We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joyce Sample. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joyce below.
Joyce, appreciate you joining us today. We’re complete cheeseballs and so we love asking folks to share the most heartwarming moment from their career – do you have a touching moment you can share with us?
Last Fall, we vended at a women’s expo with a vendor we connected with at a previous event for the same organization. She was an older woman who had previously purchased one of our lavender body butters. Alexis walked over to her table to look at her jewelry, and as they were talking, she said “I want to say thank you for the body butter because while my husband was in the hospital, I would use it on his skin. It helped with the dryness and ROUGH skin” she said a little jokingly. She told Alexis he had since passed but how good it made his skin look. She said, “When I knew y’all were going to be here today, I had to get another one.” Alexis told her mom, and it was at that moment we knew how beneficial our products are for our customers. Alexis said to her “I’m so sorry for your loss, and I’m happy our product helped your late husband’s skin”.
Testimonies like this really help us to appreciate our customers even more.
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 back background and context?
We are J.A.B. Your Face – Joyce Sample (mother), Alexis and Brianna Johnson (daughters). We are located in Philadelphia, PA. We got into creating soaps during the pandemic. As a mom with two young adult daughters, I wanted to find something productive for us to do… to keep our minds off of the pandemic, to combat cabin fever, something we can bond over and tap into our creative side. Since there was a pandemic going on, there were no trips for skincare products. We all have different skin types and started looking for DIY soap recipes to make for ourselves. We’re all passionate about our skincare and started making different kinds of soaps for our individual skin types. We started telling family and friends what we were doing and we started making soaps for them too. We kept hearing, “You all could make this a business.” One day Brianna said, “We should call it J.A.B. Your Face… you know jabbing skin issues.” and name stuck. We started out with just three soaps, raw honey and oats for sensitive and dry skin, lavender for mature skin, and turmeric for acne-prone skin.
We are J.A.B. Your Face. Joyce (mother), Alexis and Brianna (daughters), and we are West Philadelphia natives. We got into creating facial soaps during the pandemic. As a mom with two young adult daughters, I wanted to find something productive for us to do… to keep our minds off the pandemic, to combat cabin fever, something we can bond over and tap into our creative side. Since there was a pandemic going on, there were no trips for skincare products. We all have different skin types and started looking for DIY soap recipes to make for ourselves. We’re all passionate about our skincare and started making different kinds of soaps for our individual skin types. We started telling family and friends what we were doing, and we started making soap for them too. We kept hearing, “You all could make this a business.” So as the pandemic was just starting to ease up a little, we started thinking about it more seriously, but honestly a little scared to start a business during a pandemic, and we’re creative not business minded. So I (Joyce) contacted a friend who is a life coach to talk about our idea. She took the time to have Zoom calls with us to keep us focused on building a business and to keep us encouraged. Brianna said, “We should call it J.A.B. Your Face… you know jabbing skin issues.” And the name stuck. We started out with just three soaps, raw honey and oats for sensitive and dry skin, lavender for mature skin, and turmeric for acne-prone skin.
We believe what sets us apart is that even though we’re creating soap to aid in someone’s skincare routine, we take pride in making them look pretty and unique. Alexis and Brianna have their own place now, and when we come together, we make sure we are in good spirits. On those days when we are not, we do not force it, and we grant each other space. We truly believe “good energy in – good products out.”
We would want potential customers to know that we test everything on ourselves first, then family and friends. As soap makers, we cannot claim that our soaps can cure any skin conditions, but we can say our ingredients can aid. We have one customer who is a nurse, and she buys ten at a time. As for our butters, we’re still adding to our product line, but so far, the feedback has been great, and it fuels us to keep creating more. We would also want potential customers to know that since 2020, we have not used any commercial soap on our faces. We only use our own.
Because of our growing number of products (soaps, body butters, coming soon facial moisturizers, etc.), we will be rebranding in the very near future.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
One story of resilience would be our very first time vending. The event was outside in a park. Tables and tents were provided for the vendors, which was a good thing because about halfway through the event a storm rolled through. We had family and friends that were driving a pretty good distance to support, and a few hadn’t got there yet. Customers ran to their cars and a few other businesses packed up and left, but we stayed through the bad weather until the sun came out again and the family and friends we were waiting for arrived. We ended up selling out of everything. It may sound corny but that set our tone, work through whatever obstacles come up until we’ve gotten over the hurdle.
Since then, we have participated in many events (pop ups, expos, and conferences). Every event is not a sellout, but we will stay and make the best out of each event. Because of this, we continue to get repeat invitations from those hosts.
We all have full-time, demanding jobs, and Alexis is in grad school, so this takes a lot of dedication and discipline, but we believe in each other and in the goodness of our products.
If you could go back, would you choose the same profession, specialty, etc.?
We would choose the same profession. Collectively, we’re all passionate about handcrafting products for people to include in their skincare routine. It’s a business, but it doesn’t feel like it to us because we truly love what we do. We are always learning new ways to improve our products and the business, and that’s what keeps us going. Brianna becoming a licensed esthetician tied into our skincare business and everything began to align. As we continue to grow in our knowledge of producing the best products, we’re reaching new heights. For example, this past fall, we were blessed with the opportunity to be a vendor, among many established businesses, at a national, three-day conference where we connected with professional black women. They gave us so many pearls of wisdom to hold on to. They even came up to us after they tried our soaps and body butters to say how much they liked them and how they used them. On the last day, one of the women, who is in the skincare industry, came over to offer words of encouragement and even bought from us. That was confirmation for us that we are on the right track to building something great.
Contact Info:
- Website: bodybyjab.com
- Instagram: jab_yourface
- Facebook: J.A.B. Your Face