A Kitchen Hobby Turned Into a $320K/Year Business (HOW?!)

How does this young mom make $320,000 a year crafting soap from her kitchen? I needed a way to make money from home. But is making six figures at home while being a full-time mom realistic for most people? I had no business experience. I just started reading about all the bad stuff they put in soap and thought to myself, maybe I can make something better. What are the typical startup costs? 400 bucks. And how does she get a ton of customers through her online store? My marketing budget is literally zero dollars. So where all the customers come from? If you ever dreamed of making six figures from home, stick around because Ashley is going to show you exactly how she does that every single day. So we're here with Ashley today. She's going to teach us how to make some soap, which I'm excited to do on a minimal budget. But walk us back. How'd you first get into this business? So I had just had my daughter and I started diving down the rabbit hole of what's in all the products that we use every day. You know, you have a baby and you want everything to be perfect for them. So I started diving into all of that. And I found out that the products at a lot of the stores weren't really that great as far as personal care products. There's a lot of chemical ingredients like the fragrance and everything like that. So I decided I could do it better. And I decided just to make it at home for myself and my family. We're early in 2026. How long have you been doing this for? And talk to me a little bit about that transition from, you know, before Ashley to like now Ashley as well. I started making soap four years ago and I began the business shortly after that. When I first started, I didn't know anything. And I still don't feel like I know anything. I just kind of take things as it comes to me. And that's how you grow, especially in entrepreneurship. Like, for example, I didn't know how to manage employees. I didn't know how to do payroll. I didn't know how to do taxes. Like the first time I had to look at a tax document, I was like, what is this? So I've learned a ton and I've just taken things as it's came to me. And that's really how you grow as an entrepreneur, especially when you're starting completely from scratch. What ingredients are you looking for in the grocery store today? So we're going to be getting coconut oil and distilled water from the grocery store today. So take me back. What was your life back then before financial pressures, anything before when you had your kid or was it truly like, hey, we just want cleaner ingredients? Talking about that. It was stressful becoming a mom and going through all the changes that come with that. So, for example, postpartum anxiety, I never wanted to be away from her. Like I thought I would have a baby and I'd be like, oh, I'm going to go to the gym for an hour. I'm going to have my family member watch her. But I just wanted to be with her all the time. And that was a big catalyst into starting the business. Then how did like soap? Like, was that like the real plan to like get over anything or like how did soap come into the picture of it? I just wanted to make a product that was better for my family and I to use. So I only started making it because of that. But then my husband started telling everyone I was making soap. I'm shy. I didn't want to talk about it. But he started telling people and then they wanted to try it. So we started giving it out and then they came back and they wanted to buy it. And that's how it kind of made me realize that this could be a business. This could be my way to stay home with my baby. Cool. Well, let's grab some of the ingredients and I want to grab whatever you need to grab here. And as you're doing, I want to ask, like, who were your first customers? Was it all family, friends? And yeah, what ingredients are we grabbing here? So we're going to need coconut oil. We'll go with this one. About $6.49. My first customers were family and friends. And that's just because we started giving them out to people who are close to us to try. And then they came back because they loved it and they wanted to buy more. And a lot of them still buy soap for me now. No way. What was the light bulb moment where you're like, OK, I'm actually going to turn this into business. Were people like loving it or? The first time I was handed money because I was like, oh, I need to make money. I love it. Well, we're going to use this coconut oil. And we're going to grab the other ingredients and we're going to start making some soap here. So stay tuned for that. The next ingredient is water. So I'm just going to grab one of these wild cherry, clearly Canadian waters or? That won't work. We need specific water for soap making. And what is that? So I can't just throw a swarming water in here. Like what water are we using then? No, we need distilled water. Perfect. Right here. So who else were you selling to back then? I know family and friends. But once you got your first customer, where were you selling at? I started signing up for some free local farmers markets. And I brought my daughter along with me. And I was able to baby wear her the whole time I was selling. And we had a lot of fun. She loved people watching. And we made some soap sales. Then when did you transition to online sales as well? I started posting pretty regularly to social media. And then it was a couple months in that I had my first video start to go viral. And I really started to get sales online. Was that like a crazy feeling? Because I feel like that's a whole new realm of possibility once you start doing online sales. It's insane. It almost feels unreal because you see these orders coming in, whereas you're used to being face-to-face with people. And you're doing a face-to-face transaction. And then you have your phone online. And you just have money coming in. And it's the craziest feeling. And it just showed me what truly how much power there is in social media. When you were getting those first