Soapso

The concept

My friend and I had the idea to sell handmade, whimsical soaps. We wanted to make something that was joyful, personal, and right at the intersection of ridiculous and practical. So we started Soapso, an e-commerce and wholesale business making a line of fun soaps.

The process

My friend and co-founder had the soap-making experience, and I brought the design and web development background. We design all of the soaps ourselves, adding seasonal designs periodically and partnering with local businesses to design custom promotional soaps.

In addition to collaborating on all designs with my co-founder, I designed all of our packaging, developed our brand and marketing copy strategy, and built our online store. We had a ton of great designs, and we were really confident because we were getting great feedback about the quality of our products.

When we started Soapso, we imagined that almost all of our sales would come from e-commerce, and we naively thought we would get a lot of organic leads from the word of mouth from all of our future happy customers. Like I said, we were really confident. Things were much slower to catch on, so we focused on selling at in-person markets so we could understand what was working and what wasn’t. We quickly learned that the novelty of our product was actually hurting us. Even at in-person events, potential customers wouldn’t immediately know that what we were selling was soap. Some people thought they were magnets, tiles, or even candy! Our sales at in-person events increased dramatically by simply offering some very simple, small soap samples. By simply offering people “a free soap sample,” they got it. “Oh, it’s soap?! That’s amazing!”

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After that we focused more on in-person events as a marketing strategy, offering a promo code on the back of all of our free samples. We also started selling in more retail stores. And just recently, we started building a web application to allow customers to upload their own images or designs and order them as a pack of soap. With what we’ve learned from our in-person research, lessons from wholesale, and our new custom products, we’re ready to reinvest some of our profits in digital marketing and acquire new customers.

The result

Soapso has been a fun side hustle that became profitable and sustainable the very first year we started it. With the launch of our custom design app, we expect to acquire new customers looking for personalized gifts or promotional items.