Wiepie (VEE-pee) is an old Dutch name, so old it’s hardly used in the Netherlands anymore. The full version is Wybrigje. The meaning: courage and bravery, used in the language of war.
The name suits Wiepie Cross, though you wouldn’t necessarily know that from talking to her. She is modest: warm, direct, and unhurried. But the story of how she got from cow country in East Texas to running a tallow skincare company in Waco – by way of Malaysia, Nepal, a thousand-acre West Texas ranch, four or five moves, a husband’s traumatic brain injury, and a community she spent years looking for – has required exactly that kind of nature.
Global Roots
Wiepie’s mother is Dutch, one of five siblings whose parents moved the whole family from the Netherlands to East Texas, having heard about the dairies there. (There’s still a tightly knit Dutch contingent in Sulphur Springs, where the dairies are now being crowded out by data centers.)
Her grandfather was in his fifties when he hauled the family across the ocean, having met only with a land agent before making the leap.
“That was a pretty bold move,” Wiepie says. “To start all over.”
Her grandmother had planned to make cheese, but American regulations proved too complicated. They sold the equipment and just milked. Her mother grew up hearing the bell of the cows in the dark before dawn, going out to bring them in, helping with the milking every day. Wiepie’s father also emigrated, arriving from Mexico at nineteen. Her parents were each navigating a new culture, a new language, a new country – and they did it with grit.
Wiepie thinks about that now that she’s a mother of three.
“How do you instill that when there aren’t necessarily hard times?” she says. “You don’t want to give your kids hard times intentionally. But how do you instill it when life looks a lot different than it did for them?”
Bad Medicine
Wiepie started college as a nursing major, already suspecting that health and food were intricately connected. Two years in, she hit pharmacology.
“I’d already seen how so many chronic issues were not benefiting from what medicine was offering. It was just pills, and patients weren’t actually getting better.”
She wasn’t dismissive of emergency medicine – “we have benefited from the emergency system multiple times” – but the chronic disease picture didn’t add up. The nutrition program wasn’t the answer either; it was still teaching the old USDA food pyramid.
“I was looking at people following that model, and it wasn’t helping them at all.”
She ended up in environmental science with a minor in public policy, starting a locavore club on campus where she hosted monthly dinners made entirely from local ingredients. Then a farmer named Joy came to teach a sauerkraut class, and Wiepie went home and opened Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions.
It all clicked. Wiepie started working at the farm.
“I lived off [their] raw milk and breakfast sausage,” she says. “It just changed everything.”
Joy also held a gardening class that semester. A tall cowboy named Cody walked in, a fifth-generation farmer who presided over thousands of acres of cotton and wheat.
Cody had recently begun to examine it all.
“He really had questions about who benefited from his food,” Wiepie says.
The two got to know each other. It was clear where things were headed.
So of course, Wiepie “flew off to Asia for a year.”
From Fulbright to Farm
Before meeting Cody, Wiepie had won a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in Malaysia. For a full year, she and Cody wrote letters – real ones, by hand. It was a real courtship.
At the end of it, he flew over and they did a motorcycle tour through Nepal, she on a purple bike, Cody on army green. He proposed on a mountain.
This time, Wiepie was ready; she knew Cody was The One, and that his farm was where they’d go.
“I was really bitten by the travel bug,” she recalls. “But I also really wanted to raise my kids on a farm. There’s a small season of your life when you can do that.”
They married, moved to the farm, and dove in: milk cow, milk goats, sheep, a huge garden, farmers markets.
“We didn’t have kids at the time, and we basically owned our place and our car,” Wiepie says. “It was an amazing way to start a life together.”
That’s also when she started reading about tallow in the Wise Traditions journal. She asked Cody’s parents for freezer fat and rendered it. It was trim fat, which she didn’t yet know was the wrong cut, and made a face cream with it.
She now acknowledges this was not the ideal order of operations. But the idea had taken hold; she had become determined to find something natural to put on her skin.
Wiepie had been working at Natural Grocers as a health coach; when not consulting clients, she’d be walking the beauty aisles, reading labels.
“There were often 25 to 50 ingredients. I’d think, That could not be how we did this ancestrally.”
In 2017 she found an article about tallow from a small company called Vintage Traditions. Almost nobody else was doing tallow skincare.
“I thought – this must be a need I could fill, even though nobody really knows they need it right now.”
Wiepie spent two full years testing every rendering method she could find, amounting to hundreds of hours. Again, she was determined.
“I was not going to accept any smell. I knew if people were going to put it on their face and really love it, there could be no [beef] smell.”
She wanted to keep everything as authentically ancestral as possible. She switched from essential oils to herb-infused oils: herbs from the garden, stuffed in a jar, covered with fat, would be far closer to what someone’s great-grandmother would have made.
Friends and family kept asking for more. She formed a company and called it Texas Tallow, set up a table at a local holiday fair still pregnant with her first daughter, and explained the concept to anyone who would listen.
“People thought it was an odd idea. But I explained how the fatty acid profile of tallow mimics the oil your own skin produces, and they got on board.”
Growing a Company While Growing a Life
The company has since moved through five relocations, a pandemic, and the year Cody had a traumatic brain injury.
“There were times I couldn’t have done it,” she says. “I had a new baby, another kid, and Cody was in the hospital.”
Her church community was especially helpful during the hardest times, and she’s very grateful for them.
The family recently moved to 100 acres outside Waco with a spring-fed pond. They’re diving in again: sheep, a milk cow shared with other families, a garden producing comfrey, lemon balm, plantain, and violet for the products. Between that and raising, educating, and feeding the kids as naturally as possible, Wiepie’s got her hands full.
(She’s thankful that Cody does all the rendering for Texas Tallow – “it’s my least favorite part,” she says.)
What Stays Small
Nutrition is big for Wiepie.
Family and faith and community are even bigger.
The business is big, too, but not to the detriment of the above. In fact, Cody asks Wiepie regularly: do you want to build this into an empire? Or hand it off, step back, just manage?
Neither. Whether it’s business or family, “I want my hands in it.” Which means keeping the business at a smaller scale.
A group of 4-H teachers visited the farm once, and every one sent a note afterward, thanking Wiepie for sending them home with something handmade: fresh lemonade, okra, pickled beets, a jar of tallow.
“How many companies can still do that?,” Wiepie ponders. “When you grow so big, you lose that. You can’t.”
The rendering stays in-house. The product line stays short. All packaging artwork is watercolored by friends – no AI images, ever.
“If I have a conviction about having truly clean skincare, then I’m not going to use AI images in my branding.”
Her four-year-old son peels the potatoes for dinner. Her daughter makes the sourdough tortillas. The starter (generations old) is still going. There’s time for schooling and snuggling the kids, and her customers – marveling that her simple-ingredient creams last for months without preservatives – keep coming back.
That feels like the right kind of evidence.
Find Wiepie and Texas Tallow at TexasTallow.com.
Note: Texas Tallow is not the same as Texas Tallow Products, which is not Wiepie’s company.
About Saturday Stories
Saturday Stories is a weekly series from the School of Traditional Skills, dedicated to the people in our community who are quietly building a more beautiful, intentional world.
Every Saturday, we highlight a different journey – from urban homesteaders and traditional craftsmen to neighborhood mentors – to show that a life of purpose and self-sufficiency isn't reserved for those with a hundred acres. It’s possible right where you are.
