We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kira Minadeo . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kira below.
Kira, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
One of my most meaningful projects was an artisan soap wedding favor for my friend’s wedding. She’s been my #1 advocate for starting a soap business from the day I started crafting soap designs. I was honored to be asked to do it and she gave me creative design freedom for the soap and the accompanying lotion label. What didn’t resonate enough with me at the time was she was also still intentionally helping me promote my passion.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started crafting handmade soap to introduce more healthy products into my household for my family and to have extra gifts to give around the holidays. My day job can be stressful and making soap and bath products in my evenings gave me the creative outlet I needed. I found I was always thinking about what my next soap design would be. It turns out you can only use so much soap in a household and I had accumulated quite a bit of it. Selling it to others made sense. I crafted my first loaf of soap in 2017 and slowly started expanding my line with lotion, bath bombs, shower steamers, liquid soaps, dish bars, beard products, shampoo & conditioner bars, bath salts, and lip balms. I’m proud to see how far I’ve come, slowly building my product line, and I never get tired of hearing people tell me their skin doesn’t feel dry any longer after using my soap. I feel like I dream in soap. I draw inspiration to design my creations from several sources: nature, my wonderful children and husband, other soap makers and sometimes the name of a scent. Last year, my husband became a permanent part of my business and it has been fun having male perspective and the best business partner I could ask for. We still get along too!
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I love bringing others’ design ideas to fruition. Someone brings me a concept and I create their idea with soap. Figuring out how to pour the soap to create their vision is so much fun for me.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I had to unlearn perfectionism. As I got started, sometimes the soap designs didn’t turn out the way I had envisioned. Sometimes they still don’t. This is what I learned:
1. The soap is still really high quality and awesome to use.
2. No one knows what design I had in mind and usually the soap still looks pretty cool.
3. What I considered a failed design was sometimes one of my best sellers.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://simplykirioussoaps.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simplykirioussoaps
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/1057575981094520/
- Other: [email protected]