Tutorials on soapmaking, bath fizzies, lotions and more
It was a nice surprise today to come into work and find that not only had our blog been unlocked (thanks Blogger for getting to me first thing Monday morning!), but we’ve been nominated for a Blogger’s Choice Award in the “Best Craft Blog” category. It’s exciting to be nominated. If you’d like to vote for us, here’s the URL to vote for The Soap Queen!
Lisa from Feto Soap (www.fetosoap.com) has created a lovely bar of Wild Sasparilla Shaving Soap.
Lisa says “This soap was born while being filmed on In Context – but it’s been in my head for months now.
Ingredients: water, palm oil, olive oil, coconut oil, castor oil, sodium hydroxide, stearic acid (from palm oil), fragrance and brown oxide.”
Kudos to Lisa for such a beautiful swirled batch!
I just got a huge order of Pich Posh goodies in the mail from their small store in Canada. The photos don’t show everything I got. I was having trouble staging the photos with all the products in the frame. My bad.
The order came quickly, was packed well and the presentation was excellent. Despite the international shipping, all of the products arrived intact.
This is what I ordered: 1 Bath Milkshake, 2 Cupcakes, 2 Bath Fizzies, 1 Solid Bath Melts, 4 Bath Frappes. Everything is brightly colored and attractively packaged. Despite the fact that it’s summer and there is no Air Conditioning at my house, I’m still excited to go home and take a hot bath, just for an excuse to use these bath delights!
Interesting aside: the founder of Pich Posh started the company a few years back to help pay off his student loans. His degree is in Film Studies and you can even find a few film reviews on their e-commerce site.
Garrett Pich has created a warm and friendly looking store, judging from the photos. Ff you can’t make it to his Canadian store (in Regina, Saskatchewan), be sure to check out their site and get your bath goodies through the Canadian Post.
Look for reviews of the products in the upcoming month.
Kudos to Bramble Berry customer Gigi from Under The Willow for being featured on the Martha Stewart Community Forums homepage! That’s a big coup and quite a cause for celebration! Woo-Hoo for Gigi for helping to raise the profile of handmade soap.
Writing a business plan is like flossing or forcing yourself to exercise daily. It’s good for you. You know it’s good for you. It’s just not very much fun and has no immediate pay off.
The banks like business plans. Investors demand business plans. Supportive families feel better when you have a business plan. But, writing them is painful, long, tedious and just plain good ol’ fashioned hard work.
In my experience, the first step to writing a business plan is summarize the business. What will you sell? How will you sell it? Who will you sell to? In essence, this is an elevator pitch so if someone doesn’t make it into the details, your first page will tell them most of what they need to know about your company. This is like a cover letter introducing your company so include details like start-up costs, why customers will buy from you, why they will pay what you are asking and what you expect your profit to be.
If the bank or the potential investor is interested in your company, they can turn the page for the micro details of your operation.
The page should look like this:
Name of company
Principals involved in company (names/titles)
2 to 3 paragraph summary of company, including general financials, market size, and business model including products/services being sold and customer demographics
The first page is meant to be short and sweet, similar to the hypothesis page for research studies.
Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for details on the rest of the business plan road-map.
This is one of the more um, realistic bars of soap that I’ve seen. The mold looks very intricate. Buy your own Boar at Hapaculture. It’s a reasonable buy at $7 for 6 oz.
Heather Bailey designed some very appealing fabrics that make me want to actually sew. I can knit and crochet but sewing has thus far eluded me. But, these little goodies would make such perfect aprons that I might just get inspired.
Norman, my COO in the photo below, says that the Soap Queen blog is getting too business based and that I should start blogging more on crafts. I promise, next week will be more crafty. I’m making some cool soap projects this weekend (frosted salty caramel ice cream bath cupcakes) and painting my stairwell pistaschio green and brown. So, next week will be all about both projects, I promise. By the way, that’s me and Norm, at the cockpit of a non-functional Fed Ex plane. He still is trying to look like he’s in charge (notice the hands on the steering wheel).
But in the meantime, ack! Did you see that our own Seattle brand, Jone’s Soda is being dumped by Starbucks, another local fave? The official word is that Jone’s Soda is being pulled because Starbucks needs to make more room for refrigerated food on their shelves.
But, when you dig a little deeper, Starbucks is not dumping Izze, the Jone’s competitor. Why not? After all, getting rid of a few Jones Soda bottles doesn’t make room for much more than one more lunch item But, dig down a little deeper and find that surprise, Izze is owned by Pepsi. And guess who sits on Starbucks board? A former Pepsi exec sits on Starbucks board. Additionally, Starbucks has a distribution agreement with Pepsi to distribute the pre-bottled Frappuccino bottles that you see in stores.
So, what does this mean to Jones Soda? With their much ballyhooed deal with Seahawks, they were riding the high buzz wave. And, Starbucks only makes up 1 to 3% of their total sales. But, Starbucks was a buzz builder, with lots of foot traffic. And what’s the instricic value of associating with a successful, do-gooder brand like Starbucks?
The analysts are wobbling a little with one saying that the major sell off after the Starbuck’s news makes Jone’s a good buy. At a 83 Price to Earnings Ratio, it’s an expensive buy. I’m still interested though. The management team appears strong, the company has been in business for 20 years and they have strong street cred, which has proven instrumental to bringing the tipping point of favorable consumer habits.
