PSA - Washing hands with Alton Brown

And - WHY!


See?  Soap - good old soap is the answer!  And handmade is even moisturizing!

Spruce Soap

We've actually had our Spruce Soap available for over a year, but I'm just getting around to telling you about it!

We had a local company ask us to make their corporate gifts for Christmas 2018.  They are a landscaping firm and liked the idea of fresh scents - especially scents related to their business.  We had this spruce scent and along with a few of our other regular soaps,  it worked for them. We made a creamy bar of soap with a deep green marbling through it and couldn't resist adding it to our line up!

Living on a Christmas tree farm ourselves, we loved it too.  It is so clean, fresh and woodsy, and it makes the bathroom smell like the great outdoors.  In fact, if you close your eyes, it's like taking a shower in an evergreen forest, minus the bugs.

Updates

I have been so remiss in maintaining this blog! I happened to stop by yesterday and thought I better let you know what's been happening.  I'll be posting frequently for a while to bring things up to date.

In the past year or so, we have made a number of changes...  We have added color to our labels and streamlined our line of soaps. You can see them all right here:

All our soaps are available on our website. 

Although our main business is wholesale, we have made our website retail friendly for the many people who visit our county and want to purchase our products when they return home.

If you are a wholesale buyer, please contact us for codes and other information.

See you again, soon!

Big Changes

It seems like there are lots of changes in the air around here.  As I reported, earlier this year, we worked on changing our labels.

The biggest change to our product is happening right now though.

Over the years, Palm oil has become more and more controversial as its demand has caused deforestation which endangered and destroyed the habitats of many creatures (in particular, orangutans) while contributing to climate change.  We really do not want to encourage, even on our small part, these unethical practices and we hear from many of our customers that they don't either.  We have attempted to acquire sustainably harvested palm, but find it not only difficult to find, but hard to validate.

As a result, for some time, we have been experimenting and researching, trying to figure out how to change our soap formulation to keep the quality the same while removing palm oil from our recipe.

At the beginning of the month, we started making our soaps with rice bran oil replacing the palm. Because palm added to the hardness of the bar, we also added a small amount of sodium lactate to each batch which helps to harden soap.

You will probably not notice any difference in your soap except in the list of contents on the label, but we will all feel better about making and using our soaps.

New Soap Labels

We were working on new labeling since the end of last year when we found that we could no longer purchase the paper we always used for the "cigar band" labels for our soap.  We have always liked the idea of a stick on label that would allow buyers to actually see the soap because while all of our soaps are beautiful, some seem to almost be miniature works of art. This gave us the opportunity to make some changes.

We tried a couple of things, but finally found a size and color that worked for us - the result looks very similar to our old labels:

Until you realize there is no label on the back or one of the sides:

All the pertinent - and required information is still readily available on one side, but the colors and designs of the soap are fully visible, and as always, it is easy to smell the scent of the soap through the stretch wrap.

We are pretty happy with this new label.

We hope you will like it too.

Kutztown Folk Festival - Podcast!

In early July, I was a vendor at the Kutztown Folk Festival in Kutztown, PA.  It is a great celebration of traditional PA "Dutch" foods and crafts.

The festival lasts 9 days and there were many high points, but one was meeting Phoebe from Phoebe's Pure Foods and making a podcast with her.  We talked abut soap and some of our other products.

You might want to give it a listen:

Phoebe's Pure Food - Podcast

Making Soap - Slideshow

In case you are curious, here's a little slideshow to show how we make our REAL soap:

We make "cold process" soap, from scratch. Each soap has the same base. Additives are what make each variety special.