Lemon & Lavender

A block down Main Street in downtown Madison, Alabama, a storefront with a black and white awning houses North Alabama’s first refillery. Lemon & Lavender opened in 2021, founded by two local mothers, Shannon Fisher and Brandy Booth, who wanted to build a shop that left a lighter footprint for their own kids to inherit. The shop moved into its current Main Street spot in the fall of 2023, joining the wave of small businesses that have reshaped downtown Madison in recent years, and it has since become one of the more distinctive stops on the block precisely because so little of what it sells is meant to be thrown away after one use.

The centerpiece of the store is the Refillery, a wall of dispensers where customers bring their own containers and, in the shop’s own shorthand, shop by weight and pay by the ounce, for shampoo, body wash, laundry detergent, dish pods, natural cleaners, and other everyday essentials. For shoppers who do not already have containers on hand, the shop sells glass jars designed to be reused again and again, which keeps the barrier to entry low for anyone trying the concept for the first time and turns a single purchase into a container a customer can bring back on every future visit.

Beyond the refill wall, the shop organizes its retail floor into seven sections: self-care and luxury bath products, clothing and accessories, home goods, kitchen items, curated gift collections, baby and toddler products, and organic, natural pet products. Fisher and Booth describe their mission as offering a curated selection of eco-friendly products that let customers embrace a more sustainable lifestyle, one they say benefits both personal well-being and the health of the planet, and every decision, from ingredient sourcing to how an online order gets boxed up, gets filtered through that same lens. Part of that sourcing runs through a partnership with 1818 Farms, the Mooresville, Alabama grower and skincare producer, which stocks some of its shea and lavender based goods on Lemon & Lavender’s shelves alongside the shop’s own refill offerings. The store also ships orders using Shopify Planet’s carbon neutral shipping program, which the shop notes has already offset roughly 149 kilograms of shipping emissions, the equivalent of about 380 miles of gasoline powered driving, a small but concrete number that fits the shop’s broader pitch to shoppers trying to shrink their household’s environmental footprint one purchase at a time.

The shop has also grown into a gathering spot for hands on classes, hosting workshops on sourdough baking, candle pouring, and chunky blanket knitting alongside its regular retail hours, with additional seasonal workshops added around the holidays. Those events, along with the shop’s online store at lemonandlavendermadison.com and its active presence on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube, give Madison shoppers more than one way to interact with the business beyond a simple walk in visit, and workshop seats are typically bookable online ahead of time.

Free parking near the storefront and the shop’s central spot on Main Street make it easy to fold a stop at Lemon & Lavender into a broader downtown Madison outing, whether that means a quick refill run on the way to dinner or a longer visit to sit in on a workshop. Hours run daily, with the shop open until 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and closing a bit earlier on Sunday afternoons. For shoppers trying to cut down on single use plastic at home, it remains one of the few dedicated refill destinations in the area, let alone inside Madison city limits, and one of the few local shops built from the ground up around that single idea rather than adding a refill station as an afterthought to an existing gift shop.