- I am guessing that if you're here,
it's because you're considering starting
a home soap business and you're probably brimming
with clever and unique soap ideas
and can already picture yourself
placing beautifully-wrapped soaps into packages
for your new customers.
Along with that excitement though,
you might also feel a tiny little bit overwhelmed.
I get it, it's a lot to think about.
You might be wondering "what type of soap should I make?",
"is this even a proﬁtable business idea?",
and "how will I sell my soap?"
amongst many other questions I am sure.
Don't fret though.
That is how all business owners feel
when they are ﬁrst getting started, and that's why I'm here.
I'm going to help you sort out all those thoughts
and come up with a great plan
that will cover all the bases you need
in order to start a successful soap shop.
Let's dive in.
(bright music)
Bonjour, my name is Deb and I am the founder of Tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers and handmade shop owners,
just like your fabulous self.
You can learn more about our community, Tizzit HQ,
via the link below this video, but for now,
let's jump straight into today's conversation:
making and selling homemade soap.
Now, a quick but important note about this video.
I am about to cover a lot of ground
and the very last thing I want you to feel is,
"Oh, my God, there's so much to do!"
There is, but no one expects you
to get everything I am going to talk about in this video
done by the end of next week.
Phew!
This video is here to give you a step-by-step approach
and an overview of what you will need to get done,
but please remember that when you break it down
into small tasks and take things one step at a time,
it's all absolutely doable.
I also will be linking below this video to extra resources
to help you with each step of the process in more detail.
So make sure that after you're done watching,
you click the link below to go and check these out.
So, first things first.
Is homemade soap a proﬁtable product?
A quick look at the soap market
will give us a lot of insight.
A study of the global soaps market
projects the market will grow from around 24 billion in 2019
to 40 billion by 2025.
Now that's a lot of growth.
The homemade soap market has seen an increase in demand
from customers who are trying to avoid commercial soaps
containing synthetic ingredients and harsh chemicals
and preferring homemade soaps
with natural ingredients and oils instead.
Other customers are attracted by the unique designs
and fragrances and the uniqueness of handcrafted soaps.
A big plus of the soap market is that soap is a product
that hopefully you use up.
So it has great potential for repeat customers.
It's also a popular gift with unlimited uses:
birthdays, holidays, care packages,
You name it, it's a great gift for it.
It's also kind of novelty
and people love to try handcrafted soaps.
It means that people are willing to pay more
for handmade soaps than they are for mainstream soaps,
which is great for your bottom-line.
So, I think we can safely say the sales potential,
repeat business, and consistent income is there
if you make the right products
and target the right customers.
So what's next?
Well, you'll want to spend a little time
deﬁning the type of soap you want to make and sell.
This is the fun part.
I like to call this, ﬁnding your style.
So start where you are.
What do you already like to make?
And what kind of soaps would you be most excited
to be making so you can have fun and enjoy your business?
What I really want you to discover
when you ask yourself these questions
is what you would be proud to sell.
What would make you happy,
quite simply, to create consistently?
Are you interested in creating organic,
natural soaps with a rough look and texture?
Or is what you're most interested in
when it comes to making soaps the way they look and smell,
playing with fun scents, fun colours and fun shapes?
As you probably know there are different ways to make soap,
melt and pour, cold process, hot process, rebatching,
and each method has its pros and cons
that you'll want to consider.
There is no good or bad choice here,
it really just depends on the characteristics
of the soap you want to create.
Here are some questions to think about:
What kind of soap are you currently making?
What soap do you want to be making,
and what soap-making process supports this vision?
Which process do you feel most comfortable with
at the moment, or could easily feel comfortable with
with a bit more experience behind you?
Which process do you want to learn the most?
It's important to really consider this
because we want to turn the hobby you love
into a business, sure,
but we want to turn it into a business that you love too
so you can enjoy making every soap that you sell.
Okay, now that you know the type of soap
that you'd like to sell comes the million dollar question:
who is going to be interested in buying that soap?
After all, everyone uses soap, or so I hope. (laughs)
So it's easy to think,
"Anyone, everyone can buy my soap."
But this couldn't be further away from the truth.
A customer interested in buying
a unicorn-shaped galaxy coloured soap infused with glitter
is not the same customer as the one who will buy
a rough block of cold-pressed coconut oil soap
infused with turmeric and lemongrass.
These are two different people.
So who are your people?
Who will fall in love with your unique soap?
This is your ideal customer.
