Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Stephanie Alexander. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Stephanie, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?

For the longest time when I started my business it was a one man show. One of my biggest challenges was rejection, and I conducted minimal business online and almost nothing in the way of face-to-face business. My biggest hurdle was thinking “what if people don’t like the products that I work so hard to make”, and “what if I’m the only one who can appreciate them”. This thought process was my constant worry until I met my husband, and he became my biggest supporter and encourager of growing the business. He was very supportive of my ideas. When we started doing pop-ups in artisan and farmer’s markets it was just the two of us. We sacrificed many of our days off from our full-time jobs so that we could build a business presence in our local community. With both of us working full-time it was becoming impossible to do everything. We knew we needed help for us to expand and grow our business. Our “side hustle” started to grow and we needed to find someone reliable, hardworking, knowledgeable, and passionate that we could trust to represent us and the products that we make and sell.

We put multiple hiring ads on various platforms, but we did not receive a single application. It was somewhat discouraging. Finally, four months later we received a message in our Instagram Inbox from Julius. At that time, we didn’t have an office, so we had to meet him for an interview at a local café and juice bar. After the interview my husband and I felt that Julius would be a great fit for Lelu, and he became our first (part-time) employee. We are thankful that he took interest in what we do, and we are thankful to have such a reliable and trustworthy employee.

About two months later after we hired Julius we added Lousan to the team as another part time employee. She currently lives in Chicago, so she teleworks. Her main tasks include handling much of our online presence, editing and updating product descriptions on the website, writing blog posts, and assisting with social media postings and promotions.

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.

At 25 I learned how to make my first handmade soaps. I was suffering from numerous skin issues such as acne, dry skin, and rashes. I felt frustrated as I tried product after product only to find that nothing would give me any lasting relief from these issues. One day as I was browsing the internet for yet another skin treatment option to try, I found some information about natural products and how they could potentially help me. I started off using ingredients found in an average kitchen or pantry, which then led to me doing some very in-depth study on how to make my own natural soaps. I was delighted with the results, as I finally found something that worked! I loved the smooth and gentle soap, and I loved the resulting relief from my skin issues. Not only did the soap work, but it also gave be a great sense of satisfaction knowing that I had made it myself, as well as peace of mind knowing that the ingredients were natural and there were no chemicals in the product to irritate my skin.

I continued to make small batches and began sharing it with some of my friends and family. Soon, I started getting inquiries from more people asking if they could try my natural soaps. I began making more and giving these sample bars out to try. I received a lot of feedback from different people with many different skin types, and they all loved how the soaps made them feel. I started receiving more requests and while the experience gave me lots of joy and satisfaction, I knew that I couldn’t just keep giving away soaps.

Inspired by the positive response, and feeling enormously encouraged, I began making small batches of soap and selling the bars. This small start eventually grew into making other varieties of all-natural soaps and then slowly expanded to us developing other all-natural skincare products.

The growth of our little business encouraged us to try participating in a few local pop-up markets. Our first pop-up market was around 2019 and it went very well, we began to do them more regularly. It was going well until a few months later when Covid happened. Pretty much everything came to a stop, but by God’s grace we maintained the support of our local community and we managed to survive.

As of last month, we have officially opened our office/showroom located at 505 Main Street, #O4, Chula Vista, CA 91911. We are beginning to focus on expanding into wholesale so that we can make our products available and accessible in more locations.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When I was just starting out, I only knew that I enjoyed making soaps. I had a hobby that I enjoyed that soon turned into a “side hustle”. At that time, I had limited access to resources or help with starting a business. I had the passion but lacked the business know-how. Basically, I was just learning as I went, making mistakes along the way, and trying to improve with each obstacle I met. And in addition to that, when the economy took a major downturn around 2009, I got laid off. It was just a sequence of discouraging experiences during that time.

Without reliable full-time employment, I had nothing in the way of surplus income to use for building my soap business, so I made the difficult decision to temporarily place things on hold. Eight months after pausing my little soap business, I enlisted in the United States Navy and spoke very little about my soaps for nearly eight years.
I was on my third tour in the Middle East, and during some much-needed time off I was having dinner with some friends. Eventually, the evening’s conversation drifted to talking about past jobs prior to the military. One mentioned he had been in construction and explained how happy and satisfied he felt after putting in a long day of work and at the end of the day standing back and seeing the results of his hard work. That really struck a chord with me, and I mentioned that I used to make handmade soaps and could completely relate to those feelings of satisfaction at the completion of a job and seeing the results of your work. That conversation ignited the fire again, and I could not stop thinking about my soaps. The excitement I felt years ago when making handmade products for people regrew from there, and I knew I needed to try again.

After completing that 3rd tour in the Middle East, I was assigned to San Diego. It was a rocky start, and challenging balancing full time work for the Navy with navigating all the hurdles associated with starting a business. But after many months of work, I registered my business and completed all the necessary state and federal requirements, and I started attending local farmer’s markets and pop-up events on every weekend I had off. It was starting off looking like a great first year, and sales were growing steadily. Then another challenge came when Covid happened after only 6 or 8 months in business. It was rough during that time, and we all know the economy still isn’t great, but we continue to push through and still manage to slowly grow. It’s all about trying to find different ways to grow while continuing to make the high-quality products that our loyal customer base expects from us.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

Yes, we manufacture all our products. When we were just starting, we made everything from scratch, including all our packaging and labels. It took a lot of time of learning, reading, and researching. It also helped to be a part of the local markets and pop-ups because that gave us the opportunity to get advice from other business owners.

For every product we make, we put a lot of thought into it. A product that we plan to launch is never perfect first time. We try different combinations of ingredients, use them ourselves, make notes on how to improve, and then adjust the ingredients and try again. After many trials and a lot of tweaking and adjusting we eventually achieve the results that we want for each of our products. Once we are satisfied with the product, we give out small samples to a select group of people to test and try. Then we get feedback and opinions from them on the product, which sometimes leads to another round of testing and adjusting until finally we have a product that we can be proud to offer to the public. It’s important to us that all the ingredients we use are good for the skin and beneficial to our customers. Our goal is always to put out the best product we can, and never market a product or include ingredients that we would not use ourselves.

We really value the process of developing numerous small test batches and then manufacturing our products in larger quantities. Our strict control of ingredients allows us to have a lot of control of the overall quality of the products we offer to our customers. We work hard to source high quality ingredients and produce high quality products for our customers.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lelusoaps.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/lelusoaplab
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/lelusoaplab
• Other: Showroom Location 505 Main St, #o4 Chula Vista, CA 91911