Part 2 – the experimenting
I mentioned in part 1, that the development part of running this business was one of the steepest learning curves that mum and I have ever been on. I stand by that, although I would now add that the marketing and selling side of things comes in at a very close second.
I’m actually writing this before I’ve sent out part one (it’s been scheduled on my very clever Shopify app to send tomorrow morning), but it’s a little unnerving to embark on part 2 before I know how well (or otherwise part 1 has gone down). But here goes nothing….
The first bar(s)
So (pre having my own children) when I had endless free time to experiment with new and exciting sustainable alternatives, I came across soapnuts as an alternative to washing powder. Soapnuts, for those who don’t know, are a little fruit, related to the lychee family that contains saponins and have traditionally been used to make soap. More recently, they have made a bit of a resurgence and you can now buy them in their dried fruit form and pop them in a little bag to throw in with your laundry. You can get about 5 washes out of each little bag and after that you can take out the soapnuts and throw them on your compost. Super sustainable and a bit of fun too! So there I was with the shampoo bar I had been given from my sister in one hand and my soapnuts in the other when I had my first lightbulb moment: if these soapnuts cleaned clothes, then why not hair? We’d done enough research by then to know that to make a solid shampoo bar you needed some kind of fat or oil base and surfactants (the ingredients that cleanse your hair), emulsifiers (ingredients that mixed your surfactants and base together) and any extras like actives, oils or scents. This, by the way, is a very simplified version.
So I set about attempting to turn soapnuts into a useable surfactant for my new wonder-shampoo bar. This in itself proved challenging. The soapnuts didn’t particularly like to be ground, blended or processed. They tended to get a bit sticky and clump together. But I got there in the end and mixed together the rest of my ingredients.
Again, I made that sound quite easy, but even getting hold of these ingredients was a challenge. Each of these ingredients had to be researched (we didn’t want to be using anything to strong or irritating on the scalp, anything that came from a petro-chemical source or anything with an opaque manufacturing line. This was days and days of research for each ingredient, and we started compiling a very long list of things we decided we didn’t want to be using. We contacted suppliers for information data and safety data sheets and while some seemed quite happy to provide, for others we had to fill out extensive forms about intended use and our own knowledge of what we were doing with these ingredients. Some of them came in fine powders which meant we had to head out to our local paint shop and buy some heavy-duty masks (this was pre-covid, so they weren’t as easy to come by) as well as goggles and gloves to prevent accidental splashes from harming us. At this point in time, we didn’t have a website, nor had we even registered as a company and so a lot of suppliers saw us for what we really were (a couple of enthusiastic amateurs messing around in the kitchen) and refused flat out to send us any samples or sell us anything at all.
After a while however we had managed to compile a reasonable number of useable ingredients and we set about making our first bars, including the one made with soapnuts. One of the first problems we faced was combining the ingredients. We had to heat the oils to melt them to make them mixable, but a lot of the other ingredients didn’t have hugely high heat tolerances, so we could only add them as our mixture began to cool down. Some waxy pellets melted easily, others burned (we set off the fire alarm a fair few times to begin with). Some powders never seemed to change state at all and ended up giving the final product a grainy texture. As time went on, we upgraded our manufacturing equipment, but at the very beginning, this is what we started with:
- A home made bain-marie (a stainless steel bowl in a saucepan of water)
- A thermometer
- Our kitchen weighing scales
- A syringe
- Kitchen spoons and forks to mix with
- An Ikea rubber ice-cube mould (in little heart shapes)
- Goggles and face masks
Mum and I were meticulous about cleaning the kitchen beforehand (sometimes I suspect that mum only agreed to do this with me at the beginning because she got such a clean kitchen out of the process) and we tried to be as scientific as possible throughout the whole process. My husband and dad joked that we looked like Walt and Jesse from Breaking Bad as we carefully measured out our ingredients and hovered over the stove in our gas masks and goggles (we did look fairly ridiculous). If I’m completely honest, I can’t actually remember if the soapnut bar was the first one we tried or if there were earlier iterations, but I do know it was certainly in the very early days of experimenting.
The 'poo bar'
Long story short, we managed to mix everything together and squished it into our little heart shaped moulds to set. A couple of hours later we came back to, what can only be described as little heart shaped, sticky poos. I forgot to mention earlier, but soapnuts are brown. The bars hadn’t set particularly well (an incorrect liquid to solid ratio) and the soapnuts had made them this glorious brown colour, that, even with the best spin-doctor in the world, I don’t think would ever be sellable. We laughed, I even tried one that night in the shower (it got stuck in my hair and took some serious combing and conditioner to get out) and went back to the drawing board, the ‘poo bar’ thankfully consigned to the history books.
We muddled on through like this for a while (I think I may have even attempted a second poo bar, convinced that if I could just get it to set then perhaps it would work, but I can’t be sure on this), until we decided to invest a bit of money in an ebook with details on the different components of solid shampoo and how to make them at home. This was certainly a step in the right direction and we were soon making bars that at least resembled a solid shampoo bar, even if they didn’t work too well.
We documented each of our attempts on Excel and soon became savvy enough to try three or four different variations in one experiment eg four different levels of surfactant in one experiment rather than mixing up an almost identical formular four times. This, of course, lead to more problems, one of them being that occasionally we forgot which ingredients we had added to which bowl (now with four different bain-maries on the go at once). We developed a highly sophisticated (read very simple, can’t believe we weren’t doing it at the beginning) system in which we lined up all our ingredients on the bench and moved them backwards so they rested against the wall once they had been added to each bowl. Writing this down, it seems so absurd that we didn’t think to do this at the beginning, but we really were brand new to this and without educators or youtube videos to watch, we were, quite simply, learning by failing. Often it was highly frustrating, but it was also really exciting and incredibly rewarded when it felt like we made progress.
We struggled with our scales (not intended for measuring quantities less than 1g which we needed to do) and so invested in a more sensitive set. We invested in proper pH monitor after we discovered the urine sticks we had been using (left over from mum’s work as a GP) were out of date and perhaps not quite as accurate as we’d hoped. We developed new methods of testing our bars as we soon realised that our very subjective feedback from family members relied more on how stressful their day had been rather than the incremental differences in our bars.
One of the methods we were particularly pleased with we named the ‘Tizzy Test’ (the name of course is Tina and Lizzy whizzed together). Based entirely on the Ross Miles Foam test, in order to test the foaminess of our bars we got a glass measuring jar, dissolved 1g of our bar in 100ml of hot water and whizzed it with a blender for 20 seconds. We then measured the height the foam reached. Silly things like this brought us a lot of joy and quite honestly, we laughed our way through most of these experiments. This was probably the part of the business we enjoyed the most and certainly, at least by the time we came to actually selling the bars, the part we felt most confident doing. At this stage, we had this naïve idea that once we’d perfected our product (and we knew we weren’t going to even try and sell anything that we didn’t feel was better than everything else out there) that it would just walk off the shelves. We had NO clue of the battle to even get it on the shelves in the first place! That however, is a story for another blog post.
Do let us know if any of the above was even the remotest bit interesting to you! The last thing we want is for people to groan when they find another part of our story in their inbox! Drop us a comment below 😊