From Family Farm to Etsy Fame: The Soap Making Success Story

Hey everyone, if you have thought about starting your own business you are in the right place here today So I keep my eyes open just for entrepreneurs and I love to bring on people with kind of entrepreneurial stories And that's what we have here today. This is evan He's a guy that I just have met on twitter He's a brother in the lord who I just appreciated a lot of the posts the wisdom He was sharing from god's word and then came to find out he had started his own Soap business, so we're going to hear a little bit about that But again, the reason that I bring on people like evan to share their stories is I just want to really encourage you If you have a business idea you have something on your heart that you feel like hey This might be from the lord. This might be something that he's calling me to or wanting me to do I just want to encourage you to get off the couch And start taking some steps towards it Me and evan were just talking before we got on proverbs 23 hard work brings profit Mere talk leads only to poverty. So if you have something that you want to do Start doing it start taking some steps to it. Ask the lord and see where it takes you So if you're watching here today, please hit the like button appreciate that that is the currency of youtubers. We appreciate it greatly Um, and then yeah, just go ahead and say hello and then let me know in the comment Here's the comment question for the day. What is your Best business idea that you've wanted to start but haven't gotten around to it yet Go ahead and let me know in the comments. I'd love to see what you guys have going on So we'll move over to evan here evan Can you start us out with just a little introduction of who you are? And then we'd love to hear kind of your story of how you got into this entrepreneurial journey sure, well, hi, i'm i'm evan and uh, I I work for the state of pennsylvania. I got my pittsburgh pirates hat on here for that I am a father of two i'm married and I uh Started off by thinking to myself, you know Times are tight inflation's running Um, what can I do to bring more money in? You know to take care of all that because you know kids are expensive right? And so I started thinking to myself um Okay. Oh, you should look into part-time jobs and all this stuff. Well, I started looking at part-time jobs and They don't really pay that much unless you have incredible skills and there's a lot of things you have to look into So then I started thinking okay um What what are other things I could try? So I started thinking okay. I what am I good at? I'm good at agricultural stuff. I'm good at creating things So why don't I get started and why don't I try to do something from the house? And I needed it was very important for me That I I create something that I can do while also having the kids see my wife is a realtor So realtors work when everybody else is off work, right? So she's gone selling houses When I'm home with the kids so, you know, what am I going to do with them with the kids? So the idea of daddy and me Came together because I wanted to be able to watch my kids and still find something Uh to work with so that's where everything kind of started off But the funny thing is the ideas actually came maybe two years ago But back then it was my idea. I want to do this and this is what i'm going to push for Um, i'll be honest I had a couple bad ideas when I started off I started off mushroom farming And well, not that mushroom farming is a bad idea It's a great idea but what I learned was essentially I became really good at growing mushrooms and I had all this stuff in the basement But I didn't have the facility for that and guess what happened we got fungus gnats and my wife was ready to kill me and It just wasn't working out. I I so I still know how to grow them But it wasn't it wasn't clicking and I thought oh micro greens. Everybody grows micro greens So I grew micro greens and so it's over. Well, that's just it Everybody grows micro greens i'd go to the market. There'd be all these other stalls set up So i'm thinking now this isn't working either. So finally, um My my wife again My wife was ready to kill me for that too because she's like there are fungus gnats in the house And I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but she was right she was right it really was bad so Finally, she said if you're gonna do anything it better smell pretty so I thought okay What smells pretty? Oh soap smells pretty and the same market that i'm talking about We go to our our market and I go all the time because i'd sell the the mushrooms and sell microgreens to some farmers Who would buy it? Well, we walked by a soap store and my kids wanted to go in and so they got you know little they got bath bombs They got bars of soap and I got my first bar So I figured i'd just be nice to this person who made soap whatever and I went home and I washed my hands with it And they felt amazing And for the first time I realized oh my gosh Hand handmade soap is good for your skin Like I would go out of my way to walk upstairs to the bathroom just to wash my hands With this bar of soap and it started hitting me like this is really good Like this is so much better than anything else. I realized like the stuff you get in store dries your skin out. It's terrible so What did I do? I got