online sales, did the perception of this business change for you? Because now people you don't even know are buying this. So how did that perception change? I felt like it could really grow into something big. Because once you're on the internet, you can reach so many people. So you could be in front of millions of people just in one sitting instead of going to farmer's markets. And maybe I see 100 people, whereas I could go online and see thousands of people. I like it. So we got our coconut oil. We got our distilled water. We're going to check this out. We're going to get a final budget just so you know how much this costs. So let's head over there and start doing it. All right, so we're checking out here. We got $179,828,1007,1656. That's it? Yeah, that's it. Cool. Well, let's pay. Awesome. I'll get it. No, no, no, no. This is on the upflip. This is on the upflip card, everybody. We're gentlemen here. Okay. Awesome. So we are at Hobby Lobby now to get some sodium hydroxide. We're going to look for a crock pot and anything else that we need here. What is the significance of sodium hydroxide and do you need it to create soap? Yeah. So if you want to make soap from scratch, it's a necessary ingredient or you just have oils. You just have coconut oil and water. It's needed for the chemical reaction that turns the oils into soap. So every bar of soap is going to have sodium hydroxide in it? Yep. Any bar that is true soap. Cool. Well, let's go make some true soap and get some sodium hydroxide. Awesome. So here is our sodium hydroxide here. About $16 it looks like, but I know you can also do it in bulk, and that's what you do once you get big at doing this. How much does it cost you? So you can get a 50 pound pail for only $150 off of Amazon. We have the coconut oil and the distilled water. What else do we need to get started? Just some of our equipment. So we're going to need to get a crock pot and an immersion blender. Cool. So you can actually even grab your immersion blender just from right here. They have it all in their soap making aisle. And that is a necessity to actually mix all this thing together? Yeah. It makes a huge difference in being able to get your soap, your whole batter. And it's about $18.99 here, so $19.16 or $35. You know, we're about $51, $53, somewhere around there. Check my math out Flip, I know you will. So let's go grab the crock pot then. Awesome. So when I think of a crock pot, I think of like being at home with my mom, like putting like a bunch of food in a crock pot. I mean, is it the same thing? So it's going to be the same crock pot, but you don't want to be using the same one that you use for food just because the soap making is going to cause a lot of wear on the crock pot. So I recommend just getting a cheap crock pot and going with that. When you are looking at crock pots to buy, what matters? What doesn't matter? So nothing actually matters. The biggest thing is that you have that heat source and the crock pot spreads the heat over very evenly. So technically you could even make hot process soap on the stove, but it's much easier just using a crock pot. I would go larger to start with, just so you can get into those bigger batches if you want to. Sweet. Now that we got all of our soap, I'm excited to get my hands dirty slash clean and start making some soap. So let's go. Let's go. Before we get into it, what are the different types of soaps you make and sell? And what exactly are we going to be making here on this table? So right now we're going to make hot process soap. Hot process soap is a form of soap making where you force the chemical reaction to happen much more quickly by using heat. This is a form of soap making that I used a lot when I first started my business. But as it's grown and I've scaled up and I've been making a lot more soap, I instead use the cold process method, which is very similar. It's just with the cold process method. You're mixing the soap together and you let it just go through the chemical reaction on its own and sit. Whereas hot process soap makes things go a little bit faster. I'm excited to do this. What are the other types of soaps, though, do you do? Yeah, tell me more about that. So the biggest differences with our soaps is the base oils used. So we do a sea salt soap, which is sea salt. It's really good. It's my favorite. It's sea salt, organic coconut oil, and cocoa butter. That bar has a really strong lather. It's really hard, lasts a long time, and it's plant-based. And then we also do a lot of beef tallow soaps made out of grass-fed beef tallow. Wait, no way. Oh, yeah. It's a big thing right now. It's become very popular using tallow for skincare. Interesting. So that's a very creamy bar of soap, has a more mild lather. But people that have very gentle skin love that bar. We are with the soap expert here today. So I'm excited to start actually doing this. So let's get into it. So as we're getting all this stuff ready to go here, we're just using the three ingredients we bought. Again, it's going to be the sodium hydroxide, the coconut oil, and the distilled water. That simple for the audience to get started with it. Yep, you don't need anything complicated to make a bar of soap. I had a D-plus in chemistry in high school. So hopefully... I failed chemistry. No way. Yeah, I hated it. I hated the class. And then now I'm like, I love making soap. And I'll go and research the science behind soap making. Okay, so first we're going to weigh out our coconut oil. It's very important in soap making that you are accurate on your measurements because we are using a specific amount of sodium hydroxide to saponify, which means turn into soap. Big word. This specific coconut oil. Okay, cool. Let's say we are making different soap recipes. If we're using different types of oils, that's going to change the amount of sodium hydroxide we use. So if you're off on your measurements, your soap is not going to turn out right. We're going to need 908 grams of coconut oil. 908? Yes. Okay. So this, how much is this