This Is My Morning: Trinity Mouzon Wofford, Golde Turmeric
Trinity Mouzon Wofford makes her own mornings. Earlier this year, Wofford and her partner Issey Kobori moved from East Williamsburg to their shared hometown in upstate New York. Their goal: to escape NYC rent prices and focus on building Golde, a wellness company that sells turmeric blends for teas, lattes, and golden milk. As a small business owner, Wofford controls her own schedule. Each day is balancing act, packed with tasks like taste testing new product blends, running social media, and shipping out orders—fueled by plenty of turmeric, of course. Amid the frenzy, she makes time for self-care with afternoons spent at the apple orchard and the naturally minded beauty routine of our dreams. Below, Wofford tells us how she blends together her day.
—Aliza Abarbanel
1/5Self-Care and a Shower
When I wake up, I grab my phone to check emails and Golde’s social media to get a sense of what the pulse of the business is for that particular day. From there I’ll get out of bed and do some quick stretching to collect my thoughts. Then, I shower and get ready for the day.
My routine is definitely a mixture of high/low. I use Dr. Wood's Liquid Black Soap as a face and body wash. After that, I follow with my favorite Drunk Elephant products, the B-Hydra serum mixed with the C-Firma serum, followed by their Marula Oil. Then I seal it all in with a dab of raw shea butter. You have to get the unprocessed kind that comes in a yellow tub. I usually buy mine from one of the street vendors in Union Square. That leaves me somewhere between glowy and greasy, depending on who you ask. For hair, I try to keep it simple—not easy with an afro. I'll do a treatment mask once a week with bentonite clay, apple cider vinegar, and grapeseed oil. I apply that all over my damp hair and let it sit while I shower and then rinse it out. It's so messy, but worth the trouble. My curls come out perfectly defined and soft, so I don't use shampoo or conditioner after. I just apply gobs of Eden Body Works Coconut Styling Elixir and let it air dry.
Photo by Issey Kobori2/5Morning Turmeric Tonic
After my shower, I go and heat up water for my morning cup of Golde tea, which I sip while doing work. We just started partnering with this great collective, Diaspora Co., for our turmeric. They're a woman of color-owned organization that's centered in social justice through food. They just launched a direct-trade turmeric powder that has twice the curcumin load of most turmeric, and actually pays the farmers a fair wage. The flavor/quality is unreal—another world from the stuff that sits on grocery shelves for years.
I add two teaspoons of our blend to hot water with a teaspoon of raw honey. Raw honey has become sort of an obsession at this point because it tastes so much better to me and also has been really helpful for my immune system.
Photo by Issey Kobori3/5Meeting Over Miso Soup
Around this time, Issey wakes up and gets into his side of work, which is the creative stuff like photography and product design. We’ll take a little breakfast meeting break to go over what we’re each working on for the day and obviously eat. Usually I do either just sourdough toast with almond butter or sometimes I add raw honey. Issey is Japanese and lately he’s gotten me really into doing miso soup in the morning. We’ve gotten all these sort of different types of seaweeds so I throw in kelp and kombu and a bunch of other ones, all with different mineral contents and wellness properties.
Photo by Issey Kobori4/5Shipping Out Orders
After breakfast, it’s time for us to ship out all our orders. We still go to the trouble of dropping them off at the post office everyday instead of scheduling someone to come and pick them up—I think I’m still in the mindset of being really, really, really tiny. We go into town every day and drop off huge armloads of packages, and usually after we drop stuff off we’ll grab some lunch from Four Seasons, which is the O.G. health food store in the area. Then we finish up work for the day.
Photo by Issey Kobori5/5Afternoon Apple Orchard Excursion
Every once in a while, we’ll stop by our friends’ apple orchard—very upstate lifestyle, I know. Our friends own Saratoga Apple, which is the destination for the area. We'll go there to grab some apples, but they have really great cider donuts which I usually can’t resist either. I just tried a new apple, Zestar, which is what we'll usually go for, but we also ask our friends what's good right now. We’ll just have those as snacks or sometimes I’ll make a really, really good apple pie. My secret is a lot of butter and a lot of flour inside the filling, so it’s almost doughy on the inside too. It’s kind of indulgent but it’s really good.
