said. Trust is paramount in those relationships — ones they forged over the years at Northeastern Organic Farming Association conferences and Vermont Beekeepers Association annual meetings.
Showing up at those events as a buyer as well as a producer “is a very different vibe for me,” West said with a laugh. “Maybe no one else cares. But I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m on the dark side.’”
Vermont Beekeepers Association president Bianca Braman said she’s happy to supply honey from Vermont Bees, the Swanton business she co-owns with her partner, Adam Foster Collins, and his dad, Bruce Collins. Vermont Bees retails about half of its raw honey in three sizes of mason jars, Braman said. It wholesales the rest to Republic of Vermont and other well-known customers, such as Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier, Honey Road restaurant in Burlington and Stone Corral Brewery in Richmond.
Vermont Bees’ prices top the average of $3.50 to $6.50 per pound for Vermont-produced bulk honey, Braman said, which often deters other beekeepers from buying it. But Republic of Vermont started sourcing it a couple of years ago.
“We were uncertain how we felt about other people bottling and selling our honey, because we do have a store presence and we love our label,” Braman said. When she and her partners recently considered supplying another major account, they instead called West and Seiler to see if the couple wanted to buy more.
“They’re just so honest and straightforward,” Braman said, “and it’s a nice partnership to be able to support two families that way.”
Now, Vermont Bees delivers buckets of honey 1,000 to 2,000 pounds at a time to Goshen, where Seiler and West process and bottle it.
Vermont Bees has between 450 and 500 colonies in Milton, Westford, Georgia and across the lake in the Chazy area of New York. Crops from the two states are kept separate and sold within their respective states so it’s clear where the honey comes from.
“There’s a lot of honey being sold under Vermont labels that isn’t from Vermont, and it’s a difficult thing to navigate,” Braman said. With Republic of Vermont’s approach, she added, “hopefully people tasting our honey will know, ‘Oh, this is what Vermont honey tastes like.’”
That said, there’s no way to tell whether the contents of a Republic of Vermont bottle come from the 2,000 taps and a few bee yards at its Goshen HQ or one of the handful of farms with whom Seiler and West work.
“People in LA care about the quality and the story,” West said. “They don’t necessarily care that I was hunkered over the evaporator.”
Barrels of syrup are never blended, he said, to preserve each one’s unique character. But that’s not explained on the label. Outside of Vermont, Seiler added, “We’re just trying to educate the consumer that it comes from trees and is made in the spring.”
The couple landed the Erewhon account, which makes up 7 percent of their revenue, with a cold email. They have purposely avoided other large retailers, who would expect them to accept lower margins and pay fees to guarantee shelf space. In addition to supplying Erewhon, they self-distribute to hundreds of stores, mailing carefully packed boxes straight from Goshen. Republic of Vermont is pretty big in Oklahoma City, thanks to a longtime relationship with a co-op there. Locally, it’s stocked at Healthy Living and Common Deer in Chittenden County, the Stone Mill in Middlebury, and Retreat Farm in Brattleboro.
About 50 percent of Republic of Vermont’s sales are direct-to-consumer through the company’s website, and 40 percent are wholesale. Customers who make the trek to the small shop at the Goshen sugarhouse comprise the remaining 10 percent.
Revenue grew 20 percent last year, with 60 percent of customers coming back to order again. So far this year, business has grown at the same rate. West and Seiler hope that will continue, but they shy away from a “‘Shark Tank’-style, growing-or-dying” mentality, West said. Soon, they’d like to hire an employee.
When they started — with a self-admitted “shaky business plan” — they chose the name Republic of Vermont to give themselves flexibility if the sugaring thing didn’t work out.
“It wasn’t Ethan’s Sugar House or Goshen Sugarworks,” West said. “We could fall back on selling cookies.”
Now, the name’s breadth feels intentional.
Even the direct-to-consumer packaging feeds the narrative of wholesome Vermont. An online customer review of Republic of Vermont honey notes East Hardwick’s Sylvacurl wood shavings, used to protect jars during shipping. The fluffy curls in each box don’t look all that different from shavings piled on the snow after tapping a tree. As the reviewer writes, it “just kind of takes you to VT for a quick second.”
Brand New
In his 1760s poem “To Rutland Go,” Thomas Rowley spun an idyllic image to entice settlers living across the border in New York: “Here you good land may have, / But come and see. / The soil is deep and good, / Here in this pleasant wood; / Where you may raise your food, / And happy be.”
The state’s modern marketing also began with “agrarian authenticity,” according to Spear at the Chamber of Commerce: “maple and dairy and small farms and trust rooted in the land.”
“We’re a very small state,” Spear continued, “but in the marketplace, we operate with a much larger footprint because of the trust associated with the name.”
That trust helped food brands such as Cabot Creamery, Ben & Jerry’s, and King Arthur Baking explode in the 1990s and early 2000s. Their nationwide success, in turn, made Vermont “synonymous with quality and artisanship,” Spear said.
The 2006 implementation of the “Representations of Vermont Origin” rule protected the state’s brand even further. For a company to capitalize on all the good things “Vermont” could convey on its label, 75 percent of a product’s ingredients would need to come from the state, or it would need to be “substantially manufactured” within its borders. That regulation eventually led Cabot to remove “Vermont” from many of its labels, but the association had already worked its magic.
“Few places have managed to scale their identity without hollowing it out,” Spear said. As the Vermont brand has evolved, the changes have been “additive rather than extractive.”
Values-driven outdoor and natural product companies such as Darn Tough and Seventh Generation helped expand the state’s reputation beyond food and, in turn, emphasized that “Vermont” can represent environmental stewardship and community focus. The state has a bevy of B Corps, the independent certification that marks a biz as “mission-driven,” balancing purpose and profit.
