Hale Nalu Botanicals · Kaneohe, Hawaii
A Family Growing Something to Heal With
We’re Aaron and Joni, raising our sons on the windward side of O‘ahu — the same stretch of coastline where the Ko‘olau mountains catch the first light over Kaneohe Bay, and a honu will glide right past you in the shallows like you’ve known each other for years.
Hale Nalu Botanicals started the way most good things do around here: slowly, outdoors, and with a lot of trial and error at the kitchen counter. What began as small batches of salve for our own scraped knees and sun-dried hands turned into something we wanted to share with our neighbors — and now, with you.
Why botanicals
There’s something about working with your hands — melting beeswax, folding in island-grown herbs, dialing in a salve until it’s exactly right — that we’ve never gotten tired of. Hale Nalu Botanicals is that obsession turned into something real: salves, sticks, and creams made in small batches, the way we’d want to make them for our own family, because we do.
What else keeps us busy
Making salves is the main event, but it’s not the only thing growing around our house. Here’s what else takes up the garden, the kitchen, and most weekends:
🌿 Growing what we use
Most of our herbs start in our own backyard beds before they ever make it into a batch. If it’s a good growing season, you can usually tell by what’s steeping on the stove.
🧍 Small-batch mixing
Every salve, stick, and cream is still mixed and poured by hand, in small batches, so we can keep an eye on quality from the first melt to the last label.
🏖️ Time on the water
When we’re not in the kitchen, chances are we’re in Kaneohe Bay with the boys, which is usually where the best ideas for the next batch show up.
The crew
Hale Nalu means “house of waves” — fitting, since most of our family’s decisions get made somewhere between the shoreline and the kitchen table. Aaron, Joni, and our sons are behind every batch that goes out the door.
We built this around the things we already loved — good ingredients, the windward side, and a family that’s happiest with dirt under our nails.