We recently connected with Jessica Wunder and have shared our conversation below.
Jessica, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us 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.
As with many handmade creators (I think), soap-making started as a hobby for me. I’ve long been a fan of indie and handmade perfume and bath/body products, and I’ve been fascinated with the general idea of scent development. I always wanted to dabble in perfumery, but it never seemed within reach. The idea of making soap as a way to explore scent development somehow never occurred to me until a weird set of coincidences in 2018.
An indie brand I like offered “custom” perfume oils – you choose from a list of scent notes and they blended it for you. Unsurprisingly, I fell for this approach hard and ordered several blends. There was one oil in particular that seemed a bit too strong for daily wear as a perfume, but I thought it might be good in soap. I’m a deeply analytical science nerd (I have Bachelor of Science degrees in Biology and Molecular Biology) and the chemistry of soap making and fragrances really appealed to me. Meanwhile, I happened to be laid up, as I had broken my ankle and couldn’t put weight on it, so I had a good bit of free time on my hands. I started doing some research and went down an internet rabbit hole on making soap from scratch (a.k.a. “cold process” or “hot process” soap). It seemed both daunting and doable at the same time! Around the same time, a friend introduced me to a friend of hers who already made soap! We hit it off pretty much immediately. I’m indebted to her, as she was a massive source of knowledge, support, and even some beginning supplies. Hell, to this day, I’ll reach out to her to ask her opinion or thoughts on some new ingredient or technique.
I started by making cold-process soaps, which are made from lye – a very caustic substance that requires proper protective equipment, caution, and care. You don’t want to be distracted or careless when working with it! I enjoyed the work, but felt I couldn’t do it quickly … or too often. Sometimes, I just didn’t want so much effort! Even though I was sharing my soap with friends and family – you quickly make more soap that you can use yourself and have places to store it – I wasn’t sure about making it a full business. Selling to friends to cover costs is one thing, but selling to the public? That’s very different. Plus, monetizing a beloved hoppy is always tough to do; no longer can you just make whatever suits your fancy. Additionally, handmade soap is really having a moment, even before the pandemic. (I started my soap-making journey in 2018, but didn’t launch as an official business until 2021.) Etsy is full of soap makers and in markets, soap is one of the categories that fills up quickly.
But I am an explorer at heart and can never do things the “normal” way. So I experimented. A lot. And the more I made, the stronger the positive feedback I got. The more confident I became in my technique and formulas, the more ideas I got – for scents, themes, additional products. I knew I wanted to share these ideas with a wider audience. (Your friends can only buy so much.) So I did serious research about becoming a business and all that comes with it.
I’ve worked hard to develop my soap formulas (I am a perfectionist) and I am very pleased with them, but my pride and joy are my scent creations. There are a lot of fully fleshed-out, complex fragrance oils that many soap-makers use in their soap (and that’s ok!), but I craft my scents using single-note fragrance oils, essential oils, and high-quality perfumery components. That’s something you don’t really see much in the market. I offer not just soap, but a unique-to-the-brand, sensory experience. I know that while I will have to make some scents and products that don’t necessarily speak to my preferred scent categories, I will always create scents and products that *I* would want to buy and that speak to my aesthetic. Making my own bespoke scents means there are few, if any, other businesses that offer what I do.
I also operate within and speak to a darker, stranger, “alternative” aesthetic. This is a theme that seems to be becoming a bit more apparent, especially within indie creators, but still doesn’t seem to represent a significant aspect of the market.
There was one moment in particular for me that really confirmed my decision to go public, as it were; A very good friend of mine, who’s been one of my biggest cheerleaders and supporters from Day 1, told me, “Your soap just smells so good and it just makes me so happy. I love starting my day with it.” That statement really crystallized for me part of what would become my mission – to make a product that, while humble in use (it’s just soap, right?), could make a difference, however small, in someone’s day.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My goal is to create bath and body products that are luxurious, decadent, and nourishing for the body and the soul using hand-crafted scents that go beyond the normal; scents tailored to those of us who like to explore the hidden, unusual, and dark corners of our world. Products that are not only useful but are as beautiful and unique as the body they serve. Products that use the highest quality ingredients possible from ethical sources.
Doom Witch Soaps is most definitely an extension of myself as a person – someone who finds delight in the strange and unusual, beauty in darkness, and magic within the hidden recesses of the world.
What untold stories lie among ruins?
Soap may seem a strange vehicle to explore these ideas, but I find soap to be an ideal candidate for any artistic expression. Soap is an interesting example of duality to me. It’s a humble product that serves a mundane, everyday need – cleaning. However, the actual creation of soap is a sort of alchemy – transforming basic ingredients of oil/fat, water, and caustic lye – ingredients that, on their own accord, are far removed from the concept of cleansing – into an object that serves a need.
Few people may think much of their daily shower or bath; we do it almost automatically. But there is a kind of magic in the ritual of removing the vestiges of yesterday to create a clean slate for today.
The daily shower/bath is often a ritual of (often unintentional) meditation. How many of us can say we’ve had our best ideas or realizations in the shower? Working through the well-known motions of cleaning allows our minds to wander.
