We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tim Maides. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tim below.
Tim, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
Almost every facet of our business is differently than the industry standard. Being professional chefs by trade, we started making soaps but first looking at what ingredients we have around us. Nebraska is inherently farmer country and I knew that we should be using products local to us, and not having them shipped from all over the world. After some testing and digging, we found a local sunflower oil farmer just three hours away. His oil contains over 41% vitamin E oil making it very nourishing and moisturizing to our skin. We use 60% of their oil in all of our products making it the most locally sourced soaps in Nebraska.
Tim, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
With our background as Chefs we care very much about the ingredients of what we consume. In this case, skin is the largest organ in the human body so we very much wanted to keep our ingredient list as simple and natural as possible. Combining this with utilizing ingredients and products nearby, we produce some of the finest soaps in Nebraska. We only use therapeutic grade essential oils and at least 60% of our Nebraska grown sunflower oil. There are many cheaper options available but we refuse to use synthetic fragrances and bulk olive oils. Our products speak for themselves, once you use it, your skin will crave it. Especially here, where the winters are brutal and drying.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
We manufacture all of our own bar soaps and liquid hand soaps so there was a substantial learning curve. My best advice is to take notes constantly and meticulously. As a chef, all recipes constantly evolving and changing. You always want to get better and perfect your art and the only way to do that is to keep track of where you’re coming from. A lot of people can make cold processed bar soaps, but when we entered the world of hot process liquid soaps, there was a vast amount of trial and error paired with lots of chemistry and experiments to get it to the final product it is today. The hardest part is just to get started, because we always expect perfection from the beginning, but that is not how reality works. We can only improve over time.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Basically every aspect of this business has been a constant state of navigating hurdles and life changes. It started with my friend in the basement of my house and has since evolved into a whole manufacturing lab where we produce soaps for farmers markets and dozens of the wholesalers around Omaha. Since then one partner has moved to Southeast Asia and we’ve acquired another partner who also ran the business when I was living abroad for work. What we constantly reminds ourselves is that no one is harder on you, than yourself. We truly expect perfection from ourselves but it’s not natural. There will be hurdles, there will be setbacks, but the important part is to keep experimenting and pushing forward. The old adage “Rome wasn’t built in a day” applies a lot for us since this is a part time business venture so we’ve been slowly expanding and growing over the years. We invest a lot of money back into the business, similar to a start-up venture so we can purchasing new equipment and tools that will allow to expand into a more profitable business venture. This means a lot of sacrificed time but in the end, it will be worth it.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bensonsoapmill.com
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