product? Okay. And we already have the scale zeroed out. I'm excited. This is going to be cool. This is not something you get to do every day. Should I take a big scoop? Yeah, just as best you can. With soap making, every oil is going to make the soap feel different. It's going to give different properties to the soap. Right now, we're working with coconut oil. Coconut oil creates a hard bar of soap that has a strong lather, so it's really bubbly. So if you're one of those people who you're like, I only feel clean if there's a lot of bubbles involved, you're going to love coconut oil. Is that like psychology though? What are some of the psychology things that you've had to use while selling soap? Well, scents are a big thing. But one really big thing is how you market it. I could take two of the same bars of soap, and if I approach it a different way, it's going to sell better. Especially if I'm highlighting some key ingredients that are in it. So for example, let's say we use colloidal oatmeal in that bar. I'm going to talk about all the soothing effects of colloidal oatmeal. You have really sensitive skin. This is going to be the bar for you. Would you say this is more of an art or more like a science, like doing all this stuff together here? It depends what kind of soap maker you are. There's some soap makers that are straight up artists. They can make the most beautiful bars of soap. And then there's also some soap makers that are more like into their formulations. And I feel that I fall more in that category. Even though you failed chemistry, you're in that category. So much has changed. But I like playing around with different ingredients. Like we have our soap of the month club, where we send out a different bar every month, and we're always working with something fun. Like we'll add avocado, different milks, all different types of ingredients to our soap. It's so cool because you've been doing this so long and for four years, and you're so passionate about it. You're so confident talking about all the science of it. But you were a beginner at one point. So what are those common mistakes beginners typically make when they're doing soap? So with teaching soap making, what I have learned is most people end up having issues with their scale somehow. Oh, really? Okay. They just didn't quite weigh it right, or maybe their scale's acting up. I've had many times where my scale was just not calibrated correctly, and then I've lost a whole batch before, which is no fun. But I've noticed a lot of people have issues with the scales, or they'll buy some weird ingredient that didn't really actually make sense. Like for example, when you go to purchase your sodium hydroxide, it needs to be just sodium hydroxide. There can't be any other extra ingredients in it. So now we're going to move our crockpot of coconut oil over to the crockpot. We're going to turn on the crockpot so that can start melting down. Do you do it at like high, medium, low? You can do either one. It's just going to go a little bit slower if you do it low. I like it high just because I like to be done quicker. Speed is everything. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I put that on high. That's going to start melting it down a little bit. We don't need to completely melt it down to start on our lye solution because the heat from the lye solution is going to melt down the coconut oil all the way. But I just like to get it started. It makes it a little bit easier. All right, sweet. So we got this in here. What is the next step? So the next step is we are going to make our lye solution. So we're going to be using our distilled water and our sodium hydroxide. This is the part that you need to be really careful on. Make sure you're wearing your proper safety gear. And then another thing I forgot to mention earlier is when it comes to making your sodium hydroxide solution, you want to be using either stainless steel or a plastic that is rated for high heat when mixing your lye solution because sodium hydroxide can react with other metals like aluminum. So it's important to use stainless steel. So that's what we're using is a stainless steel bowl. Can I throw anything into a soap bar or what do I do? Pretty much. People can throw egg yolk in there. What? No way. I've seen people throw sourdough breadcrumbs in there. No way. You can do anything in soap that is made from scratch. Let's start mixing this all together then. Awesome. So first, we're going to weigh our water. You always want to add sodium hydroxide to the water. Never water to sodium hydroxide. It can bubble up and create a volcano, which is just dangerous to clean. It's not fun. When you make hot process soap, you want to use a little bit more water. Okay. So I did forget that I used 300 grams. Okay, why is that as you're pouring it? The heat kind of causes it to cook out a little bit. Okay. The hot process soap is really going to heat up and it's going to lose some of the water and also it becomes really thick. So if you're using too little of water, it's going to be really tough for you to mix it up. So now we are going to do 132 grams of sodium hydroxide. Here we go. This is the moment of truth. You want to work in a well-ventilated area. Okay, sweet. And also this is getting extremely hot. Like if we took a thermometer, it'd be quite hot too. It's just the way the reaction happens. Wait, no way. Very hot too. So that's where we're going to pour this now right over our oils. No way. And it's going to help to melt down our oils. Oh yeah. I got a whiff of that. Looks like mashed potatoes, like a Thanksgiving dinner, like we're about to have here. That's what everyone says. So as you're letting this sit down here, what was happening? What was happening in this crockpot? So it goes through a couple of different phases. First, it gets really thick. It almost becomes one big block. And then it starts to look like mashed potatoes, like what we've got in here. Once it looks like mashed potatoes, that's when we're good. That's when it's gone