books. I started getting um, you know amazon books downloadable books I started learning different styles different things you could do um Started learning how to create some soaps and let me tell you It's not easy to do this when you're starting off and the first couple ones I made were horrible batches absolutely horrible batches but You know We kept going go going for it and kept working on it and we started getting something that did work And the difference is I told you earlier that when I started off I did some things I wanted for myself Because I just told myself you're good at agriculture go sell it This time I said, okay lord, that was fun. I learned stuff from it But I also don't want to drive my wife crazy because that's not a winning strategy Just just fyi for any guys out there not a winning strategy So what do I do? Right? How what do I find she talked about things that smell pretty? So I talked about soap she seemed on board So, okay, so we so we start pushing this and I made a couple bad batches and I thought oh man I messed that up. How does this work? But I read a little bit harder about it and one day I made something I called rose swirl I had a special equinox fragrance. I got from one of my suppliers And I pulled it out of the soap mold and it was the most beautiful thing i'd ever seen And I cut it up. It had gorgeous swirls on everything. I put that online sold like hot cakes And for the very very first time I had a winner So yeah, the the one that says rose swirl was my very first successful uh soap recipe And we've designed them, uh in many different shapes and fragrances since then But the main thing that we do when we make our soaps is we use five natural oils And lye lye is essentially what makes the oils into soap you see and so We we started saying wow, you know, let's put this stuff online and i'm on i'm on x I mean, uh, thank you so much james for following me. I appreciate that. That's how james met me and what did we do on x? I just started advertising things and it started off with just a couple nice people that were buying things You know so and so forth, but it kind of expanded from there and people started realizing this is like the best soap i've ever used Because they had spent their entire lives buying soap at the grocery store, right? That's what everybody does Well, once they got it on their hands as I said your skin feels the difference you realize wow These are five oils and not a chemical. I can't pronounce or would need to agree to know And so we kind of got started, you know, we got started from there Um now as you can see we make other things too. I I enjoy making candles. We make candles out of soy wax You can see there Uh, we learned how to do some lip balm we learned how to do some hand cream that also works We use all natural products for everything um So I I don't want to say that soap's the only thing that we have you you even see that we have uh, We have bunny wool there. We do raise rabbits. We love that, too Um, and they're angoras and so you actually shear them like a sheep So we do sell those for any of you spinners and uh and knitters out there But I guess what i'm trying to say is if I can impress people with any oh That's my daughter looking at me when I when I was uh, growing the microgreens, by the way I say all this to say I had to go through a lot of things that didn't work Before we found something that did work and It was perseverance of you know over a year like year and a half really but you gotta keep trying and if like I There was a part of me that said oh maybe your quest You know evan to find something you can do and watch your kids at the same time. Maybe it's just a pipe dream Maybe you should go to walmart and get a part-time job. Maybe maybe maybe maybe But it wasn't until we sat down we prayed about it. Lord. Help us find something that works when it took off and Like I said, I I I would love to take credit for lots of this Um, but I really feel like I was simply led in the right direction I feel like walking into that soap store was one of the most important things we could have done. I didn't even want to go Um, and I feel like I was being directed the whole time and I was being prepared to learn how to sit down and how to You know discover and how to be led appropriately Okay, very good. What an amazing story, uh couple questions that I have for you um on your entrepreneurial journey, uh is first off Uh, can you talk about when you failed in those first few business ideas? Because I see this a lot from people where they fail A couple times and then they give up right and we know that persistence is key to an entrepreneur's journey Also the christian's journey right is uh, when you fall over you get back up keep going Um, can you just talk a little bit were you tempted to give up after those failures? Were you discouraged or did you see him? Oh, I learned how I can do something successful or what was going on in your mind after those failures Oh, definitely your initial reaction is shock and horror Um, because you think like I spent a thousand bucks on a course to learn how to grow mushrooms That's not chump change, you know, and I thought oh i'm gonna learn how to make all these great things I did learn how to make incredible mushrooms that people wanted and I did have the highest quality things out there But what else did I