Soap Making

My soap making adventure started out as a way to make affordable, natural soaps that would relieve my husband, Richard’s, varied skin conditions. Little did I know at the time that it would turn into a full fledge business for us. The journey has been great and the rewards of running a business are even better. I still get excited when it is time to make a batch of soap just as I did when I made my first batch many, many years ago.

I don’t make soaps as frequently as I did in the past because I now make large batches that can last us for at least a month or sometimes two months. Therefore, I am making soaps at least once a month and let me just say that it is a busy day for me and hubby – making large batches per fragrance can bring on challenges. Any who, here is how things are set up prior to soaping, the process and the soap in the mold. Of course this picture gallery is of our most popular soap Tea Tree & Neem.

enJOY!

First we prep our area by placing contact paper down. This makes clean up easier and protects our work space. We also get all of our tools ready that will be used in the soap making process. The white bucket is what we use for soap making. It is a short, wide thick bucket and its size and shape make it easy to work with. The grey bucket is our lye that we buy 50# at a time now. We have come a long way, I remember when we were buy 1 – 3 containers at a time. God is GOOD!

I then put on my safety equipment – masks and full shield masks

Can’t forget the gloves, btw I wear special soaping clothes when soaping and my shirt is long sleeve

These are the essential oils used in our Tea Tree & Neem Soap. They are not yet weighed

This is water and lye weighed, the stage before they are mixed together.

All of our solid and liquid oils weighed

Neem Powder weighed and ready. We use both Neem Oil and Neem Powder in Tea Tree & Neem

Essential Oils weighed. I know it is alot, but this is a huge batch

We do the RTCP (room temperature cold process) method. And this is the stage when the hot lye is added to the room temp oils. We use the whisk to help distribute the lye so that it can melt the other hard oils.

As you can see the hard oils are melting nicely after several minutes

All melted

Neem Powder added after all oils are melted and we also add the essential oils at this point. If you can see it, the grey metal thingie that you see is the paint attachment to our drill. We use this to blend everything together.

Soap in the mold

All done – well until it is time to cut!

It is March and time to really get things on and popping. This year has really taken off with a BANG for us and we are very GRATEFUL for it. Things are starting to really look UP and folks are recognizing Karess Krafters – God is GOOD!

The nature of this blog is inform our customers of a changes that is in the making. Not major a change but a change that we hope will make a positive difference and a better experience for our customers.
When we first introduced our Hemp-loe body cream as well as our hair conditioner we were looking at a way to keep cost down as well as work within the limited storage space that we have. Therefore, since we were already selling our sugar scrubs in a jar container we thought it would be best to offer the cream and conditioner in the same style container. We already had inventory for them and had found a nice space to store them in our work area. Well after much discussion with Hubby and feedback from a loyal customer we thought it would be a great idea to switch to bottles for the said items. We were already getting bottles for our Fruit Nectar Hair and Body Oil so all we needed to do was execute the idea of switching to bottles.

Now that we are nearly out of our jar inventory, we will restock bottles instead for our creams and conditioner. This way customers have the ease of carrying their lotion in their purse, keeping the conditioner in the shower and less potential to contaminate the product. So over the next two weeks look for our creams and conditioners to be packaged in bottles. You will have the option of getting a pump or disc cap.

We love getting feedback from our loyal customers. If you have a suggestion that will help you experience Karess Krafters better, be sure to drop us a line.
Til next time, Be blessed
Richard and Rochell

We have finally taken a picture of our New Soap Sampler set. We are pretty pleased with the packaging. It is not too fancy nor is it to cheesy. We love the ease of wrapping each bar with that cardstock paper and placing each soap bar in its own little compartment within the box. We have to use paper shred in order to raise the bars up due to the compartments being pretty deep in-depth. But all in all we are pleased with it and hope that you are too!

Our soap sampler is perfect for travel and gifting! We expect we will sell a lot of these.

Recently, Hubby brought me home a small 4x4x4 Kraft shipping box that he came across through out his travels. He knows that I am always on the look out for really small boxes for single item shipping that are FREE! I have had this box for a little while and finally used it yesterday for a single item order. I was very pleased with the sturdiness of the box and how my 4 oz jar fit so perfectly in it as well as the free samples that I included.

I am more excited about two things – first, the box is light which means shipment stays within the First Class range and second, the box offers protection to the contents in holds. For the longest time I have used the bubble mailers to mail single item orders (soaps, scrubs, moisturizer, etc.). I have always worried that during shipment the bubble wrap would take a serious beating and rip thus ruining the contents it holds. Well, I did have an incident like this to happen two years ago during the holiday rush, but there were not enough incidents for me to make a change. Even though this incident was the only one we had, I feel it is necessary to implement the 4x4x4 boxes in to our shipping inventory. This way my mind will be at ease and I can eliminate the Kraft paper that I use to wrap each jar for added protection. I can also get rid of the tons of packaging peanuts that I have collected over the years.

Therefore, I have 4x4x4 Kraft boxes ordered, a half of roll of Kraft paper to get rid of, my mind at ease and excitement to put the boxes in use.

