Seven soaps submitted!

We’ve submitted seven recipes to the labs for review and approval. We’ve experimented with a bunch of different things (lesson learnt: working with sea salt in soap is really challenging!), and getting a variety of soaps that we were happy with has been our focus over the last few months.

This is a key milestone towards making our soaps available for sale. I’m sure we’ll write about the experience and steps required from beginning to end, at some point, but we’ll say now that there are a number of steps you need to get lined up before you are legally ready to offer your soap (or any cosmetics) for sale, mostly driven by cosmetic and trade regulations.

The seven recipes we’ve submitted are:

• Pure tallow (this is also the base ingredient for the other soaps)

• Charcoal and kaolin clay

• Calendula and lavender

• Goats milk, oat and honey

• Gardener’s soap

• Bentonite clay and rose geranium

• Litsea and bergamot

Obviously, this could require tweaking if the labs come back with feedback, but this is all part of learning as we go, and transparency is important to us, and progress towards success is always littered with bumps and hurdles to navigate and overcome - all part of life. We also have product sheets and other documents to work on, including batch records to ensure we are auditing and tracking what we produce, and when. This is a requirement, but is also just common sense in terms of managing inventory and being able to trace a sale back to a specific batch, in case any problems are reported. Other steps are the relevant insurance for selling cosmetics, and registering that you’ve had your product recipes approved. We’ll make sure to get some pictures uploaded in the gallery.