Soap is an ideal medium for the expression of scent, which is an important sense for humans (and many other animals). It influences our sense of taste, our mood, and even our memories. We make strong neural connections between scent and memory, and most people have at least one example of a nearly long-lost memory that can be revived through scent: the unbidden tears that prick eyes at smelling the cut grass of lost summers, the whiff of a beloved’s perfume, the foodstuffs of your youth. If showering or bathing with one of my products can give someone a little thrill of adrenaline, a rush of dopamine, a spark of serotonin, then I’ve done my job.
What further kinds of magic are possible when one is exposed to scent – that conjurer of memories lost, that evoker of buried emotion – while performing a meditative ritual?
This is a question that Doom Witch Soaps seeks to examine.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
This isn’t so much a lesson that I had to unlearn as much as a mindset. I’m a perfectionist, and I refuse to compromise the quality of what I do. But I also had to learn that just because the product isn’t exactly 100% true to what I had in my head, doesn’t mean it was a failure or compromise. Honestly, it’s a lesson I’ve needed to learn before I ever started making soap, and one that I’m still learning. At least I now know it’s something I need to be mindful of when creating.
I can point to when this lesson really hit home and embedded itself into my consciousness. In the early days of my soap making, when I was primarily creating for myself and friends, I had entered a soap-design contest and had this idea in my head for what would be a beautiful soap, one inspired by the oil-slick colorway that was gaining traction at this time – swirling rivers of deep teal, emerald green, and bright blue with flashes of purple and pink. But I made two mistakes: I underestimated the amount of color needed to achieve the brighter colors I wanted, and I used a fragrance that is known to cause a harmless, but unattractive brown discoloration . I usually check for this, but my excitement got the better of me. The end result was a pastel soap that eventually gained a muted tone. Most definitely not what I was looking for!
I was pretty upset about it at first, but decided to pick myself up and try again. This time, I carefully checked my fragrance, made adjustments to my colorant amounts, and added in black as base color to make the other colors pop more.
But I hadn’t planned on making another batch so soon, and I discovered midway through that I was out of a particular ingredient. I decided to substitute with salt, a common and acceptable substitution. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but, in my stress, I didn’t fully dissolve the salt in my liquid. The end result was a pretty soap – black with swirls of teal, purple, green– but it had white bursts of salt crystals throughout.
Honestly, I was pretty devastated. Two failures in a row! My husband gently reminded me of an important rule when making art: if you find yourself frustrated with a piece, stop, leave it alone for a day, sleep on it, and come back with fresh eyes. I was…less upset the next day, but decided to get some perspective and sent images to several of my friends who were following my soap journey. Surprise! No one had any idea either soap was a “failure.” Each was pretty in its own right, and most folks thought the one with salt was intentionally created like that – the salt crystals lent a starry-galaxy feel to it and gave a nice bit of scrub. Everyone that I gifted those soaps to were absolutely delighted.
That’s when the realization finally pierced my stubborn, perfectionist, thick skull: there is no such thing as perfect, and perceived “failures” are not only learning opportunities, but are based on one person’s (mine) very biased perspective. (Ironic that it took me this long to take to heart since I used to teach and would tell my students something very similar). I actually have plans to revisit that salt-galaxy soap!
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
No, it hasn’t yet. But I thought it might be good to answer this question for others who haven’t yet been able to make the transition.
Since I launched recently, I still am maintaining my full-time job. I like having health insurance! But, while being able to create and get paid for it full-time is the dream, I can’t deny that holding a full-time job(and working to grow within that position) while also growing and managing the business has actually helped me in several ways:
Introduction to ideas, guidance and programs/software that would be beneficial for my business.
I work as an analyst in a tech-forward company for my day job. In the past year, I’ve attended leadership seminars and discovered web-analysis products that have applications to the business! I’ve started looking into one software that provides data and analysis for your website to help understand areas or user interfaces that may be making the experience more difficult for customers. I’m pretty excited about that.
Forced focus on next steps, goals, and daily work-schedule.
Honestly, I can be pretty bad with procrastination. Something about a deadline motivates me. But with limited time and energy, I no longer have that luxury if I want this to thrive. Having to examine my schedule and carve out time for the business, my personal growth, and healthy downtime has really made me take a hard look at how and where I spend my time and energy. I also have several chronic health issues that can and will sap my energy and leave me bedridden if I overdo it. I don’t always get it right and I still worry that I’m moving more slowly that I should, but I’m definitely more mindful about what I choose to spend energy on.
Forced prioritization.
This is sort of similar to the above; having short windows of time to get things done means I can’t really afford to spend time on inefficient things (e.g., taking 6 hours in Photoshop to get an image “perfect” in a way that most people won’t even notice….ahem). While this does mean that some concepts have to be shelved until later (because they require a lot more research, development, or experimentation with materials), it also forces me to do cost-benefit analyses that would be easy to forego if I had more time.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.doomwitchsoaps.com
- Instagram: @doomwitchsoaps
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoomWitchSoaps/
Image Credits
Jessica Wunder John Stepp