It's important to deﬁne
because anything else you will do after that
will be for that ideal customer,
so getting clear on who that person is is key.
There is a fair bit of competition
in the homemade soap niche,
so this is going to be very important
to make sure that you stand out from the competition
and crush it with your sales.
This is typically a step that everyone tries to skip,
but let me tell you,
after working with thousands of shop owners over the years,
skipping this important step
is also almost always the reason why some shops take off
and become very successful
while others struggle to make a sale.
So, don't skip it.
It will make everything after that a thousand times easier.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the video,
I have resources to help you with this.
So, when you're done watching this,
check out the link below.
Next, onto branding.
And without knowing it,
you've already started thinking about your brand.
When we think of branding,
we tend to think immediately about shop name, logo,
colour palette, and although these are important,
a brand is so much more than what you can see.
The most important part of any branding strategy
is to get clear on what makes your shop and products unique.
This is why the work you've done just before
was so important.
Without knowing it, you've started to deﬁne
what your soap brand is all about.
You've niched down from, "I make soaps"
to, "I make natural soaps
with positive afﬁrmations stamped on them."
You've found your style, your niche, your brand vision.
The time you put into creating a solid, effective brand
before you start will pay off in so many ways.
Now here's the good news.
When it comes to designing your brand logo,
you really don't have to hire a professional designer
at this stage in the game.
Creating a logo can be as simple as picking a beautiful font
and typing your shop's name with it.
In fact it often gives the best results.
Professional logos and designs
have their place down the road,
but it doesn't need to happen
as you're just getting started with your business.
Keep that money to buy raw materials instead.
Okay, so what's the next step?
Now that you have a fabulous brand and logo,
you need to spend a little time
making sure you are satisfying any legalities
for your country,
and the countries where you plan to sell your homemade soap.
Do some research to see if you need to comply with any food
or health product standard,
register your business name and all that good stuff.
Rules and regulations
are going to be different in each country,
but it's often simpler than it can feel
and is make everything feel legit,
which is a great mindset boost
on top of something you actually have to do.
It's also good to set up a different bank account
for your business at this point.
Keeping business ﬁnances separate from your personal one
is going to make it so much easier
to keep track of your business income and expenses.
Now, let's talk about
how you can set up your soap shop at home.
You want to plan out the following spaces:
where you will create your soap,
where you will store your soap ingredients,
where your soaps will cure.
Be mindful of the airﬂow you need
for the soap-making method that you chose.
Where to store your ﬁnished soaps.
Some sort of ofﬁce space
and storage of packaging and shipping supplies.
Your soap shop production area may be in your kitchen,
in your ofﬁce space,
may be a desk in your living room, that's okay.
Just think through what you will do where
and decide a logical place to store the items you need
for that function so you can keep things organised
and easily pull things out or pack things up
which will save you a lot of time down the track.
I wouldn't recommend buying a lot of stock to start with.
It's best to keep your inventory to a minimum
as you learn what products sell most.
How many times have you heard the saying,
"Practise makes perfect"?
If you want to run a successful homemade soap business,
it's time to put that saying to work.
Learning to make an artisan soap with consistent quality,
batch after batch will take a bit of practise,
but you will learn quickly.
Dive in and have fun with it.
It's okay if some batches don't turn out.
That's how you learn, right?
Experiment with recipes, designs, fragrances, shapes.
Share your test runs with family and friends,
ask for their honest feedback
until you feel conﬁdent with your product
and ready to sell it.
Once you are, it's time to choose your selling platform.
You really have two choices here:
setting up and selling on your website
or selling on a marketplace.
The most common marketplace for handmade products is Etsy,
while the most well known website platforms
are Shopify and WordPress.
They each have their pros and cons.
Marketplaces like Etsy offer a large built-in audience.
Many people shop Etsy for soap.
They're easy to get started with
with no complicated tech set up
so you can get started much more quickly.
They're already trusted by customers.
People generally trust checking out
and using their credit cards on a platform like Etsy.
But on the other hand,
you have to deal with multiple competitors
and price competition.
There're a lot of other Etsy soap sellers on Etsy.
Marketplace fees, Etsy charges fees for each sale made
through their platform.
And you don't have complete control
for things like the look of your shop
or what features are available.
In short, you don't own your Etsy shop.
You are renting a space on the Etsy marketplace
and you have to obey their terms and conditions.
