Mountain Musings: Running your own Business
Mountain Musings – A guest column by Dottie Simmons who lives in eastern Humboldt County describes life at her rural homestead:
It has been 10 years now since we retired from our bath and bodycare business and, interestingly, it has come up quite a few times of late.
I have allergies to synthetic fragrances and coloring agents and, back in the 1970s, it was hard for me to find a bar soap I didn’t react to. So we started making cold process soap at home for our own use, 30 bars at a time.
Simmons soap in the 1980s – 90s
Long story short, I had been doing small local craft fairs with handspun yarns and knitwear from our small flock of sheep. One Christmas we made extra soap for gifts and there was some left over. We cut up kraft paper from grocery bags to wrap it and made labels and put a basket of soap in our booth at a Christmas Fair in the old Eureka Mall. People bought the soap and came back the next day to get more! That wasn’t happening with yarn and hats, etc..
Over the next year we increased production until every flat surface in the house was covered with pyramids of soap as it takes a month to properly cure and harden. By 1982 our booth at fairs went from a side basket of soap to 50/50 soap and fiber to 100% soap. Our batches went from 30 to 60 to ultimately 350 at a time, made with equipment we put together with a friend to work on our off grid system. We created better packaging and labels changed from stickers and rubber stamps to pre-printed paper bands.
In 1985 we decided to branch out into wholesale. Local stores – Murrish (later Shop Smart) in Redway, the Co-ops, Eureka Natural Foods, and the Dinsmore store were some of the first to take us on. And we ventured into mail-order in those pre-internet days.
We placed 20 word classified ads in a few national magazines, sent them off and… waited, fingers crossed. And we began to get requests in the mail (we had no telephone until 1999)! Our first brochure was a hand lettered, photocopied, tri-fold regular sheet of paper. We sent these to each interested party and to our delight and amazement got orders in reply! To say we were somewhat unprepared would be an understatement. Our first shipping boxes were hand made from repurposed cardboard from large boxes from local stores, held together with masking tape. Customers would write back that they loved the soap but the box was falling apart when it arrived! OY!
Simmons soap in the 2000s
The next few years we got our MBA at the school of Hard Knocks, with a lot of help from SBDC workshops, CR extension classes, other small mail- order businesses in a group called ‘SHMOG’ (Southern Humboldt Mail Order Group) which included amazing businesses such as Music For Little People, Kicking Mule Records, Signature Coffee and more. And later from the Humboldt Made group and national Hand-Crafted Soap Makers Guild.
Meanwhile we kept up our Craft Fair circuit, which at its peak included 22 fairs from Berkeley, Ca. to Veneta, Or., Auburn, to Redding Ca, and Benbow to Arcata locally, with many places in between.
Spring forward 30+ years and when we surrendered to the obstacles presented by a major highway project and sold the business in 2015, we were making 25,000 bars of soap by hand annually along with other products. We had a mailing list over 20,000 and sold wholesale across the country, mainly on the west coast including several Whole Foods Markets. We had an internet store that sold soap and other products, mainly geared to folks like myself with allergies, coast to coast (we had briefly sold internationally, which was exciting, but the shipping often was more costly than the product so we decided it was dumb) and had dropped our Craft Fairs back to 3.
Do we miss it? Yes and no. The people, the developing and making of the soaps and etc., was a joy. The hours at a computer and paperwork not so much. The knowledge about everything from designing to shipping to marketing, business licenses and rules and legalities of all kinds (FDA to USPS to local, state and national taxes and regulations), has been priceless.
Entrepreneurial tips?
•Find a need and fill it. Otherwise know that convincing folks they need something they haven’t had before takes much more time and investment.
•Take advantage of groups and SBDC, College of the Redwoods and other workshops. Take classes on whatever you need, from advertising to business math, to production, as there are things you will discover you haven’t thought of.
•If you sell wholesale, ask the people you sell to what works best in their environment. They have invaluable knowledge about packaging and displays.
•Ask the shippers (UPS, FedEx, USPS) for any tips.
•Understand from the beginning that profit is what you re-invest in the business and not yours to keep, and that you need to know what your overhead really is.
•And most important – if it’s not fun you’re in the wrong business!
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Love stories like this. There is an old joke though. The beauty of owning your own business is that you only need to work half days, and you get to pick which 12 hours.
But congratulations on building and eventually selling a successful business.
That old “joke” is seriously true here.
My Grandmother, back in the 40’s would make soap from lard drained from the cracklins that she made in a wood fired whale oil cooker. She raised hogs on the family ranch. Butcher time in the fall, when the weather would turn cool enough, was very busy. The hogs were processed for pork, bacon, sausage, head cheese, and ham. Like Hormel, she used everything but the squeal.
She would make the soap from water, lye, and lard. She would cure it behind the wood cook stove.
I find it strange that the newcomers that moved here thought they came for a “simpler life”. LOL
A friend referred to it as the ‘Not so simple life’ and that’s what we’ve called it ever since.
The simple life just means someone has worked the kinks out of it so no one who looks at it now has to figure it out nor do the hard work.
I too had a stint of self employment during an economic downturn. I learned so much and enjoyed it thoroughly. But there were no health benefits, the paperwork the government wanted was burdensome and I learned people, even rich ones, tended to be short of bill paying money frequently. The education was priceless. But when a good job offer came through the business, I took it. The experience left me with great respect for those who run their own enterprises.
My Father had a small business for 38 years, 5 days a week…
Small Business is basically a race between your expenses and your income…
I worked for him out of College, for 24 years…
It is fun to be on your own, but Corporations and Government forced all the little guys out, and I worked for a 50,000 employee Corporation, which ended up owning our little company, for another 10 years…
Small is beautiful…
22 craft fairs is an exhausting thing to consider…
Thanks for sharing your soap adventure. The cooperative, non-directive approach creates a really nice working environment.
Thank you. Fragrance-free is what clean smells like, not these scented hand or laundry soaps. Don’t get me started on dryer sheet that can be smelled from three city blocks away (no exaggeration). While I merely dislike those soaps, my wife is sensitive to artificial fragrances; her sister gets severe migraines and nausea. I currently use Humboldt Hands with the coconut shells for abrasion; wife puts something else in the bathroom. We will most certainly look into your soap. Are you in Co-op or ENF or someplace else in Eureka?
It’s nice to hear that craft businesses are doing well these days.
Kathy Mullen, who used to own Kneeland Glen Farmstand, still makes her unscented goat milk soap and sells it from her home. She can be reached at 707 496 0459.
Thanks, Pat.
Hi Dottie, I believe we met a long time ago, in the mid 90s! I was a consultant and I think you hired me to advise on soap making chemistry. I now live in Humboldt, just read your article, and am thrilled to hear of your company’s enduring success! Sending you my best wishes. Victoria
That’s a good article and video to go with it, about an important subject.
Now, that I cannot live without your fragrance free natural bar soap, what brand of bar soap would you recommend that I use instead. Others I have tried are not as mild scentwise as yours. I didn’t even like Dr. Bronners Mild Baby Magic bar soap.