SudzBuzz

Have we been busy or what? Summertime is always busy for us, and this year is no exception.

We’ve been attempting to keep up with soap production, with mixed success. We sell our soaps at the Fort Atkinson Farm Market in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Seems like every week we have sold out of one or more soaps varieties, and have to add that one to the never-ending list of soaps to make. We’ve become more efficient in our process, so we make more soap in each batch, and we still sell out. We feel fantastic about this, because it’s very gratifying when our customers tell us that the soap helps their skin feel good.

We have been working very hard at formulating new and attractive scents solely from natural essential oils. Our latest successes with that has yielded a new favorite–Samba. A captivating blend which includes ginger and cilantro (who would have thought?), Samba lights up customers’ faces when they smell it. We also created Northwoods, combining the best our northern forests have to offer, with cedar, spruce, and birch.

Our volume of sales now allows us to purchase our base oils in larger quantity, which saves us some money. We will be passing on this savings to customers  in our unscented soaps:  Just Suds, Unscented Fine Oatmeal, and Sylky.

Sadly, one of our suppliers of fragrance oils, Southern Soapers, is going out of business. They carry a line of phthalate-free fragrances that we haven’t found other places so far, and we will have to keep looking to replace them. Southern Soapers has fantastic customer service, a huge variety of fragrances at reasonable prices, and we will miss them a lot. We wish Kelly Bloom (the owner), and her staff, the very best.

I shop most of the year for new scents for our soap, but at this time of the year, I have money to spend moreso than usual. I get to be just a little more free with the greenbacks, and I love it. 

Shopping for soap scents offers even more excitement for me than pouring over gardening catalogs, though that’s pretty cool too. Eventually those loose their appeal and I actually go outside and dig in the dirt. With soap scent shopping, I search with not just the scents themselves in mind, but also how I might combine the various aromas…

As I consider each oil, I refer to different websites on aromatherapy and perfumery, men’s and women’s. I’ve also done some reading on the human brain and olfactory centers and scent psychology and scent memory evocation. I find the science behind these fields very interesting. 

Just as viewing a painting can cause someone to feel very strong emotions, the “painting” created by a perfume artist with specific combinations of scents can also evoke very strong emotions. I enjoy making these kinds of special blends and adding them to the soothing blends of base oils we use for our soaps to make a luxurious combination of tantalizing aroma and silky-smooth skin.  

So, what have I dreamed up  this year?

The exotic wedding flower, stephanotis, will be part of our soap line  this year. It joins jasmine, lavender, lilac and rose in our floral line. I’m still shopping for different floral directions. 

I’ve found a more true tart green apple scent! I’m excited about this one–it’s not apple pie, not a baked apple, it’s a fresh, crunchy green apple! Same for our pear scent–just picked off the tree, nothing but pear.

We will be trying some patchouli blends. The specific patchouli oil does matter, as patchouli gets better with age after distilling. I’ll be blending with cassis, and lavender amongst other things.

We’ve had more than a few requests for eucalyptus blends, so I’ve found just the right oil for those…

And, we have upgraded and improved our soap base formulation to make it even more smoothing and softening to your skin, with richer and creamier lather. The bars will be harder and longer lasting as well. It was nice before, but sometimes I would try a different oil here or there, and found I liked some combinations better than others. I’ve always kept records of each batch of soap that I made, so when I was doing inventory at the end of the year, I took note of the higher qualities and which sold and which didn’t do as well. Our changes reflect my observations.

We’ve already started making soap for spring farm markets and our web stores, and those new batches will be ready around the beginning of April. Be sure to stop in and see what we have to offer!