Thank you Hubby for bringing that box home
Rochell

Goodness! We are only into the second month of the year and it seems as though I have already falling off the band wagon with this blogging thing. Heck I have even been slow to Twitter and post to our Fanpage. Even though I have been really laid back with my updates, I do have a good excuse, several if I might add.

First, my son who is my middle child has not been applying the time, energy, motivation, etc to the most important aspect of his life at this stage – SCHOOL WORK! Therefore, I have taken some much-needed time to make sure he gets back on track and remains on track

Second, orders have come in DAILY since the start of the New Year. We are so grateful for the orders and have been working overtime to fill orders and restock products.

Third, sometimes you just need to take a break from the things you love to do in order to brainstorm and come up with new and better ways of doing things – in my case MORE products.

With all this said, I have finally settled on the packaging for the Soap Sampler, but I have not taken a picture yet…SORRY, maybe next time.

Be blessed
Rochell

More ways to save

We are sure many business owners are looking for ways to cut cost without sacrificing the quality of their products. We are one of those businesses. As the last quarter of 2011 came to an end, we started thinking of ways to cut cost and still maintain the quality products our customers have become use to. Let us just say we will NEVER sacrifice the quality of our products to save a buck or two, our quality and attention to detail is what keeps our customers coming back for more. We’ve worked too hard to develop the customer base we have and we don’t intend to do anything foolish to lose our loyal customers and the many more to come.

With the rising cost of shipping we had to come up with ways to keep the quality, affordability and integrity of our products in tact. Due to the hike in shipping our suppliers now charge more, which cuts into our costs. So we decided to do the following

1. We buy more items local, such as our olive and rice bran oils
2. We’ve developed a relationship with a restaurant supplier whom we have been able to get equipment and raw materials through at an affordable price. Just imagine the shipping cost of 50# each of coconut and palm oils… exactly, my thought OUTRAGEOUS
3. We stop having labels for our packages printed. We use to put a label with our logo and website address on the outside box of every order that left our facility. One less thing to buy, more money saved.
4. Most of all our items are purchased from suppliers that are either on the East coast or closer, not as far out is the west coast. This has helped with the shipping cost (less distance to travel, less money for shipping). I am seeing a big difference in the overall price of products that our shipped in, such as our jars.
5. We take part in more CO-OP buying with other bath and body makers. Some of our products do not need a bulk purchase; therefore the less we buy of those items the more it cost us. Since we use raw materials such as Honeyquat in only one of our products, Honey-Hemp Conditioner, we don’t need a 25# bucket of it. So we work with others to get a larger quantity that is then divided among the participants. This saves us a TON.
6. We no longer buy from suppliers who have a “blatant” handling fee in their checkout section. We realize that some companies have a hidden fee, which is fine with us; we just don’t like to see it as “Handling” fee. We feel we should not have to pay you to handle your inventory…just saying
7. Finally, we have begun using the small Ziploc bags for our samples. We were using small ¼ oz jars but again the cost of shipping is causing those little critters to cost just as much as regular jars. We also use the foil packets from time-to-time, but have found the Ziploc bags to be much more cost effective. We will only use the foil packets for companies who request samples for giveaways (and we limit this to just 5 companies a year). Check out the picture below of the Ziploc bag and foil packet samples.

We hope our ways of saving can help someone and until we come up with more ways,

Be Blessed
Ric and Ro

I am still making big batches of soap in Karess Krafters’ work room. I love the idea of producing more soap with one batch. It makes more time to do other things, and that is always a plus for me.

Yesterday, while in the work room, I had to cut a couple of slabs into logs. Me, being a cheapo, decided to use the long cutting blade that came with one of my molds as my slab cutter. It worked well with the first few batches, but things were off yesterday. For some reason I could not hold the cutter to the point that it cut the slab perfectly. I had bars that were either too wide or too short and that pissed me off…BIG TIME. Hubby was hanging out in the work room with me and when he saw how upset I had became he immediately got some wood, his saw and drill and modified an old cutter by turning it into a log cutter. It looks much like this one. I am so blessed to have a loving and supporting husband. I just love me some Richard.

Also, one of my batches failed like crazy and I was not about to let all those precious oils just go down the drain, so I had to re-batch Blue Sky yesterday. Since it was a large batch, the crock pot method was not the best option because my crock pot is not large enough to hold all the soap. So I used two 12 quart stainless steel pots in the oven. Here is what I did
1.I cut the soap up and tried my best to cut it so that the blue portion was separate from the white. It didn’t work so well some of the blue was with the white
2.I put the blue in one pot and the white in another
3.Added water to the bottom of the pot
4.Placed both in the oven at 350
5.Let them cook down and hit each one with the blender
6.Added more fragrance to the batch
7.Poured into the mold and hopefully when I cut today or tomorrow they will look decent

Finally, I wanted to share that I have done away with the paint attachment that I was using with the drill because it took forever for it to come to trace and it did not mix my additives in very well. I am still using the drill however I am using a cement mixer attachment. It works much, much better.

Until next time, be blessed
Rochell