I might be reading too many Inspirobot quotes, but this title made sense at the time.
Every year, we encounter some major stock shortage for Christmas. We're a very small company, and only one person (Russ) makes our soap, so it happens.
Over the past few years, this business has taught me that in every problem is the seed of a better solution... so now, after I spend a few minutes (or an hour) kicking rocks and swearing, I diligently turn around to try to find the seed of the better solution.
Eventually, I hope to get that time down to zero minutes, because the kicking and cursing serves no functional purpose, but we're all human.
Hair of the Dog is legendarily hairy (see my post on Hair of the Dog Whiskey Soap), and in the Christmas of 2014, we still hadn't beaten it into submission yet. We ran out early in the season, so our very popular Wild Life Soap Set was down a man (or a soap, as it were).
Having an incredibly popular soap set be sold out just because of one soap is really frustrating.
After a day of kicking and swearing, I took stock of our inventory and decided to try a different tack: We had plenty of Blazing Saddles (the sexiest soap ever) and Fire in the Hole Campfire Soap, so how about just selling those two soaps without the third. But the two soaps together didn't really do much for me. It needed something else to become a gift set, so we paired it with one of our wooden soap dishes, and the Rough Rider Western Soap Set was born.
Since then, it has become a staple on our own site and on Amazon, and we'll be creating special gift packaging for it (just like we did for our Wild Life Soap Set) if Whole Foods picks it up for their Christmas offerings.
How's that for a bright side?
