Great Customers

All too often I and the other soapers complain about bad customers. I just want to take a little time to tell you about a great customer experience that I just had. I opened up an email this morning from a customer (Mike) who was having trouble ordering my soap online. He said that he was getting an error message at the Paypal checkout and didn’t know if the order was processed. He wanted me to email or call his studio to work everything out.

Well the order did not go through so I figured I’d call and see what kind of soap he wanted. Before I did that though, I have to admit that I did a reverse phone search just to see who I was calling. You never know if it’s a scam or some type of gorilla marketing for a company that wants to sell you the next World’s Best Washcloth or soap dish made of rare earth magnets. Anyway, it all checked out and I saw that the studio he mentioned in his email was a photography studio. Of course, I googled the studio and found his site. I’ll have to say that the work that he does is absolutely beautiful. I enjoy digital photography on a minor scale and I’ve looked at a lot of different photographer’s sites, New Generation Studio is simply amazing. They do a great job at capturing emotion and personality in a still photograph and the site layout is simplistic and elegant. Awesome work!

So I called Mike and got his order. He said that he liked the photographs of my soap and the website overall. Coming from a professional photographer, I was surprised and very appreciative. He also said that the testimonials helped him decide what to buy.

Now, I have many thanks to distribute. First I want to thank Mike for the kind words, the soap order, and most of all for not just scrapping the order because it didn’t work the first time. It’s very easy to just move on to another site if the one you are on is not working. I’m guilty of it. I also want to thank the guys at Protocol 80 who did my site. Good work, it’s getting compliments. Finally I want to thank all the customers who took the time to write me a testimonial, it paid off and got me some business. Thank you all.

Hook, Line, and Sinker

A few weeks ago I was contacted through email by a woman who was interested in checking out some of my products. Her name is Carol and she told me that she owns a bait shop near Willow Bay Recreation Area. Well she came by Friday and ended up buying some Goat's Milk bars for her store and a few Natural Soaps for herself. She told me that she read the article in the local paper that I was featured in back in February and because I was so close, she had to stop by and try some of my soaps. She also said that she had the hardest time finding me because we are not listed in the phone book and every time she tried emailing me, all she was getting was an error message (my contact page is working fine, I just tested it). So now I have expanded my products to another shop (check out the map below). It's exciting to see this endeavor grow. I'm working on more accounts and when they come in, you'll read all about them right here.

Commission Job

A few weeks ago I was asked if I could make some soaps for a Ladies Luncheon our church was sponsoring titled Pearls of Great Wisdom. You guessed it, the soap has to be pearl or at least ocean related. I had a few ocean motif molds but they were kind of small, lucky for me though, I was given a mold by the hostess Beth.

The criteria for the soap were simple: 1. had to be purple 2. had to have a feminine fragrance. So I made up a few samples with differing floral and vanilla scents and also with varying shades of purple. There was one soap that ended up being not so perfect. The colored layer ended up breaking through the white layer causing the two to mix creating a mottled appearance. Figuring that they were samples and being short on time, I sent it along anyway. The mistake actually ended up winning. Beth decided she wanted the mottled soap with a Juniper Breeze fragrance and that she needed 30 of them for the weekend. The following are a few lessons I learned in the process.

1. Wear your respirator! No matter how much you like the fragrance or how subtle you think it smells, it can still give you a migraine after a day of smelling it.

2. Cap your fragrance after every use, spilled fragrance oil will contribute the previously mentioned condition.

3. Take good notes when making samples, it's hard to reproduce what you can't remember.

4. Placing an unbalanced mold in two drinking glasses solves your problem of slanted soaps.

5.Sometimes mistakes turn out to be alright. My high school art teacher used to call those "Happy Accidents"... or was the Bob Ross?

So on Sunday I saw a few of the ladies who attended the luncheon and they thanked me for the soap and loved how they turned out. It's always a good feeling to hear how much people like and appreciate your products. Beth had to actually bring a few bars to church for the ladies who didn't take them because they thought that the soaps were decorations not favors to be taken home. I'm taking that as a good sign.

Womanet Show

This weekend I did the Womanet Show that is sponsored by our local hospital. The attendance wasn't as high as I had anticipated, but I was definitely in my target market. I sold enough soap to pay for my spot, passed out cards, and networked with other vendors; so overall I consider it a success. I did learn the value of a "Seconds Basket" of soap ends and ugly bars. I've been reading on the soap forums for a while now how quickly other soapers sell out of their seconds and experienced it first hand this weekend. Although I did not sell out of them, I certainly do not have as many and I did last week.

One aspect of this show that I did not anticipate was being asked by the event coordinator for all the vendors to go and listen to their guest speaker. I'm not adversed to listening to speakers by any means, I just didn't think that "The Power of Girlfriends" was a talk that was pertinent to my current situation. I was 1 of 2 men in that room and I really didn't feel comfortable there. I didn't want to be the reason for some of the women to not cut loose, open up, or have silly fun with the other ladies for the fear of being judged by a man. I think if there is a next time, I'll just politely decline the offer to sit through the speaker and leave the women to their own devices.

