Mountain Hideout natural handmade bar soap by Outlaw

We often hear how much people love our packaging (thankyaverymuch), so I wanted to step on the soap box to talk about... soap boxes!

Many years ago, we used to wrap soap in shrink wrap, and print our wrap labels on our inkjet printer.

Go ahead, try not to vomit:

blazing saddles western soap

(That one doesn't have the shrink wrap because it photographed so terribly, but you get the idea)

Unfortunately (or fortunately), it was very difficult to shrink wrap all the bars, and it really was not possible to shrink wrap thousands of bars per day.

You might also note that plastic shrink wrap was not biofriendly, but we were eco-sensitive even in those early days and used biofilm, which is made from some kind of biodegradable material.

As you can see, the logo was not the iconic POW-worthy logo of Outlaw today. We were so young. So naive.

After realizing that the shrink-and-inkjet method wasn't going to work forever, we reached out to our business card printer to see if he could do some custom packaging for us... and he COULD! So, we worked with Ron and David at Guided for several years.

The nice thing about the boxes is that not only are they made with recycled and recyclable chipboard, they also are a great travel soapholder and a good firestarter if you find yourself stranded in the forest with only your wits and a new bar of Outlaw to help you survive.

I literally can't imagine how a person would find themselves in that situation, but just in case, we really hope you consider burning our boxes.

Late last year, we received news that Guided closed their doors. It was sad, since our vendors become good friends over the years, and my mom and I had personally visited the guided factory several years ago.

But since good gamblers always have an ace up our sleeve, we followed up with another (local) box vendor who is delivering their FIRST EVER ORDER to our Sparks workshop tomorrow!

As I'm sure you've picked up by now, we really love working with every person along our product lifecycle, from the raw ingredients of oils to the folks who make our really cool recycled paper padding. Finding a new vendor is always a little scary, but we're excited to have this new vendor in the gang!

What do you think of the soap boxes?

 

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