through the chemical reaction that turns it into soap fully. And now we can start to put it into our mold. It's also a lot easier to work with because it's not just a big chunk. What do we need to do? Take off the lid here? Yeah, so we're going to take off the lid and then just mix it around. And then you can start scooping it right into the bowl. Can I set this down? The hot process soap feels like a paste. Are you doing this like 12 hours a day, eight hours a day? I mean, you work from home. Your kids, like, tell us more about that. So the past few months, we've had an insane amount of growth. At first, we were averaging about $20,000 per month. Last month, we did $50,000. And this month, we're probably going to do about $43,000 at the end of the month. Oh my gosh, incredible. It's crazy. It's life changing. I just can't. My first farmer's market, I think, I don't remember exactly how much I made, but I think it was like 300 bucks. And I threw a party. Starting up your business is messy, but setting up your company legally and properly doesn't have to be. That's because Busy does the hard stuff for you. Getting your LLC and getting your filing so you're legit from day one. No confusing fine print and no surprise subscriptions. Just clear upfront pricing and you only pay for what you need when you need it. So the only question is, are you ready to get your business off to a clean start? Click the link down below to get started with Busy today. For someone watching now, we got a few things out here, but do they need any fancy equipment really to get started? No, not at all. See what we have. We just have a Crock-Pot. You don't even need this mold. You could just take a cardboard box and line it with some parchment paper. So honestly, everything you use for soap making is very simple. And with running a business in general, the more resourceful you can be with everything you do, the better. Most of our equipment is from Facebook Marketplace. Bakeries and stuff are constantly going out of business. So I'll go in, I'll scoop up all the baker's racks. I'll take all the metal sheet pans. I'll take stainless steel tables. You don't have to buy stuff like that new and spend a ton of money. I have a commercial mixer in there that I also bought used. So just being resourceful can take you a long way in business. How many bars of soap will we get out of this batch here? So it depends on what size you cut it. But you'll get between 8 to 10 bars. Cool. So we've had this down. But again, you said it takes 12, 24 hours to get it all here. You don't want to cut it until it's completely cooled down. OK. And you prep before we came here. So shout out to you for that. So let's cut this hard piece. I'm going to set this one off to the side. How do we cut this? So this is the soap that I made yesterday. You're just going to unmold it and it pops out of the mold super easily. Yeah, incredibly easy. And then you can just roll back the silicone. Wow. How about that? And this is literally from three ingredients. I want to hit that home. Like this is from three ingredients. Oh yeah, you have soap. OK, here we go. So is this the right size then? Yeah, that'll be good. That's like pretty satisfying. It's kind of hard. Oh my gosh, I need to hit the gym. Especially being cold out right now. Oh man, I really need to hit the gym. Can I like push down from the top? Am I going to cut my hand open? No, that'll totally be fine. One tough thing is have you ever cut homemade bread before? I know my sister has. She's a big homemade bread person. Oh, OK. She probably knows how tough it is to like actually cut down straight. Yeah. So that's where a wire soap cutter is much more beneficial for soap making. Because it's tough. Like look how slanted this is. I'm a 26-year-old boy. I don't make bread. I don't even have salt and pepper in my fridge or in my pantry. But that's kind of cool though. Yeah, take a look at that. I mean, definitely slanted. It looks like a piece of bread. Speaking of selling, so how long did it take you from going like, you know, this kind of at homemade to like at scale, like what you're doing now? We've just progressively grown over time. There was no like huge change. We never took any loans for money or had like any huge moment where everything changed. It's just been a constant growing, putting more money into the business while still paying myself. That's how we ended up with no debt. Cool. So let's dive into revenue. That's what the people care about. What did you do in revenue in 2025? So we did $320,000 in revenue in 2025. Of this $320,000, break that down to me. I know you have a few different streams of income here. Yeah. So $190,000 of it was physical products. So we do our soaps and then we also offer shampoo, conditioner bars, a few other things. And then the rest would be from online products and our social media monetization. So we teach an online soap making course. And then we also sell recipes and we've done a few brand deals. And of course, social media monetization. While I'm just selling my physical products, I'm also just at the same time working on the online stuff because I'm making the soap anyway. So I might as well push the social media and the courses and everything because I'm doing this anyway. Either way, I'm taking home this. So I might as well do this too. Awesome. Let's get into the fun part of the startup costs. No one's interested in doing this. What are we actually doing? I got the blue markers. So I'm going to put startup costs. So we started with $20 in molds, $30 crock pot, $100 worth of coconut oil, $15 in distilled water, $30 in essential oils, $30 in sodium hydroxide. I bet people didn't think I could spell hydroxide, but I did. Keep going. $25 for the immersion blender and $100 for olive oil and then $50 miscellaneous. So like protective gear, some spatulas, that type of thing. So when we add all of this up, we get about $400 in our startup costs. Biggest monthly expense. What is it for you and your team? I would say my payroll. My payroll runs