We were lucky to catch up with Charles Johnson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Charles, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

What started as an attempt to come up with an all natural laundry detergent quickly became an obsession. We continue to strive to provide our customers with simple yet effective natural home, bath and beauty products while striving to reduce our carbon footprint! Everything we make is from scratch by hand and in small amounts. By being small and locally owned we are also able to provide custom options for our customers including certain oil formulations as well as scent combinations.

Charles, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I come from a food and management background having run several large university dining programs as well as acting catering manager on several campuses, customer service has always been something that is very important. Giving our customers quick, truthful and thoughtful responses and assistance i think is what helps us continue to thrive and grow our small business. With regard to our brand we are all about simple plant based natural ingredients. We also strive to reduce our carbon footpring as much as possible by offering our customers monetary rewards for returning bottles for us to reuse helping to keep our prices competitive with big box retailers, and managing our shipping and ordering costs.

Some of the things i am most proud of would be our formulations on many of our products. We make everything from scratch, using only simple ingredients. I am also proud up our continued growth using just the capital we earn from sales. Not having investors or banks to answer to helps us continue to steer our business in the same direction we envisioned over 7 years ago now.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

For us, in order to do this we had to make sure a couple items were covered. Health benefits for myself, leaving my full time job meant i would not have health insurance. Luckily my husband was able to add me to his insurance so that was covered. Having at least a partime second income coming in to help brace the shortfalls and afford some little investment to the business as it started to grow.

We were sure we didn’t want to borrow any initial capital so we had to do it with what little we could month to month. We grew very slowly the first probably 3-4 years, which we were actually fine with as we had never ventured into anything like this before.

To start we tried to think about our brand and how to build a customer base. The easiest and most affordable option was to get involved with local farmers markets in the surrounding area. We started small with 2 markets a week the first year, producing our items from our basement. I had set up a small production and packaging area in the basement. During this time we also started building online sales by setting up on ebay, etsy as well as creating our own website.

Fast forward through the pandemic ,we outgrew production in the basement and needed to find a larger space with retail space also available so we would be able to sell in person during the winter months as well.

We love our space and continue to refine and become more productive and profitable day by day.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Local farmers markets and craft shows or trade shows in the general surrounding area have been our best source for new customers.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sapodesolis.com
• Instagram: sapo_de_solis
• Facebook: @sapodesolis
• Twitter: sapodesolis
• Youtube: sapodesolis