Coconut Creek!

Our soaps have been picked up by the very popular retail store in Dartmouth called Coconut Creek!

Coconut Creek is a funky store located at Dartmouth Crossing just off the 118. You can not only find high end fashion items like Lug bags and one of a kind Micheque bags, but you can now find Creative Wanderings Soap!

We’ve specially made a soap that is exclusive to Coconut Creek, Pint O’Suds Beer soap, which is made with Alexander Keith’s Dark Ale. It has a beautiful nutty aroma with a nice light tan color. This is perfect for that hard to buy for guy in your life and also excellent for the scent sensitive person in your life!

They are also carrying Dino Bones, Jolly Rogers and a handfull of other items!

For the holiday season, Coconut Creek will also have a Kiosk in the Halifax Shopping Center!

You can also follow Coconut Creek on Facebook, where they will keep you up to date with new arrivals and great gift ideas!

What a difference a few months make

I must get back to updating this blog with some suitable soap porn.

In April the wholesale orders started to roll in, and then I got busy making product for the summer markets.

The husband returned from overseas in June, and we’ve been going non stop to markets and camping. I’m getting ready to take the business to the Maritime Gift Show in hopes of getting a few more wholesale customers.

The month of august has been busy. I went to Moncton to do the Victoria Park craft show and got completely cleaned out of soap. What a shocker that was. I took twice as much soap as I took last year and sold every bit of it. That made me sweat a little when I came home and unpacked to see how empty my bookshelves are.

They’re looking a bit better now.

I can sigh a little easier, but I still have a long way to go. I have eight christmas shows, three of which are “major” shows and will likely have two or three parties not to mention the internet orders. I’ve never been very good at promoting my online site so I don’t make a lot of income that way.  Then there is still the wholesale customers. My existing customers who stay open through the year and of course any new accounts I get in September.

Makes me wonder if I have enough storage space. It’s always hard to know just how much to make!

Arrrgghhhh Mateys!

I just love these little Jolly Roger Soaps, they are SLS and SLSA free glycerin soaps, the white skull and crossbones are goats milk soap, and they are embedded into clear glycerin soap! They are scented with a nice kid friendly fruity scent that is sure to please all the little pirates in your life!

Jolly Roger Soaps!

You can find them listed here on my main website!

Find me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter!

For all that you do

This week I’ve been working on a special mothers day project.

We are a military family. My husband is in the military and we have often felt the absence of him for long periods due to training or deployment. In fact, my husband has been gone for the last 4.5 months, and should be home in about 44 days (not that I’m counting).

The hardest thing about training or deployment is missing those special days. This time he was gone for christmas, our eldest child’s 7th birthday and again for Mother’s Day. I do notice however that they will be home a few days before Fathers Day. Coincidence? I think not!

I decided that I was again going to donate my time and skills to the upcoming deployed spouses “Pamper Me Day” to be held this Mother’s Day weekend. For many of us, our families are thousands of miles away and when you have young children, well, you don’t get to have a “me” day. It’s honestly just another day of the week.

I made some bath bombs. I had actually made double this amount, in Lavender, Rosemary & Spearmint and Energy scents.

This is what remains of the bath bombs. They ended up crumbling, I added too much Witch Hazel so they began to wart and crumble. This is why I don’t make and sell them, because it’s just not my forte. Every once and a while I attempt to make them, thinking that “surely THIS time I can make them!”, and they fail. I was kinda shocked that I did have a few successful bath bombs.

Inside the glossy black box contains either a successful bath bomb or a baggy of “Bubbling Bath Fiz”, a bar of soap, a lip butter and a 10% off coupon.

I want to remind these ladies that they need and deserve to be spoiled, and that they SHOULD take time to spoil themselves. Even if it means having to scrub down the bathtub in the kids bathroom to enjoy it. It’s worth it! Not that I would know about that. *ahem*

One thing that I have struggled with during this deployment is maintaining balance. I tend to swing from one extreme to the other. I go from hanging out with the kids to focusing on not living in a hovel (aka- cleaning  &  laundry &  snow & yard work & anything else that needs to be done) to working on the business to taking care of “me”. The last one is the hardest.  I only recently decided that I *have* to devote more time to things like taking a nice long relaxing bath with a book, or renting a chick flick or ensuring I get out with friends EVERY week.

When there are so many other things needing to be done, its hard to remember that we have to take care of ourselves, or everything else falls down around us. Fat lot of good we’ll be then!

So, I sincerely hope that these little “Pamper me packs” will remind these ladies to take some time for themselves.

Here they are, ready to go…..I hope they’ll love them!

Do or Do Not.

This week has been an adventure in sticking my neck out.

I *know* the steps that I need to take to grow my business, but I get hung up on the rejection factor. Let’s face it, when you put your product out there for people (retailers) to essentialy determine if they find your “baby” worth having in their store or not, it can be a bit nerve wracking. The rub of course, is that if you sit back and do nothing then you’re no further ahead.

This week I sent out six vendor packages. Three were for existing retail customers giving them some samples of soaps or products that they do not carry. It’s been a few months since they’ve placed an order, and it’s my way of staying current in their minds. The other three were for new potential clients. I’ve been working on some Dinosaur soaps and have sent them out to a few large museums with an extensive collection of fossils or dinosaur bones.

The fun part of these soaps is that they are soap all the way through, I pack as many soap bones into these babies as possible. No scratchy plastic bits, no choking hazards, just soap.

Anyway, of the three new packages I sent out, I received a new customer already. I was a bit puzzled though, as they didn’t place an order for any of these Dino bones. I e-mailed her and asked why, I mean I need to know for marketing purposes!!  Apparently they specialize in fossils that are 125 years older than dinosaurs, so they tend to avoid stocking anything relating to dinosaurs. However she loved the soap and lip butter samples that I sent along with it so much, that a rather large order came of it.

As Yoda once said “do or do not, there is no try”.

Welcome to Creative Wanderings…The Blog!

Since the server crashed last November and ate up my old Creative Wanderings blog, I’ve been a bit lax about starting a new one!

So here it is!

Stay tuned for updates, projects, contests and information about my little business and where you can find our goodies!

Thanks for Stayin clean!

Jennifer,

The Soap Lady