August 10, 2015 Danielle Vincent

How to help!

THANK GOD FOR FRIENDS AND FAMILY AND ENTHUSIASTIC CUSTOMERS (and especially specifically thank you, friends, family, and enthusiastic customers)

Without y'all, we wouldn't be here, period. And the reason is because you (be you customer, friend, family, or all three) are so passionate about helping us... whether that's going to your local stores and asking for our products or reposting your favorite products to your friends.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, "Hey! Can I come by and help you, you know, cut soap and fill orders and stuff?"

Another very frequently asked question is, "When are you going to hire someone?"

As Kenna so perfectly pointed out in her most recent blog post "What you need to know before you start a (handmade) soap business," having a handmade soap business is less about what happens to the soap, whether that's making, cutting, wrapping, etc, than it is about what I'm doing right now: writing.

Truth be told, having a soap business (and probably any business) is about 20% physical work and 80% sitting at a laptop and answering emails, reaching out to press, writing blog entries, categorizing expenses, forecasting future batches, reaching out to potential customers, following up with existing customers, making newsletters, researching new products, and doing the marketing across all our platforms.

I could do most of this stuff from a bar with free WiFi.

Side note: why am I not doing most of this stuff from a bar?

If I had unlimited money, I'd hire a couple agencies to do marketing and PR, since it's brutal.

So if you want to help...

Please write some positive reviews of our products on Amazon.

Go "like" us on Facebook and share our posts (preferably with a comment to boost the signal).

Follow us on Twitter and engage with us over there. I'm not very good at Twitter (IMO), so it really helps to have people engage with me. Otherwise, I don't know what to say.

Follow us on Pinterest and re-pin our pins.

And if you want to help in the shop...

Soapmaking isn't easy. It's hella dangerous, since it involves very caustic chemicals. It also requires a lot of concentration and many of the fragrances we use make the timing of the soap really tricky (most soapmakers stay away from our trickier fragrance combos, which is great from a market-corner perspective, but makes the batches challenging).

So we can't accept help with soapmaking.

But we can and do accept help with scoring the bacon and packaging the soaps. For the most part, we do this in massive batches so we can get it all out of the way at one time.

If you want to come help in the shop, drop me a line and I'll let you know what our schedule is. Fair warning: we don't actually have one for the Christmas season since we haven't gotten in the orders yet, but there will probably be a week or so of pretty intensive packaging in late September.