learn? I learned that I had one contact in the market who would buy them That I didn't get full price for them because you know, he's got to sell it the market I learned that I would either need to establish a stand which had time and money I didn't have You know, I started learning there were all these ifs that were really going to get in the way Um, I also learned mushrooms are great They look beautiful when you first pick them, but they don't last a couple more than a couple days So, you know if I market was only open two days of the week So if I had the most gorgeous mushroom in the world on monday, it wasn't gonna look that way on thursday Um, I learned that there was a cap, you know, there was only so many mushrooms I could grow and at the end of the day like I would work, you know, my my my butt off for Maybe a hundred bucks in a month. I mean that's not that's not gonna cut it. That's not paying the bills So I felt awful. I basically essentially replenished the price of the course And yeah, you you feel terrible because you think to yourself. Oh my goodness. I did all this stuff What a failure and initially that is what I felt and my wife even said maybe you should just let go of this and so And so forth and not not to not to bug her because she later on gave me the idea of smelling pretty But yeah, you do feel that and sometimes you have to let yourself feel that loss but then you have to tell yourself, okay That didn't work. But what did we learn through this? You know and I started realizing that for me I want something that lasts a long time so that when I make it I don't have to worry about it going bad you know, I You know you learn like you don't you want something that's easy to send like it was such a pain to drive to the market All the time, you know and to keep selling stuff. I said boy, it would be so much nicer to sell online from home learned that you know and I I learned that I can learn something very difficult and Learned how to kind of keep pressing on and let me tell you some of those bad batches I should show you the pictures of what the soap looked like the first time it was terrible but you learn what ingredients and we found that right recipe and It's really been sailing Okay, very good, I love that i'm gonna meet you for just a second while I uh Question for you. Um, can you talk about? um what you feel like how much of your success do you contribute to your Uh ingenuity your cleverness and how much do you attribute to the lord? So that's sometimes something difficult as christian entrepreneurs. It's hard. How much was my cleverness? How much was my hard work? How much is the lord blessing me? Just how do you think through that? I'm just looking to get some wisdom from you Uh, how do you kind of think through that and balance that? And you might have to unmute yourself before you start talking All right. Oh sure Honestly, so much of it was just letting the lord push me in the right direction It was first of all, I had to realize that my early failures were there to teach me something Um, they were not a message to say stop Uh, if the lord wanted me to stop he would have stopped, you know, he wanted me to say yes, but You know and that's what the lesson was and I had to realize You know, I was trying to push it through my way and it wasn't going to work Okay, so I had to learn that I would say honestly, it's at least 75 percent the lord and maybe 25 percent me. I mean All I did was start paying attention. I said, okay fine. Let's do it your way Let me start paying attention. You know, what are you saying? Where are we leading with this? and My wife said something that smells pretty that's when all of a sudden all these other doors started opening And once you see all those doors opening that's when you realize okay, your way was better than mine I think it even tells us your ways are higher than my ways if I if I remember right I think that's somewhere Somewhere But no, I really a lot of it is just you're following along and you see you see what works and that's that's mostly the lord just mostly doing it and um, the best thing I could say is that at no point did he ever make me feel like my idea my general idea was Something you can do for supplementary income while you're working and still walk work with your kids And I do work with my kids, uh, not with a lie that's dangerous but almost everything else, you know, my Three-year-old smells every fragrance and gives it a thumbs up or a thumbs down and you know My other ones they they stir everything together. We we work them in as much as possible So it's been great. My kids now look at it as you know we work a regular job and then we make something and then we Sell it to people and it's been great really working them into it and it's nice to be able to raise your kids To see that so my my six-year-old thinks that we live on a farm and we kind of don't we're kind of in suburbia close to a farm But it's it's just nice to incorporate everything in you know, and bring everyone together And again, this is what I wanted. It just took a while till we found that that winning formula and really again, I It's the same thing with like with on x I have a message placed in my heart and I write it Am I am I brilliant not really i'm being honest with you The lord has certainly blessed me with gifts. The lord has given me, you know intelligence