Our Story

Kowboj is how my family spells cowboy. It is the Polish spelling, and it is pronounced the same way. That felt like the honest name for a brand made by a first-generation kid in New Jersey who grew up on Westerns and on his grandmother's opinion that whatever you put on your skin should be something you could, in an emergency, eat.

It started with a cracked lip and a long drive

Every winter it was the same thing. A stick of drugstore balm in every jacket, reapplied every half hour, and lips that were worse in February than they had been in December. At some point it stops reading as a moisturizer and starts reading as a subscription.

So I read the back of the tube. Petrolatum, a handful of oils, a flavor, a fragrance, and a preservative system to keep all of it stable on a shelf for three years. Nothing in there was feeding anything. It was a plastic wrap for your mouth.

Tallow was what people used before petroleum was cheap. It is rendered beef fat, and the reason it works is not romantic: its fatty acid profile happens to be close to the oil human skin already makes, so it goes in rather than sitting on top. Add beeswax so it holds its shape in a tube and holds moisture on your lips, and you are done. There is no third ingredient that makes it better. There are only third ingredients that make it cheaper or shelf-stable or flavored.

The first batch was made in a kitchen in New Jersey with a pot, a thermometer, and fifty tubes bought online. It is still made the same way, in a slightly better melter, fifty at a time, with the batch number and the pour date printed on every label so you know exactly how old the thing in your pocket is.

The scents are coming, and a whipped tallow cream after that. The label will stay short.

Jan Siembida
Founder, New Jersey