Often I am asked how I got into the soap business. It's a question that makes me squirm a bit because my soap making enterprise was not well thought out. Go ahead and google "hand-made soap." You'll find – oh – about 841,000 hits. It's not a market screaming out for new entries. It ís nowhere near that sweet spot of high demand and low competition. You might be a Smarty Pants and say "Just find a niche that no one has thought of."  OK, now append the words "for babies,"  "for men" and even "for dogs" to my above search terms. See? Of course I'll take any ideas you might have to offer, but as of today I'm hard-pressed to make a rational business case for my decision.

How I started is easy to answer. I always make presents for people at Christmas and one year "soap" popped into my head. That Christmas my friends and family got hand-made soap under their trees and come to find out, they liked it and wanted more. At some uncertain point thereafter, I decided to make my hobby tax deductible and I turned it into an online business. These days, the real question is why do I keep doing it? As we've established, it's not because of my solid market research. Further, it's an expensive habit if you're a purist who insists on making it without synthetic scents colors and definitely no lard.  Finally, it wasn't nearly as easy to pull off as I thought it would be when I printed out my first soap recipe.