Today, the agrarian image, elevated craft and small-scale, sustainable sourcing come together in businesses such as Skida, Ursa Major and Vermont Glove — all “lifestyle brands,” to use the cringey term. Skida, the Burlington biz known for its playfully patterned winter hats, touts its rural Northeast Kingdom production and minimal waste. Ursa Major’s sleek website boasts that the Waterbury skin-care brand is “forest-powered,” and Vermont Glove of Randolph proclaims: “We value social and environmental sustainability as much as we value hard work.”
Republic of Vermont is right on trend: agricultural with modern design, organic or minimally treated, small production, no plastic, no synthetic fragrance.
Its bobolink magnets ($8) and knit beanies ($38) bedecked with beavers, chickadees and owls have an inherent Vermontiness, if one that’s more subtle than the old standbys of covered bridges and cow print.
When Janine Awan was stocking the shelves of her new Los Angeles shop in 2024, she was looking for “products from small brands that are unique, sustainable, well-designed and just really good,” she told Seven Days in an email. A sous chef friend who had discovered Republic of Vermont’s maple syrup in Austin, Texas, suggested Awan give it a try.
Her store Woodcat Provisions has carried the sophisticated syrup bottles ever since, and Republic of Vermont’s maple is the key ingredient in the seasonal Dark Maple Latte at Woodcat Coffee and Dinosaur Coffee, two other shops Awan co-owns.
“Because Vermont is known for their maple syrup, people automatically know it’s going to be top quality,” she wrote. The “eye-catching and very cute” label has “clear messaging,” she continued. And, in sunny Southern California, the syrup “isn’t a product people can find everywhere.”
Deep Roots
Knowing that customers across the country are falling for Republic of Vermont products and, in the process, forming — or reinforcing — positive associations with the state is gratifying for the company’s founders. “Our love for Vermont is why we’re here, why we’re doing this,” West said.
They take inspiration from previous waves of artists and creatives who came to the state, Seiler said, from Norman Rockwell to the back-to-the-landers to pandemic transplants. Many in that last group, by the way, are their target demographic.
While Republic of Vermont’s web design skews Gen Z, the company’s customer base slants toward women and includes a good number of baby boomers, who tend to have more disposable income than other age groups. But its shoppers are predominantly millennials, West reported.
“It’s kind of our peers,” he said. “Which is pretty cool.”
West and Seiler are Republic of Vermont’s only employees. A corporate personality test helped them recognize that they have very different work styles. “I’m the creative tornado,” West said. “She’s the oak tree that stabilizes everything.” Channeling West’s “caffeinated explosion” of ideas into a weekly meeting, where Seiler can prepare and assess, has helped their marriage and parenting, too.
Not every product has been a hit. They loved their tangy cultured maple syrup and honey, which they fermented with SCOBY, the microorganism-rich starter responsible for kombucha. The products took years to perfect, expensive equipment and tons of labor. But customers didn’t really get it. If another business wanted to make a go of it, the couple said they’d share the recipe.
Neither Seiler nor West is a formally trained designer, but they do all of their own labels. At first it was out of necessity, using a bootleg design program, since they couldn’t afford to hire someone. Now their well-developed woodsy aesthetic has spread to merch, including those beaver and loon hats screen-printed and embroidered in Vermont — but made in Asia, as is the industry norm. This fall, they’ll release their first collection of American-made hats and sweatshirts, produced in Vermont and Los Angeles to lessen the line’s environmental impact and ensure workers are fairly compensated, West said.
“Design-wise, we realized we had way more to say than just slapping our logo on a T-shirt,” Seiler said. They draw from Vermont’s natural beauty but also play with the state’s contradictions: a rural place with progressive politics shaped by waves of migration. “We all know how great and weird and singular this place is, and we’re trying to channel that into everything we make.”
That sensibility extends to all of Republic of Vermont’s products, whether pantry items, soaps, scents or gifts. Many involve local partnerships, including with Middlebury’s Vermont Soap and, for custom wooden toy trucks ($30), Maple Landmark.
The candles started as a way to use beeswax left at the end of processing honey. Thanks to Seiler’s skill at scent formulation, people around the country now head to Republic of Vermont’s website for them specifically, rather than as an add-on to maple syrup, Seiler said.
One that sells well locally is a collaboration candle with Haymaker Bun of Middlebury and Burlington. Owner Caroline Corrente has worked with Republic of Vermont’s maple since starting her bakery in 2017. Last year they teamed up for the Bunshine candle ($34), whose aroma of vanilla, cinnamon and cardamom seems straight out of Haymaker’s oven. (But don’t eat it.)
“Ethan and Annina do such a lovely job of creating these really high-quality, beautiful products that are so Vermont in essence,” Corrente said. “There’s a wholesome, bucolic nostalgia that comes with that, and people really respond to it.”
As Corrente expands Haymaker’s wholesale product line, Republic of Vermont’s out-of-state focus has been good inspiration.
“Vermont is really small,” she said. “For people that have big dreams, you eventually outgrow it.”
In return, Seiler and West have been picking Corrente’s brain about what it’s like to run a brick-and-mortar business in their hometown. The couple have spent the past year and a half planning for an eventual retail shop on Middlebury’s Main Street. They’re still waiting for the right location, but when they find it, it’ll give them an in-state presence they’ve never really had.
Their vision for the shop — with coffee, seating and maybe a music series — draws from another of the state’s icons: the general store. Like West and Seiler, Vermonters might roll their eyes at a “lifestyle brand,” but a general store is something everyone can get behind. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “A New Republic | From Goshen to Erewhon, a maple and honey biz bottles and sells Vermont”
Related
This article appears in March 11 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!