If you decide to go with your own website,
for example, using Shopify or WordPress,
it is your space with no product or price competition,
which is a great way to develop a loyal customer base.
You have complete ﬂexibility
and are in control of basically everything.
This time you're not renting a space.
This is your own. You make the rules.
You can have all the features you'd like,
set the look of your shop to your exact taste and much more,
but you have to deal with the tech setup and website design.
You can decide to outsource this
or it's also absolutely possible to do it yourself
without any coding or design experience,
but there is a little learning curve for sure,
so it's a time investment.
You also start from scratch in terms of getting customers
to ﬁnd your website and products
as you don't beneﬁt from the built-in audience
that something like Etsy has.
There is no one-size-ﬁts-all here.
When I work with makers, I really look at this
on a case-per-case basis
because for some selling on marketplace like Etsy
meets the brief, for others, it doesn't
and they prefer to have their own website.
Of course, it's also possible to have both,
but as you are just getting started,
I would strongly suggest you start with one
so you're not spreading yourself too thin.
Now, the money-making element: pricing your soap.
Pricing is a really, really important decision.
If you want to launch and grow a proﬁtable online store,
you need to price for proﬁt.
Don't just decide a price based on your competition
or because you think that is all people will pay.
Do your homework and calculate your costs, including:
raw materials costs, what it costs to buy your supplies,
labour costs, what it costs in hourly rates
to make each product,
overhead, often forgotten and so important.
These are all costs not directly related to labour
or materials, but necessary to run your business.
For example, your studio rent, insurance,
all that kind of stuff.
Your goal is to pick a proﬁt rate
that is fair to your customers, fair to yourself,
and reﬂects your product's value.
Remember that handmade does not mean cheap.
You work hard and make great soaps.
Please pay yourself for your hard work.
And pricing is not so much about cost,
as it is about value.
Let's take natural soap as an example.
Someone who prioritises using soaps
with natural ingredients is willing to pay more
for a natural soap that they feel is healthier to use.
They value it more.
When you learn how to price based on perceived value,
not just on cost,
you not only can have a very successful business
that does not require you to work 20 hours a day,
but you also start selling
to the most beautiful of customers,
who love and cherish your products
and know your products are worth
what you're charging for them.
I have a tonne of resources that I have created
to help you in the pricing process.
I will make sure to link them below.
So make sure you check them out
when you've finished watching this video,
but for now, let's talk about packaging.
Your product packaging
is the ﬁrst thing your customer will see,
touch, and experience.
It forms their ﬁrst impression of product value,
and then impacts if they will buy from you again and again
and tell their friends and family about your soap.
So it's important to thin through how to create
a fantastic unboxing experience for them.
I have a guide to help you do that
that I will link in the link below.
Next is product photography.
Product photography is deﬁnitely not something
you want to cut corners on.
Remember that the shopper online cannot touch
or smell your soap.
So they are buying based on the picture
and the description alone.
Your pictures need to be so amazing
that the customer is excited
and can picture your product in their house.
They need to be able to smell your soap
through the pictures.
There will be a little learning curve with photography,
but once you ﬁgure out what works for your products,
you can just rinse and repeat for every soap you make.
Taking time to learn how to do it right
the ﬁrst time around will avoid you having to go back
and re-do photos later on,
so your efforts will be time well-spent.
Here again I've got some helpful resources.
You've guessed it, via the link below.
Now last but not least, product descriptions and titles.
The soap descriptions and titles in your soap shop
need to be clear and answer all the questions
the customer may have.
Talk about the speciﬁc ingredients in each soap
and most importantly, the beneﬁts they provide,
and describe fragrances with visual and descriptive words
that paint a picture.
A natural soap might smell like spring rain or
a walk in the forest.
A colourful soap may have scents that convey emotions
or tastes like motivate or birthday cake.
This is a fun process
where you can use your creativity with words
and make your soap stand out from others.
Product descriptions and titles
should also help you rank higher on search results
in both Google and/or Etsy if you sell on Etsy.
So make sure to use keywords
and to learn the basics of search engine optimization
to drive more views and visitors to your shop.
As always, resources are going to be available
below this video to help you with that.
My absolute best recommendation though
if you need help setting up your homemade soap business
is to check out all the step by step courses
we've created for you over at Tizzit.co.
We make starting your own business easier for you
by walking you through each step of setting it up,
from branding to pricing to photography.
So make sure to check those out
via the link below this video.
Thank you for watching, Happy Soapmaking.
And until next time, aurevoir!