between $12,000 to $14,000 a month, depending on how much everybody works. And I am included in that payroll. And you're paying yourself a six-figure salary. Not of course, but you're paying yourself a six-figure salary. And how many other employees, just so the team or people know? I have three. One of them, including my mom. Fair. And then the other two? The other two, they both work part-time and they come in here. They help me label soap, ship orders. I don't handle any shipping of orders anymore. Welcome everybody to FanBlitz. We got a fun little friend here, Mr. Duck. Shout out to Don's Dish Soap. He's a goose. Either way, we're going to keep going. So welcome to our FanBlitz questions. Ready for these questions from our community? Oh, yeah. How do you stand out from competition? I post to social media a lot. And I also have a little twist on the business because I teach it as well. I like it. Did you have a big vision from the business from when you were just getting started? No, I just wanted to stay home with my baby. Oh, that's what you do. I want to stay home with this little thing all day. How did you determine who your target audience was? Just other people who are also interested in using more natural ingredients in the products they use every day. Would you recommend starting at a farmer's market for your idea? Oh, yeah. It's a great chance to get out in front of people, make some sales, and get the chance to talk about your products. I like it. Oh, I think he peed on me. How do you decide on packaging? So that's been... I wanted it to be more eco-friendly, but I also wanted it to be... Sorry. Quick take the goose. You have to edit that in there. All right. How did you decide on packaging? So the biggest thing is I wanted it to be eco-friendly, but I also wanted it to look nice, really show my brand and the more natural side of things, and be efficient for us to pack. Then last one, what's the best part about owning your business? Being home with my family all the time. Yeah, even though he pooped on me, that's okay. That is a wrap on family. So what were you charging back then? Would you recommend a beginner to start at that same price? So I actually charged more than I do now, which is interesting. Wait, no way. Yeah, I actually was able to lower my prices just a little bit because I started buying in large amounts. Especially on your base oils, that makes a huge difference because you saw how much the coconut oil was when we went to the grocery store. When you're buying it by the pallet, you're getting much better deals on it. And also I'm way more efficient. I can make 400 bars of soap in a day easily. Oh, that's insane. Yeah, whereas if I'm making three loaves of soap, I need to make a certain amount of money on that. But I was charging $14 a bar when I first started. Wait, $14 a bar for something like that, or? Just about, just about the same size. Okay, wow. And now it depends on the type of soap. We have a few different types of soap, but we're doing between $10 to $12 now. Because when I hear that, again, I'm a 26-year-old boy, so I don't buy very nice soap. Is that on the higher end, the lower end? So that's all within range of artisan soap made with real base oils. When you get an Irish spring soap or something, you can take a look at the back and it's nothing like what this is. So for what it is, it is normal. But if you're used to using $2 soap. Would you recommend someone to start out on the lower end of the market if they're just getting in this? Or where would you recommend just starting out again? Lower end of the market, higher end? Going great. You see a lot of $8 to $14. Like I said, I do recommend doing things like deals where it's like, hey, buy three, you'll get one free. Because that makes people buy way more soap instead of just getting one. So that makes a huge difference. How many bars a week are you pumping out with this current setup that we just did? And what are you doing now? I would say I was doing about 40 a week to get ready for farmer's markets and stuff back then. Whereas now we're doing about 1,000 a week, give or take, depending on the week of what's going on. It is so cool. This is a mass production of soap, just truly at your home, which is just so cool. Yeah. Well, let's go check out the mass production of soap here. Absolutely. All right. This already looks and feels much different because now we're doing the full scale production of what you're doing now. What do we got here? This is massive. So this is enough to fill one of these slab molds. Okay. So we just have enough to do a slab mold. This is going to be a very basic bar of soap, but I'm going to show you guys how we do it. Quick comparison. Show us what we use to mix just that homemade batch. So here's the size of it. And now here's what we're dealing with. So let's get to mixing, I would say. All right. So what's step one here? So step one, because everything is at the right temperature, we're going to pour our lye solution directly into our oils and then we're going to begin mixing with the immersion blender. Cool. Let's do it. So did you grow into this gradually or how did you get into this? Yeah. It happened very slow. So I just have been, as the business grows, I start growing things. I was just using those smaller loaf molds that we did earlier when we made soap, but just a bunch of them at once. But those are a pain to clean when you have like plenty of them. So then I had a company reach out to me that went in to send me these molds and now we have a great relationship with them. We get all their molds from them and yeah. Wait, that is super, super cool. And like what, how much did like this thing cost you? That one wasn't too bad. I think it was like $300 on Amazon. It's just a commercial immersion blender. I was going to say, of course, like for the audience, like you don't need to start with this. You can really do smaller as you did and as we did. So what is exactly is this and why was it covered? This is our lye solution. I cover it just