Log 002 // Soap Games

I used to make potions in the bathroom at my grandma’s house. Every bottle under the sink, every travel shampoo from the last hotel stay, the conditioner I wasn’t supposed to touch. All of it into the tub. The smell was questionable. Final product unusable. I just loved the process.

Combining things made new things. That was enough.

Eventually the potions stopped. Not because I lost interest. Because at some point the mess became wasteful. The product was unusable, the materials were spent, and there was nothing to show for it. Play started requiring a justification. A purpose. An output worth the input.

The older I got the more that logic compounded. Messing around with something — at work, at home, wherever — started feeling irresponsible. Like I should already know what I was doing before I started doing it. Experimentation without a guaranteed outcome stopped feeling like learning and started feeling like waste.

So I stopped experimenting.

At Wholesale Supplies Plus, the resident maker had been doing it forever. She knew everything without a recipe. Watching her work felt like a different language. I’d never be fluent because I’d started too late. It was a whole world I just found out existed.

Then she retired. And someone needed to make the soap for my Instagram videos. That someone was me.

I started where the business tells everyone to start: melt and pour. Melt the soap base, add fragrance, pour into a mold. Low stakes, fast results, nothing to ruin. The perfect on-ramp for someone who’d been told for years not to waste materials on something she didn’t know how to do yet.

But melt and pour went somewhere. Sugar scrubs. Lotion from scratch. Body butters.

Recipes I found, then modified, then made entirely my own. The formula wasn’t the final thing. It was just the starting point for finding what I actually wanted.

The community found me at the same time. While I was photographing ingredients, writing captions about new fragrances, and adding soap making staples to our emails, people were turning them into things I couldn’t even imagine. The same base products in a hundred different hands became a hundred different things. No two makers working the same way. No ceiling on what the materials could become.

I fell in. Not as a marketer. As a maker.

And that’s when the marketing got good.

I knew what questions beginners asked because I’d asked them. I knew what made a formula feel worth trying. I knew what the community celebrated and what it side-eyed.

I knew the difference between a brand that understood soap people and one that was just selling to them.

At some point the flicker started. This could be a business. I could sell this. I could build something here. Our customers were doing it, so why couldn’t I?

And the moment I started optimizing the hobby, I lost the plot. The potions stopped feeling like magic. They started feeling like inventory.

I’ve been trying to find my way back.

The best thing that ever happened to my marketing was stopping trying to do marketing. I made the thing. I joined the world. The rest followed.

I’ve been making things in my kitchen again.