and wisdom But there are a lot of intelligent people that can't share something or don't have something There is a difference when you say, okay lord work through me and I won't get in the way And so that's what I feel. A lot of it is really it's it's just me saying i'm gonna stop getting in the way Show me what's going on Amen just step to jonathan says the steps of a good man is ordered by the lord And he delights in the journey So dustin says I just listened to judah smith before this about how we are broken without the lord How everything he the lord gives us is free. I like free. Amen grace Not deserved in any way. So there's a lot of verses that go along with what you were saying Psalm 127 unless the lord builds the house those who build it labor in vain And you know if god's not on your side, it's not gonna it's not gonna work out Um, so I love that. So maybe last question here. Uh, what's in store for the future? Are you looking to grow the store and make this a bigger thing? Are you kind of content with where it's at now or what's kind of what's kind of in your uh future plans? Um, and I did mute you so you'll have to unmute again Sure. No, that's great. Um, I would like to grow it. I i'm finding myself having lots of fun doing this um pretty much I get done with work and then I run out to the kitchen and and start working on on creating something else or I look for new blends or you know New fragments I pull people on on x and I say what are things that you're interested in and I try to find them And um, that's been great My wife has done a lot more of working with me now. She's my packaging expert. So she's the packaging company i'm the uh creative direction or whatnot, but um I would love to incorporate my my oldest daughter Uh, I want her to get to the point where she could start making things as well Um, that's probably a couple years down the road, but I still want to get to that point And yeah, i'm having a great time With this, uh, we were looking to maybe find some markets to sell it to as well locally But honestly, we've done so well online. It's been it's really worked out great and it's so convenient for us. So Um, you know, it's nice to it's nice to sell something we I you know sold soap to a a guy who works up in alaska on the oil rigs, you know, because Uh, his hands really need something that gets taken care of and he buys it, you know We sent stuff to canada stuff like that before so it's exciting. I'd i'd like to definitely get that going more Um, and we'd like to create more things, but we're kind of we're mostly a soap store So i'm kind of you know going to stay true to that, but we also branch out we create other things too. So Um anything that's you know Good for the skin care anything that I think we can do better Than what you're going to get in a store if it's what you're going to get in the store Then go to the store, you know if it's all natural if it's something that doesn't have that Uh, we feel better with that. We've had some family members that very sadly have had uh, cancer diagnoses and whatnot So we're kind of extra sensitive about the ingredients we put into things. We don't want to put anything, you know that May be linked with something. So that's why that's very important. Okay. Well, I love that We'll go ahead and close with some calls to action Um, first off everyone. I want every single person that's watching this to go over to daddy and me farms on etsy Um, you don't have to buy anything but at least follow the shop look around a little bit See if there's anything that that you would like um any of the soap or any anything like this one thing i'm very amazed at is A 223 five star average review. So that's pretty unique Um for any shop honestly, like almost everybody has some problem at some point So having that high of reviews for that many, um, that's amazing. I love that So go, uh, follow, uh, check out etsy follow the shop check out what he has to offer Um, and then also check him out on twitter I'm gonna just leave your twitter for people to follow too because you have a lot of wisdom Um, you've I just really appreciated the way you respond to different, you know, there's always controversy on christian twitter Um, there's always and I just appreciate the way that you approach it with grace And you are strong and you stand firm and what the bible says, but you do it in a gracious way Um, you know showing kindness to your opponents that god might grant them the repent repentance Um, and so I love that. So go check out his etsy store. Check out his twitter account Uh, evan, thank you so much for being here today sharing a little bit of your story Um, I would love for us to stay connected I have some ideas for for potentially growing your stuff as well that we can we can talk about off air Uh, but thank you so much for coming on sharing your journey and I hope it's been an inspiration to people Thank you so much. It's been an honor just to be on here and thank you for inviting me. I truly appreciate that Awesome. Thank you so much. And thank you audience. You guys are amazing Whether you're watching on youtube or twitter appreciate you guys being here Each and every day we'll be back tomorrow. I think I think i've got a video tomorrow I'm sure I do but thank you guys so much. God bless you all and hope you all have a great rest of your day Thanks