to kind of hold in a little bit of the warmth. Look at that. Make sure you're all going together. Yeah, it's a cold day. It's already like very cold, which I like to keep it more like room temperature when I pour it. But it's cold today. I feel like we're making like a big like batter or something. Like it's like we're making pancakes right now. If you're into baking, you'd probably like soap making. There's a lot of little finicky things. Just like baking a loaf of bread. Soap's the same way. So ingredients that are in this, is the same ingredients that we were using earlier, just in bigger quantities or what's exactly like in this? So yes and no. So there's always going to be sodium hydroxide in our bar soap. There's always going to be a liquid. You can swap certain liquids, but for the most part, it's going to be distilled water. And then our oils can change. So this is a tallow soap. We're doing grass-fed beef tallow right here. Earlier, we did a coconut oil soap and you can do coconut oil and olive oil. You can do coconut oil and tallow. You can add some sweet almond oil in there. There's so many possibilities with soap making. That's what I want to ask. Like what's the craziest bar soap? Because I think you guys are doing like a beer soap right now. Like tell the audience about that and some other crazy inventions you can do with soap to open their mind to the possibilities. Oh yeah. So this month we're shipping out a beer soap for our Soap of the Month Club. Our Soap of the Month Club, we make a completely different bar soap every single month. Sometimes there's milk in it. Sometimes there's avocado. Sometimes there's honey. Sometimes there's watermelon juice. Like we're always doing something different because there is so many possibilities for soap making. So again, this is a big size. I should have done this earlier. I mean, add size and put my whole arms around it. Like how many bars of soap will this batch make here? This will be 80 once this mold is full. 80? Okay, cool. Obviously consistency is important here, but like how do you ensure consistency between each batch? So honestly, soap is pretty simple. When you're making bigger batches, the only change you need to do is just multiplying every ingredient in the batch. Really? It's that simple? It's that easy. It's really like making, as you like said, like you can- Just like it. Yeah, I love it. A thousand bars of soap or so, how much time would that take or like how many days? That would take me about three days with the equipment I have right now. And also the biggest thing isn't so much the actual soap making that takes a lot of time. It's the cleanup and prep to make soap. Most businesses fail because they start with the wrong idea, but you can avoid that trap with our free report. The 137 most profitable business ideas. Grab it now using the link below. So this is going to be different than the small scale cutting we did earlier. What exactly are we going to be doing with this then? So this is going to make about 80 bars. We're going to first cut it into loafs. So like the long loafs, and then we'll whip out our bar cutter and we'll cut them into bars. Equipment, how much does this stuff cost here? I believe this slab mold was $300. And then I want to say this was about a thousand dollars, but there is cheaper options. So this is our tallow facial bar. This design is- It's pretty. Yeah, I love this bar. The design is created by using activated charcoal. So again, we're still using only natural ingredients. And then it's scented with tea tree and lemongrass essential oil. And the whole base is grass-fed beef tallow. And we use aloe vera liquid instead of water. So you're getting that like cooling, a little bit of a cooling effect. Well, I'm sunburned. So I probably could actually use this. Yeah, exactly. Cool, well, let's load it up and get cutting this thing. Awesome. Wow. Yeah, this is much different than the small batch we did. Yeah, easy. Look at that. That is gorgeous. Like marbling. It's like a stage. So I know we're going to make a lot of food references, but yeah, that is a really pretty. Soap always looks like food. Let's push this through. I'm pretty excited to see this. Is this a two-person job? One person job? I normally do it by myself, but- Okay, well, I'm not going to sit here. It could be more helpful with another person. So I don't really put my foot in the bottom of the table. And what are you looking for as you're cutting this? Is this just like a straight push or- You just want to continuously give it force. Let's see this thing. You kind of stop. It can just make it harder to do. Cool. Let's see it. So you just push it right through. That's pretty sick. There you go. That's pretty cool. I'm not going to lie. That was so seamless. What are these like wires? So wires are amazing for anything. Yeah. Cutting soap. It just goes through so easily. It gives you a cleaner looking bar. So can we pull up one of these and see like what this looks like inside? Absolutely. That is like gorgeous. Actually, that is super cool. It literally reminds me of like marbling on like a steak or something. That's like how satisfying it looks like. It truly looks like marble right there. That's the fun of soap making is you can get into doing different designs and just making it a pretty bar of soap. Wait, so are these intentionally like designed like this or- Yeah, we do an intentional swirl. So the way it works is we just pour the soap, half of the soap batter into the mold. And then all you do is you add your colorant to that second half of the soap batter. And you just swirl it in there and it creates a really pretty design in the soap. Now we're going to pull out the smaller wooden soap cutter over there. We've got multiple things over here. Yeah. So we take all these off and then we pull out the other soap cutter and we'll cut it into actual soap. So we got this out. What exactly is this and how much does it cost and what does it do? I asked you five questions there, but take it as it is. So this is my bar cutter. This cuts up the loaves into actual bars. I believe this is about $215. Again, this one just came from Amazon. It makes it really efficient to be able to cut the full loaves at once. And it makes the bars all very uniform, which is really important when you're selling to have them all the same size and weight. Of course. All right. So I'm just going to go like this and simple. And you just push it down. That is super easy, though. