PLACITAS -
     Joshua Peine ostensibly sells cloth bags filled with evergreen needles and bottles of cedar-scented lotions. But what he really sells is harder to define.
     It has something to do, he says, with memories and positive associations and even a bit of magic. "I think there's a subliminal message in everything," said Peine, who owns Clear Light The Cedar Co.
     Peine, whose name is pronounced, "pine," ships several tons a year of woodsy New Mexico scents to boutiques and mail-order catalogs all over the country.
     He feels cedar has mystical properties, understood for centuries by Indian people. Some customers are looking for that quality from The Land of Enchantment, Peine said, while others just like their closets to smell good. People have written him to say the scents remind them of their honeymoon, or of their grandmother's herbs. "There's nobody that doesn't ever have a pleasant evocative sense of evergreen," he said.
     Peine has turned that good feeling into a business that has about doubled every year for the past five. He expects sales this year to total $450,000, compared to $250,000 in 1986.
     With 16 employees, including 8 contract workers who do bagging and wrapping out of their homes, Clear Light is the largest employer in this unincorporated village on the slopes of the Sandia foothills. During the harvest, which takes place during the colder months, the company might employ as many as 25. "There's a tremendous amount of labor in this," Peine said. The first step, of course, is collecting the raw materials. Peine has agreements with people who own land here, allowing him to prune the tips off their trees.
     Placitas has fresh mountain air, but on the company's premises, the forest scents are concentrated and heady. Up to 15,000 pounds of boughs can be stored there at a time. One employee, who handles shipping and receiving in a room that smells like a sachet, said that by the end of the day she isn't really conscious of the fragrance. "When you're working here all day long with that, you get so used to it that it just blends in," she said. At home, she often runs hot water over some cedar needles so the scent will permeate the house.
     From pruning to shipping takes at least three months. The greenery is thoroughly dried in a shed equipped with solar collectors; then the needles have to be cleaned and graded. Two workers operate a machine that sifts the cedar needles over a metal screen. Dust and dirt fall through the holes; this will go into a mulch for the garden, and the workers remove any twigs or brown needles. This process is repeated several times. "The final product," Peine said, "actually comes out cleaner than the tea that you drink."
     Dried flower petals are mixed in with some batches of needles to make sachets. Peine sells the green needles separately too, and he even sells bags of "cedar blend," which include twigs and bits of bark, residue that normally would get thrown away. These "souvenirs of the forest" show up in fancy bowls in boutiques in New York and San Francisco. "In the cities where there are no trees and grass, people like to see anything natural," Peine explained.
     Clear Light products have been strong sellers at "A" and "SF," sister stores in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Mary Clark, bookkeeper at "A," said the two places sell about 50 pounds of the cedar blend every two or three months. "We cannot keep it in the store," she said. "In Santa Fe the product is a big tourist item, and sales boom in both locations around Christmas," she added.
     Peine moved to New Mexico in 1970 from Hollywood, where he had appeared in more than 100 television shows. In search of a different lifestyle, he traded Indian jewelry and moose hides and started Clear Light Trading Co. He learned about New Mexico cedars from Indian people and started selling sachets. In 1982 he changed the name of his business to The Cedar Company.
     Sandia cedars, which technically belong to the juniper family, are especially redolent, according to Peine. The quality of cedar needles depends on a range of factors, including the age of the trees, their exposure to the elements, and altitude.
     Peine markets his products as room fresheners, bath sponges, even decongestants. He sells sprays to spruce up closets, oils for perfumes, and a line of shampoos, lotions, and other cosmetic products.
     Peine developed the formulas for his skin-care products with a chemist friend, and they are manufactured off the premises. Although he swears by their quality, he avoids words such as "hypoallergenic." The labels just describe "walk-in-the-woods" feelings.
     Eighty percent of the company's sales are wholesale accounts with mail-order houses, including The Nature Company and Orvis. Peine has sales representatives in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.
     Later this year, Clear Light will break ground for new company headquarters on a 2-acre site in Placitas called Laughing Bear Ranch. Eroded patches of land will be excavated so the buildings will barely show on the horizon.
     These days, Peine is putting much of his energy into environmental causes. He wants to set aside part of the new location as a nature preserve. Business has been good enough that he "can afford to make little statements and support bears."
     That is not to say he will stop selling cedar; Peine plans especially to expand sales of his skin-care products. He has limited sales of the fragrant bags of needles to decidedly upscale places, to preserve the mystique and also to avoid overextending production capacity.
     Some people might call this good business. Peine calls it "good karma."