The person behind the product
Jimenez Julien
Founder of HerbalCounter, publication director at MLJ, SASU, and the person who answers the email when a batch log does not behave.
Why I built a record system for herbal counters
I did not come to this trade through botany. I came to it through a filing problem. In 2021 I was writing small operational software for makers who sell what they produce, and a clinical herbalist in Vermont asked me a question I could not answer with anything on the market: if a supplier tells you a lot of dried root is bad, how do you find out which of your clients is holding a bottle made from it? She had a card box, three notebooks and a spreadsheet, and none of the three talked to the other two.
I spent the following eighteen months in shops. I weighed herbs badly, mislabeled a jar of mullein, and watched owners work with a level of precision that no inventory product I had ever seen respected. What struck me was that the knowledge was not missing. It was written down. It was written down in four different places, in a private shorthand, by a person who had no spare hour in the week to reconcile it. The problem was never discipline. It was that the tools on offer treated a custom formula like a product SKU and a maceration like a purchase order.
HerbalCounter came out of that. The core idea is small and stubborn: the formula record, the batch log and the ingredient lot are one continuous thing, and software should keep them joined rather than asking a person to rejoin them by memory. Everything else in the product is downstream of that decision. Reorder prompts exist because par levels only work if the system knows what a batch actually drew. Recall packets exist because the join is already there and printing it is trivial.
How I work with the shops that use it
I run monthly calls with a standing group of fourteen owners across nine states, and I spend at least two days a month physically behind a counter somewhere. That is not marketing theater. It is the only way I have found to catch the difference between what an owner says she needs and what her hands do at four in the afternoon with a client waiting. Almost every good feature in this product started as a small complaint someone made while doing something else.
I am also candid about what I will not build. HerbalCounter will not become a point of sale, will not give clinical advice, will not suggest formulas, and will not sell or analyze the formulas stored in it. Those are boundaries, not a roadmap gap. Herbalists own an intellectual craft, and a vendor sitting on top of their records has no business mining them.
Experience and expertise
- Fourteen years building operational software for small production businesses in the United States and Europe, the last five focused entirely on traceability and batch records.
- Field research across 40 apothecaries, clinical practices and small wellness manufacturers, including three multi day placements on production floors.
- Working literacy in United States dietary supplement recordkeeping expectations, and in the documentation that co ops, clinics and independent retailers request from small suppliers.
- Publication director for MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes HerbalCounter and answers for everything on this domain.
How this product is built and maintained
Product decisions are made in the open with the owner group before they are built, and anything that changes how a batch or a lot is recorded goes out with a written note explaining what changed and why. Data safety is not negotiable: records are encrypted in transit and at rest, stored in the United States, backed up nightly, and exportable in full at any time in formats you can read without us.
Every page of this site is written by hand and reviewed against the product before it ships. Statistics come from anonymized aggregate usage or from the quarterly owner calls, and if a number cannot be sourced it does not appear. Testimonials are published with the consent of the named person and are edited only for length. When something on the site turns out to be wrong, it is corrected rather than quietly deleted, and the correction date is visible.
Support is deliberately unglamorous. Email reaches a person, replies land within one business day, and the same person who writes the code reads the difficult tickets. There is no chatbot in the way.
Published articles
Everything I have written so far for The Formulation Bench, the HerbalCounter magazine for clinical herbalists and apothecary owners.
- How should I price a custom tincture formula when every client blend uses a different ingredient set?
- What does the FDA actually require on the label of a tincture I blend and sell myself?
- How do I set up lot tracking so I can trace one finished bottle back to its ingredient lots?
- Should I buy bulk herbs from a wholesaler or contract directly with a regional grower?
- What are the most common mistakes herbalists make when scaling a formula from one quart to five gallons?
- How did one small apothecary move from farmers market sales to a licensed production space?
- What should be on my checklist before I release a finished batch of salve to the shelf?
- Where is the herbal products business heading now that state practice laws keep shifting?
- What is it really like to run a retail apothecary and a clinical practice out of one room?
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com about the product, a partnership, a correction to this site, or a research request. If you run a shop and want an hour of my time to talk through your record keeping with no obligation, say so in the first line and I will make room for it.