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's super smooth. It's awesome. I'm going a little slow, but like that is very smooth. Oh, yeah. And then to be able to just cut up 80 bars in just a couple minutes is huge. I put my whole weight into it. Just like that. And then can I just pull one out to show the audience here? Look at that. Very pretty. Are there any final steps before we actually go off and ship these bars of soap? Yeah. So first, they need to cure for a month. That is going to be the peak amount of the bars are going to be fully hardened. They're going to lather well. And then we also bevel some of the soap. So we don't do it for all our bars. But for example, like this, our tallow bar, what we do is we kind of just shave the edges. And that's easier for that first use on the bar. And then we wrap it in its label. And then it's ready to go. So just confirm. So it is like a month waiting process for there. They should be shipped off. Yeah, you should, especially if you want to give your customers the best product, because that's going to be the bar that's going to last a long time and lather well. Cool. So there's whatever, 10 bars of soap here. But I know you guys got a thousand back there. So can we go check it out for the audience? Of course. Let's go. Cool. Let's check out where the money makes. And this is insane. This is really cool. And it smells super good. I can smell all the like aromas in here. So where exactly are we at here? So over here is where we do our shipping. And then basically in the middle, we have our curing soaps. And then at the wayside, we have all our ingredients and some of our equipment. And it's just basically broken up into those three parts. What I absolutely love about this place is like, we're still on your property. Like, this is just like your garage, essentially. It's just made into a, like a warehouse, essentially. I'm sure you want to expand on that, but like, yeah. 100%. I'm living every mom's dream because it's like, my baby's asleep. I'm like, okay, I'll go get my work done. It might be 4 a.m. in the morning, but like I'm walking out here. I can get like five hours of work done before she even wakes up. So give me the high level. What does the process look like for shipping? So when it comes to shipping, first, once the bars are cured, we're going to take them off the shelves. We're going to bevel them if we're beveling them, which just means shaving the edges to make it a little bit more smooth. And then we're going to label them. And then the way we label them is we just use coffee filters. So like craft coffee filters, put a little piece of tape on it. And then we wrap the soap band around it, which is the label that says what the soap is, the ingredients and everything. And then I have my employees print off the shipping labels and what's in the order. They print all those off. And then they just sit here and they box up the soap. It's pretty simple. Then it sits here to be shipped out the next day and USPS comes and fix it up. I never leave my house. Do a quick reflection for me, man. How different does this all look compared to when you're shipping orders, when you're just getting started? So different. For one, I don't really do much of the shipping anymore, which is amazing because I love being in the creative aspects of the business, the content creation, the making more soaps. And just overall growing the business. So it's just nice to not have to do those parts anymore. But it's crazy how much we're shipping out every single month. I can't believe it. How many bars of soap are like all in here right now then? Oh my gosh. Probably, I want to say about 3,000 on the curing racks right now. And we're kind of behind because Christmas was crazy. And we're trying to ramp up production. But 3,000, I mean, that's a lot of bars of soap just in here. We made 80 today, if that or so. Yeah. Exactly. Insane. Give me the master class. How are we going to be packaging this today? And what type of bar soap do we have here? So we have our Eucalyptus and Spearmint Sea Salt soap. It smells good. It smells really good. One of our stronger smelling soaps. And it's one of my favorites. It can really clear your sinuses in the shower. My sinuses are very clear right now. Right? It's a great bar of soap. So our packaging process is very simple. We just use the coffee filters. And we just go ahead and wrap it around the bar of soap. So you're just going to wrap it all around. And then you're going to fold it all in. It doesn't need to cover the full bar of soap, because it's going to be covered with the label. OK. So this doesn't look very pretty, but I'm trying my best here. My employees are pros at it. And I'm going to put a little piece of tape down. OK. It's that simple. We're going to get the label around it after. OK. Again, my employees are amazing at it. It looks super pretty when they do it. They've done so many. So then you just wrap it around. Yeah. And then you cut off the little bit of extra. Yep. And then we just take our hot glue gun and glue it down. Totally like 45-second process on this thing. Oh, yeah. And it's even faster when you're doing a ton at once. Oh, my gosh. So how much do you ship of these a week then? It depends on the week. Of course. End of the month, we get really busy. I would say we do most of our volume at the end of the month. Why is that? Because our soap of the month is shipping on top of our regular orders. So for example, just this is 700 bars of soap sitting right here. So you're shipping out, obviously, a lot of products here. What are