How is your business doing? Would you be willing to share some advice for those looking to start a soap (or other craft) business?
So 2020 was... what it was. Between world events, my pregnancy, car crash, other personal expenses and death of my cat it has been a memorable year for assorted reasons.
It also forced a change on my lifestyle and how I manage both space and time, so there are definitely lessons learned. For one, I could not handle the soap fragrances when I was pregnant because it just set my nausea off something shocking, and then the fatigue later on meant I was not churning out 1 or 2 batches a week like I’d been able to at my peak, and now that I’m fairly well the time constraints of Baby mean I’m still not able to make soap as often as I used to. Firstly one, the fragrances are not good for her, and secondly she doesn’t allow a long enough block of uninterrupted time to make the bars before they set.
Making cold process soap takes a couple of hours from start to finish, including cleanup, and you can’t really stop after you’ve added the lye or it will thicken and set before you’re ready. And finding those chunks of uninterrupted time with Baby has been increasingly impossible, so I’ve had to branch out into similar projects that have different time requirements.
Namely, that has been lip balms and bath/shower bombs. Lip balms take much less time to make, and can be interrupted at any stage and gently re-melted, plus the suppliers are the same and some of the oils are the same. The colorants would be the same if I used them. Bath & Shower bombs use the same fragrances as soap, which is one of the more expensive ingredients, so I am expanding my range based on what I already have in stick. My ultimate plan was to have little gift bundles that included a soap, bath/shower bomb and lip lamp all in complementary flavors/fragrances. Bath and shower bombs don’t ship that well though, so there is my new problem.
So, the business is basically dead in the water unless I can find a regular chunk of time to have the baby minded somewhere away from where I make soap.
But from when I was still going, one of the biggest logistical issues was storage. The cold process soap takes 6 weeks to cure before it should be used, so I have to store it in such a manner that it can continue to dry for that time, and that turned out to be stacks of shelves all up the wall. You need less storage space for things that don’t take as long to make, but you still need to store them somewhere unless you only work on commission.
It’s also important to consider where you are going to sell your product. The pandemic meant I didn’t have the face-to-face markets that I enjoyed most, and frankly going to the post office was a bit of a pain with a newborn around so it became not really worth the effort to ship everything out. Selling niche and gimicky things works better with internet sales but the postage needs some consideration, especially with the exchange rates I was pricing fairly low.
I know it’s taken ages to reply to this, but please let me emphasize just how time-poor I’ve been.