"Baby" Soap

I finally got the Lavender Essential Oil yesterday which has been holding up the production. A lot of my friends have recently had kids or they are going to have one soon and questions about soap for their little ones have been coming in. My cousin asked about soap for her daughter last month after she read the list of chemicals, I mean ingredients, of a popular baby bath product line. She and a lot of her friends were concerned about what they were putting on the skin of their precious ones and wanted to go all natural. I sent her some 100% Olive Oil Soap to try, but told her that I'd make her some "baby" soap once I get all of the ingredients that I need. This soap will have higher percentages of Olive, Rice Bran, and Avocado Oil which should make a very gentle and moisturizing soap. So now that I have everything ready, it's off to the Soap Cave...

Soap Making 101

I’ve been asked quite frequently lately as to how I make soap. So I figured that I’d take some photos of the process and explain what’s going on. Let me first say that the process I use is the Cold Process (CP) as opposed to the Hot Process (HP) method of soap making. I’m not going to go into depth on the differences of the two methods. I will say this, CP takes place at cooler temperatures and takes longer for the soap to fully saponify. What is saponification you ask? The short answer; it is the reaction between the fats (vegetable oil) and the alkali (lye) which yields soap. The long answer can be found here, and here.

I start by preparing my lye-water. I mix distilled water and Sodium hydroxide in a large beaker (always add the Sodium hydroxide to the water, not the other way around). At this point the temperature of the water will spike above 160F/70C and will release hydrogen gas. It’s a good idea not to breathe these fumes and I forgot to mention earlier that gloves and glasses are a must for this part. I love using my magnetic stirring plate to help this part along. I just let it run and it does all the stirring for me while I go and prepare my oils.

To prepare my oils, I measure and mix a blend of Avocado, Coconut, Olive, Rice Bran and some other oils. Some of these oils are solid at room temperature, so everything must be heated until it blends together. Once everything blends, I take the pot off the burner and let it cool to the desired temperature I need to mix the lye-water and oils.

While I'm waiting for the lye-water and oils to cool, I usually prepare my soap mold and measure and pour my essential oils. The mold I use is one that I made from poplar and is simply lined with freezer paper. The essential oils will be added at trace and I'll need them on hand when that happens. What is trace you ask? It's the moment during the mixing and saponification process when the soap becomes thick enough to support traces of dribbled soap on the surface. If that doesn't make sense, click here. I add the essential oils at trace, because at that point most of the lye has reacted with the oils. If the essential oils were added earlier, they may actually react with the lye a become saponified and not add fragrance to my soap.


Once everything is set up and the temperatures of my lye-water and oils are at their approximate points, I'm ready to pour. I slowly pour the lye water into the soap pot while mixing with my stick blender. The oils will change color from a clear amber (on the left) to an opaque light cream (on the right) once the lye-water is added. I keep mixing until the soap looks uniform with no streaks of unmixed oils. At this point the soap is well into trace (remember from earlier) and it's time to add fragrance or any other additives. Once the fragrance is added and mixed some more, I pour everything into my soap mold that I prepared earlier. I then cover the mold with plastic wrap and put a towel on top to insulate the soap while it continues the saponification reaction. The soap will go through a gel phase where it will become heated from the chemical reaction. It will change colors and become jelly like, but it is nothing to be alarmed at, it is supposed to happen. It's all part of the CP method of making soap. If your soap is wrapped and insulated, you probably won't even know it's happening. The picture below is soap in the gel phase.






The next day the soap will be ready to cut. I just pull the soap out of the mold by the freezer paper and carefully peal the paper away. If you do it right you can get plenty of uses out of one sheet of freezer paper. I try to squeeze as many batches as I can from one liner. Lining my molds is actually another part of the soap making process that I hate. Now I used to use the ol' miter box as stated in my previous entry for cutting, but now it's smooth as silk cutting with the new soap cutter. That thing is money! Once everything is cut, I just stack the soap bars on my drying rack and in about 4 weeks the soap is ready to sell or use.

I hope that I answered some questions or at least enlightened you somewhat on the process of making hand-crafted soap. I'm sure I'll get some responses and comments on my procedures, but I posted this for general information and not as a tutorial. Hope you enjoyed it...

The Tin Ceiling Gift Shoppe

So I stopped by The Tin Ceiling Gift Shoppe today to see if my soap is on display. It is and here’s the photo of my first wholesale order. This display sits in the entry as soon as you walk in the door. It has wonderful placement, couldn’t ask for more, and there was actually a customer smelling them when we first walked in. It’s quite exciting to finally see my soap for sale in a store, time to get some more wholesale accounts.