your monthly shipping costs? I would say it varies between 4,500 to 6,000 a month. Nice. Marketing, everyone's going to care, how do I actually get to a process from zero where I'm shipping out 1,000 of these a week? So how much do you spend on marketing? We spend $0 on marketing. $0. Purely organic social media growth. No way. So is that where all the customers are coming from is just organic? Yep. And then the green. Tell me more about that. Obviously, people want to hear that. Well, you make all these posts on social media. You start to really build a community where people really start to connect with you. And then they start purchasing your products. And a product like soap, it snowballs. So I have the same customers coming back every couple to a few months to place another order. What social media platforms are you using? Kind of tell us more about your following. So right now, I'm on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. My biggest following is on Facebook. And honestly, Facebook has become my favorite place to post. Oh, interesting. Yeah. We have 450,000 followers now on Facebook, which is crazy. That's big. And I think we'll be able to hit 500,000 in the next month or so, because of just how much we've been growing. That's my favorite one. We definitely get most of our orders from Facebook. Facebook is huge for us. Instagram, we have, I want to say, 190,000 on Instagram. About the same on TikTok. And then YouTube, we have 35,000. I only really post my shorts. OK. But once we hire another employee, I want to get into doing more YouTube content. It's so incredible the power of social media, and people can really start businesses from ground zero and just build it all through organic social media, similar to what you've been doing. I tell people all the time, now is the best time in the world to start a business because we have that resource available to us. Could you imagine me before social media trying to go out and talk to 100,000 people in a day? It's not possible. But I can go on social media, post a video. Maybe that video takes me 20 minutes to make. I can be in front of a million people. So good. So, so good. So how often are you posting on social media then? I try to post at least three times a day. And the way I'm able to pump out so much content is I'm just filming whatever I'm doing around here. Like all day? Exactly. Yeah. And most of the time, it's just me out there making soap or I'm putting the orders out, that type of thing. So I just film whatever I'm doing anyway. And then I put it all together. I'll sit down at my computer, edit to be just the main money shots of like, I'm pouring the soap. I'm chopping the soap. Exactly, exactly. And then I talk over it. I just say whatever comes to my mind, whatever I feel like talking about that day. For advice for someone that's just building their social following, have it be Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. What's your biggest advice? Stop overthinking it. Okay. Just start posting. Because honestly, for a long time, I was just throwing whatever I could at the wall. I didn't know what was going to do well. But that's how you find out what is going to do well is you start putting things out there and you just keep track of what's doing well. And like, what is it about this video that made it perform well? But at first you don't have any data. So you just have to start doing something. Is there like a tried and true content method or like format that always like seems to work? Is it the founder story behind the scene? Something like that. Yeah. I would say the biggest thing is your hook. And your hook isn't just what you say at the beginning of the video. It's also your opening shot. What words are on the screen? Really paying attention to that is the most important thing. Because if you don't keep them, it doesn't matter what you say next. Absolutely. Ashley, this day has been like amazing so far. We have seen like your whole process. Like how have you grown? This has been so great. I mean, looking back on four years, I mean, do you remember what part of you was most worried about just getting started? I would say the part of me that wasn't sure if I would succeed or not, especially because it was make it or break it for me. I was like, I was not going to do anything that would make me not be able to be with my baby. So I burnt every bridge and I made it happen. The roadmap that was given to you beforehand, do you feel like you now have built your own roadmap where people can follow you? Yeah, especially because of the way that I have my systems laid out. Like I'm just very aggressive with social media and it works. What does success look like for you now? Just building and building with my family, with me. Everybody in my family participates in this business. Although you go on social media and you see my face all the time. My 11 year old was out here with me at 10 o'clock at night. Cleaning the floors and Andrew, my husband is constantly helping me with things. So it really is a family business that we're all building together. What would you say to someone who's watching this right now, just trying to get it all figured out? Just keep taking action because no one knows what they're doing at first. You know, we're all facing something new all the time and you just figure it out by starting to unravel it, starting to climb that mountain. So it's just taking action. Let's get to that future. Say you've taken a lot of action over the past four years, $320,000 last year. Future state you. What does success look like? What do you want to grow this to? I want to get to the point where we can buy a decent amount of property and I can build an even bigger warehouse on the property. So keep growing the business, but still keeping it family and tighten it. If you enjoyed this episode, check out episode 222 where Kaida shares how she grew an embroidery business to $1 million in 11 months. And as always, make sure to like and subscribe down below and we will see you next week.