I tried out the myjones.com site and personalized Cream Soda and Blue Bubblegum soda. Those goodies should be coming next week. I’m excited to see how the photo and printing quality is.
Forbes.com did a great 3 part series on the CEO of Jones Soda. The term “series” is probably giving it more credit than it’s due. Each part is about 3 minutes, but it’s still a very informative 3 minutes. Check it out here.
I’m rooting for the local guy to make it past this setback. After all, who else has Turkey & Gravy soda flavor?
Sweet Theamakes some yummy looking chocolate specialty cakes. And they’re local from Vancouver, BC.
I just love the creativity that Sharon from Sparkle Cookie exhibits. You might remember that she made the adorable Sparkle Fluff that I blogged about in March.
She’s back with an even better idea. I can’t believe I’ve never seen this idea. It’s lotion bars in a cupcake sleeve. What a great idea! After all, lotion bars are meant to be used all over your body or in place of massage oil and this makes them easy to pour for the manufacturers and also very easy to use for the end consumers.
It’s a great idea. Thanks for sharing, Sharon!
I have a completely professional crush on the Pangea founder. Listen to a wonderful (long) interview with him at Organic Beauty Radio. For those of you that haven’t seen their wonderful soaps and lotions, Pangea makes organic (or as organic as you can get!) body care and skin care products. You can buy the entire product line on their site.
If you want to learn more about Pangea, there’s a great article here and here.
The highlights: he pays his employees a minimum of $12.50 per hour, has a vegetable garden at the warehouse so all his staff can eat organic veggies, and employs a cook to cook lunch for all the staff.
The downlights: Pangea has been open for five years and has only shown a profit for one of those years.
It’s hard to balance profitability and social responsibility but Joshua sounds like he’s well on his way to figuring it out.
All prints and art by Catherine Ledner and available for $1200 from Beholder-Art. You can even try them in your house for 7 days to make sure that having a giant chicken staring at you makes you happy. Amber at Bramble Berry is so enamoured with the squirrel that she’s made it her wallpaper on her dual monitors.
I was entirely enamoured with Blissful Bath’s soap and toiletry products before I even opened the box. They managed to completely enthrall and delight even before I opened the package. Why? As you can see from the photo above, Blissful Bath really knows how to wrap a package! The beautiful, classy box, complete with a Tiffany-colored ribbon caught my attention and set the stage for a well received product. I was already primed to love my Blissful Bath products, even before I took the ribbon off. Lesson one: Presentation Counts
Wen I opened the box, I found equally impressive products inside. The photo above demonstrates the branding that Blissful Bath goes through. Notice the similar font and color on all the products, except the specialty Happy Birthday Cake. Lesson two: If you have a brand strategy, work it!
I was a little surprised to see that there were no ingredients listings on any of the products. In terms of reselling the exquisite goodies in stores, ingredient listings are a must. I phoned and chatted with the store and the very friendly happy gal that answered the phone said that they wholesale to stores. So, I’m waiting for a phone call from Lee Anne, the owner, to just chat about how they’re getting around the ingredient listing thing. The ingredients are on the web site, easy to find, for anyone that is worried about allergies or just plain curious about formulations. Having just gone through a painful and long re-do on 156 labels that we’re working on (all because we forgot spaces for UPC codes – rookie mistake! duh!), I hope that Blissful Bath doesn’t end up redoing their labels at some point down the road.
So far, I’ve used the Butter Bath Bomb and the Shower Butter. I was delighted with the Butter Bath Bomb, finding it to be the perfect amount of moisturizing without leaving me or the tub sticky and oily. The scent was lovely and the bath fizzy lasted quite some time. I was pleasantly surprised when it kept fizzing and fizzing for several minutes!
The Shower Butter is a basic lotion bar with the instructions to rub on damp skin. I was pretty excited with this idea, imagining that Blissful Bath’s savvy creators had managed to put an emulsifier in the Shower Butter to make it turn into a lotion on my damp skin. Alas, the butter was not happy with the fact that I was still damp and just sort of scootched on my skin and beaded up in an unattractive manner. Sadly, oil and water still don’t mix. So, I toweled off and proceeded to rub myself all over with the Black Raspberry Martini and am now happily dry and moisturized and smellin’ fine.
I’ve left the best to last. These little happy confectionery creations are amazing little bubbles of joy and happiness. I am so bummed that I don’t have any friends with a birthday coming up! I want an excuse, any excuse, to give someone the adorable Happy Birthday Cake!
This clever little feat is done with: soluble dextrose, colorant and candy sprinkles.
I tasted the frosting and forced my younger brother at Otion, to do the same (much to his dismay and confusion) and the frosting tastes somewhat sweet. Since dextrose is a form of sugar, this makes complete sense. I am so impressed with the artistry and presentation of the little Cakes. The amount of work it would take to do this extra step is well worth the $5 for this mini-bomb, with the frosting, complete with the little flag.
Based on my very positive experience with Blissful Bath, I would highly recommend them for any gifts you need to give or for a little respite for yourself. Their products are crafted with care and the the packaging just puts the extra special touch on their goodies. If you’re in MN, you should stop by their store. I’m jealous. I wish I could. If you do, please be sure to take photos and let me know what you thought!
