We recently connected with Jana Hester and have shared our conversation below.

Jana, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?

A huge challenge of being a soap maker is rising costs of raw ingredients, this has been particularly bad during the past three years. This has come in many forms- from rising costs per pound of oil to limitations on the amount you can buy. Sometimes I was not able to find certain ingredients in stock at all, having to shift gears to handle lack of supplies.

This was a first regarding limits being put on the quantity of an ingredient the business can buy at one time. Buying hundreds of pounds of certain things at a time earns a discount. Utilizing the bulk discount given for buying in those quantities has been something I strive for, and having that disappear has driven up the raw cost. The cost of sodium hydroxide (soap doesn’t exist without this raw ingredient) has had limits put on quantities sold and the cost has more than doubled, from some suppliers it’s gone up more than ten times. How does a maker work that into cost and final price of product?

Our paper supplier closed, after being in business since 1942. That was a tough thing to overcome…finding new label paper has been a huge challenge. You’ll notice our labels were changing constantly as we tried paper after paper. Having settled on two types now, at more than ten times the price of the previous supplier, they still aren’t up to snuff. But it’s the best we can find, and sadly costs an incredible amount more for something that doesn’t work as well as hoped.

The list goes on, but this has been an opportunity to try a variety of new recipes to see what can be made with more olive oil or more sunflower oil. Two ingredients that had very little price increase – luckily they are two of our favorite and most used ingredients!

Keeping prices reasonable for all budgets is important and kept in the forefront. That means changing things, almost constantly, while maintaining the integrity of the company and purity of the product. We continue on!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I’ve been a soap maker for more than 25 years (yikes!) – my mother made soap when I was a kid and I knew how to make soap before I could drive. Mom still makes soap in my home state of New Mexico.

I never thought I’d “grow up” to be a soap maker, but here I am! I make primarily cold process soap, a time consuming method that allows my patience to be perfected hahaha. Everything is from scratch (yes you can do box mix soap however I choose never to “make” that type) because it’s important to me that I am truly making the soap. I know exactly what goes in and what is purposely omitted.

Something that sets me apart from most soap makers – I always have a large amount of unscented soap in stock. I focus on folks with sensitive skin and this means making a lot of soap without fragrance or color. I have a firm belief that unscented soap doesn’t need to be boring! A lot of fun things can be incorporated into unscented soap, and several ingredients like cocoa butter and laurel berry oil have a natural aroma that comes through beautifully in cold process soap. Ingredients like petals and botanicals, charcoal and seeds can give a fun vibe to a bar of soap without being a concern for those with highly sensitive skin.

Recently I have added sea salt soaps to the line, I have to say I am in love with salt bars! They are silky smooth (think a water softener) rock hard bars and amazing on skin.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

Selling online – huge challenge for me. I am the manufacturer, I know soap, I make soap, I love soap. Soap soap soap. However I am not a computer guru or into technology, my job and even my hobbies all focus on making things with my hands.

One of the biggest challenges was when website talk came up. There was no budget to hire someone to create a website, and there was a need for me to be able to manage it myself. Constantly changing batches, I make seasonal soaps, limited edition soaps and custom soaps thus the inventory rotates regularly. I needed to update what was available any time needed.

I ended up using a platform that allows me to “build it” myself and thus manage everything myself. This was HUGELY out of my comfort zone, it was hours and hours with many many tears and frustrations trying to figure out how to do it. It was more than a decade ago, before there were options and choices for who to build a website through (wow yes I’ve been a soap maker since before the internet existed folks!). There weren’t people around to ask or have help me, it was an awful experience. People weren’t ordering from their devices at the time, so trying to make a compatible mobile device website has been a nightmare of recent………but I just hang in there!

Because of that, I’ll never change my website haha. I don’t want to learn a new platform or change the layout, I can’t fathom going through that again. It may limit me a bit, but it’s something I just roll with and do my best on.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

A few years ago we moved cities, and this has been a nightmare for my business. So much of what I did was porch pick up and shows (as opposed to online sales)…and I didn’t realize that until we moved. Even though we are still in the area, customers didn’t shift to ordering online or porch pick up in another part of the city, they just dropped off.

I’m still struggling with how to remedy this, how to encourage folks to buy from small businesses online. Doing shows is not something I can do anymore, so it’s got to be online sales. Being a non-techie I find this a difficult thing to bridge.

Moving has caused everything in life to be in upheaval for a bit, and we are just hanging on and taking it a day at a time. Soap making IS my happy place so I’ve had fun working on new soaps that are themed. There are now dinosaur soaps, soon there will be unicorn and dragon soaps. I’ve never done anything like this before, I figured branching out is the best thing to do when I don’t know what to do :)

Contact Info:

• Website: www.LittleCabinSoaps.com
• Instagram: LittleCabinSoaps
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LittleCabinSoap

Image Credits
I have taken all photos myself.