We recently connected with Maegan Griffin and have shared our conversation below.
Maegan , appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Chris and I were new parents to our daughter, Kirin. She was about 6 months old and kept producing small hives all over her body during bath time. We would try every type of bath product meant for sensitive skin, babies only, etc. Eventually I decided to look it up and make my own, as I have a small background in the science of chemistry from college. Pairing down soap ingredients to the most basic that we could, we created Plain Jane, a soap we still make to this day for her. She is older now and able to use all products that we make as well as branch out to select items. As a 12-year-old, she’s very good at reading labels to understand that not all skin is created equal. We solved our small families’ problem and quickly learned that there were many others in the area too that were frustrated with sensitive skin. Not quite an issue, but enough sensitivity that they wanted a simple product we could provide.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Like I said, our daughter having sensitive skin started our journey. Our friends are why we are here today. Friends would come over for dinner and ask for a bar of soap and leave us money on our mantle. It eventually turned into them banding together and demanding we start doing markets to share our products. I am most proud of the community that we have here in the Tampa Bay Area and the constant push they provide to us with brainstorming, bartering of services ( We have a wonderful logo from a friend that is still beyond our biggest cheerleader.), constant visits and word of mouth from anyone that shares our booth space with us for an afternoon to hear about our soap. We ask everyone to tell us if the like, love or dislike as we can only grow as humans if we know the how the experience went. Our soap subscription days end up being my favorite. I get a strong sense of pride knowing that there are people that love what we make so much, they have us automatically sending them a variety our bars each month.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I would say that I personally had to pivot in the business because of pregnancy. Naturally, you cannot work with chemicals while growing a human, so there was a small time period where I wasn’t able to work with the creation of soap, but I was also having a hard time sharing the adventure with my husband, Chris.
He just does things differently than I do! Now, it’s okay. We have small “his or hers” polls on site for markets and now its a nice joke to poke fun at each other over. It took a lot of coaxing for me to share the cooking space with him as I really enjoyed it as a solo project. Now, I couldn’t imagine doing soap without him and I love being able to depend on someone else to help me on the days I am unable to create.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Building our audience on social media is probably the hardest aspects of a business. I can create and mold all day, but I do struggle with what it takes for social media. Our social media friends are all organic. They have either come across us at a market, or maybe a reel that we made. My advice is to stay true to your personality when choosing a niche for your reels or posts. We are a giant bag of dad jokes and slightly dark rain cloud humor (can you guess who is who?!?) but that’s who you will find when you run into us walking down the street as a normal person. It’s frustrating to watch the social number on Instagram crawl but it’s more satisfying to know someone sees us and likes us for what they see as a whole.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.choppingblocksoap.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/choppingblocksoapco/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/choppingblocksoap/
Image Credits
Cactus Moon Markets