So Apparently I Own a Soap Company Now

How Wayward Soap Co. went from a dirty little idea to an actual business… and why building a website nearly took me out.

Starting a soap company sounded pretty simple.

Make soap.
Sell soap.
Make money.
Buy more soap shit.

Easy, right?

Absolutely fucking not.

What started as a love for making really good soap quickly turned into learning approximately 47 professions I never applied for.

Suddenly I'm not just making soap. I'm a product photographer. A package designer. A fragrance tester. A label maker. A shipping department. A purchasing agent. A marketing department. A customer service representative.

And, apparently, a website developer.

That last one has been particularly entertaining because I am what you might politely call NOT TECH SAVVY.

Me vs. The Website

Building the Wayward Soap Co. website has taught me several things.

Mostly new curse words.

I went into this thinking, How hard could it possibly be? You put some pictures on a page, type some words, add a little shopping cart and boom—you've got yourself a website.

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

No.

There are domains and DNS records and SEO and Google Search Console and TXT records and meta descriptions and image sizes and mobile layouts and shipping settings and payment processors and approximately 900 buttons that I'm afraid to touch because I don't know if I'm about to change a font or accidentally delete the entire internet.

At one point Google told me to add a TXT record.

Ma'am.

I make soap.

I had no idea what the hell a TXT record was, where it lived, or why Google suddenly needed one from me.

But I figured it out.

Eventually.

And by “figured it out,” I mean there was some Googling, some cussing, some clicking things with reckless abandon, and a whole lot of please God don't let me break this.

Meanwhile, There's Soap Everywhere

While I'm fighting for my life on the internet, I'm also actually trying to build a soap company.

That means testing recipes, choosing oils, comparing suppliers, finding fragrances that actually survive cold-process soap, designing bars, hunting down molds, figuring out packaging, taking product pictures, calculating costs, creating labels—and somehow resisting the urge to buy every ridiculous silicone mold I find.

That last one isn't going particularly well.

But slowly, all these little pieces are starting to come together.

And Wayward is beginning to feel less like “this crazy soap idea I had” and more like “holy shit, I'm actually doing this.”

The Part Nobody Puts on Instagram

Starting a small business isn't pretty all the time.

Sometimes it's a gorgeous freshly cut loaf of soap that came out exactly like you imagined.

And sometimes it's 11:30 at night, you're wearing pajamas, you have 16 browser tabs open, and you're Googling:

“WHAT THE HELL DOES @ MEAN IN A DNS TXT RECORD?”

There are mistakes. There are things I've bought twice because the first one was wrong. There are recipes that need tweaking, photographs that look terrible, website sections that refuse to cooperate, and days when accomplishing one tiny thing feels like a major victory.

But there's also something pretty damn satisfying about looking around and realizing:

I built this.

Maybe not gracefully.

Definitely not quietly.

And almost certainly with an inappropriate amount of profanity.

But I'm building it.

Welcome to the Dirty Dish

So that's what you'll find here.

I'm going to share some of what happens behind the scenes while I build Wayward Soap Co.—the successes, the screwups, the soap experiments, things I learn along the way, and probably a few stories that should have stayed private.

If you're building a small business yourself, maybe you'll learn something from my mistakes.

If you're here because you like handmade soap, you'll get to see how your bars go from a ridiculous idea in my head to something sitting in your shower.

And if you're just here to watch me fight with technology...

Pull up a chair.

I've got a feeling this shit is just getting started.

Be good. Get dirty. Wash up.
— Wayward Soap Co.