We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jennifer Evarts. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jennifer below.
Jennifer, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
The battle over “clean” beauty products is well-known. We see all kinds of advertisements for “natural” and honestly want to believe these products are good for us. But the fact is, the beauty industry doesn’t have a standard for “natural,” so there are a lot of definitions and a lot of variations. I think if we look at the majority of labels at the store or even on our products at home, we’ll find ingredients that are not needed or even possibly harmful. While each person has the right to decide what ingredients and products they’re comfortable with, we take a pretty clear stand. When I design a new product, I’m always thinking about what ingredients I’m using and why, as well as whether they’re needed at all; for example, we only use pure essential oils in our products. While there might be “clean” fragrances out there, we believe essential oils are better and the only truly “natural” fragrance. Does this mean that we make less money on our products because essential oils are more expensive than fragrance oils? Yes. Does it mean that we won’t compete with soaps scented like raspberry or “fresh linen”? Yes. But we stand behind our mission to send out the very best, most natural products into the world.
In addition to our unwavering standard of “natural” is our use of rain water in our soaps, which my husband started doing three years ago. This is something almost no other soap companies do. Soapmaking requires water, and using rain has literally kept thousands of plastic water jugs out of the waste cycle from our business. It sets us apart and is one of the reasons we changed our name in 2021 to, “The LIVING Soaperie.” We are always looking for ways to work sustainably and contribute to a vibrant, living world.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Our business grew out of a desire to love on others and our passion for natural products. We have a tradition of giving handmade gifts to friends and family at Christmas, so in December 2014, I had the “brilliant” idea of making a loaf of soap and cutting it into bars to share. Little did I understand then that soapmaking is both an art and a science, and it certainly can’t be rushed just a few weeks before Christmas. The first batch of soap I made opened up a world of creativity for me that quickly blossomed into a small business involving my husband and kids. Since then, we’ve developed our product line into bar and liquid soaps, hand balms, bath fizzies, body butters, aromatherapy mists, and more. We’ve always stayed true to our mission of handmaking the very best products using only natural ingredients, and, since 2021, we’ve been making our bar soaps with rain water. Our business has become such a part of our family, who we are, and what we believe, and we are truly blessed to be on this journey!
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Being in business for almost 10 years means weathering some storms, and, if we’ve done anything during this time, it’s to stay resilient! We started our business as a couple with two young kiddos and two full-time jobs on opposite schedules, so staying resilient in the early days meant seeing each other very little and trying to make big decisions while being “ships in the night.” This season of schedule conflict transitioned into a new season of ramp-up after Mike left his job to support the business full-time, which meant we did a LOT on a really tight budget for a long time. My full-time job as a teacher kept me busy, but we’d been able to at least use summers to fully focus on moving the business forward. A third season started with Covid, when we had to rethink marketing and customer outreach, since customers couldn’t touch or smell our products anymore. We needed to get creative attracting new customers and maintaining our relationship with existing ones, since so much of our business had been happening at in-person markets and events. We relied on the business to support our family financially then, and, yeah, teachers don’t make very much. Just as we were getting our feet back under us after Covid, my work situation changed, and I needed to switch jobs, meaning that all the creative things we did to save time here and there and manage home, family, work, business, and a new venture into homeschooling had to be rethought because of my demanding new job. I think the story overall is that we’ve always faced significant challenges, whether they be time, money, family, or work-related, but we’ve stayed positive, flexible, and faithful as a family, and we’ve never given up. Ours may not look like what everyone thinks a small business should be, but it’s become a part of who we are, no matter what season.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
When I grew up, there was a lot of pressure from my dad to be perfect, which translated into feeling the need to oversee and control everything around me as an adult. As the founder of a business, you kind of get to hypercontrol the details, for good and for bad, and I sure tried to! The lesson I had taught myself for years- that control translated into success- continued to break down the further we got into our business. The more I tried to DO- make the products, develop new recipes, engage with customers, sell at markets, update the website, plan for future…ALL THE THINGS (including creating those ever-necessary, glossy social media posts)- the less successful and the more stressed I was. My husband jokes to this day that he’s afraid to put labels on our products in case they won’t be PERFECTLY straight, but this is a great example of how NOT letting go can hinder you as a business owner. I can’t scale my business and still label every individual product we make. Over the years, I’ve had to UNLEARN the lesson of control and perfection. And while I still appreciate a well-placed label (I love you, baby, but they’re still crooked…), I now welcome help from others. I still have to maintain my full-time job separate from the business, and my husband has stepped in to keep it running as a team effort. Letting go can be a really tough lesson, but, in our case, it’s been the only way to keep our business alive and flourishing.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thelivingsoaperie.com
- Instagram: @thelivingsoaperie
- Facebook: @thelivingsoaperie
