Exhaustion, and looking ahead

Well, I've been here a total of five days, and let me tell you brother, my 60-some-odd year old mother is running rings around me.

I would venture that she's working harder at her job than most people do. Clearly that might be an exaggeration, but it can't be that far off base.

Let me see if I can break this down for you.

At present, we sell:

34 different soaps by the slice

6 different goat's milk soaps

6 different Soapier accent soaps

5 different soap slices in mens fragrances

3 different kinds of Reddit Alien soap

2 different Reddit Envelope Soaps

1 Trollface soap

We offer more than 40 different Soapier Samples

We have 6 different gift baskets for the holidays

3 different Soap of the Month Club options

8 different holiday soaps

and a set of Animal Cracker soaps for kids.

One woman, over the past four months, has been busting her ass to make all of this soap for our customers. My sister had been helping, but the business couldn't sustain her salary, so she had to quit. It wasn't an easy decision.

To be clear, if I had six months, I still wouldn't know everything about this business.

I've sat here... well, not really sat. I've walked around this apartment, and I've done my share of making soap, but there is no business without my mom.

Let me tell you what needs to happen, for Soapier to continue.

First off, we need orders. Now, I have some very, very good news that I'm going to spill on Thursday. This might be exactly what Soapier needs, to generate orders... we also have the holiday season fast approaching, and also the Reddit Secret Santa. Should be awesome.

We have two different venues for advertising this holiday season. I'm optimistic.

Second, we need to hire someone.

Third, we need a production facility.

Now, 'production facility' is just a fancy term for warehouse space. I like to call it a production facility because, well, that's what we do there. We produce a product.

The second and third things that we need are tied to us getting sales. We need to generate X amount this holiday season to allow us to hire someone and move our soap making out of my mom's house and into a space that is dedicated to one thing.

Clearly, moving our soap making business is not possible between now and the holidays. Not unless we received $10,000 in orders over the next two weeks. Hell, that would pay for a space AND a full time person for the next five months, at least. But I'm not holding my breath.

One of the things I've been looking into is Kickstarter.com. I want to put up a fundraising campaign, offering our Soap of the Month Club as incentive. We'll see if it happens.

Other than that... right now, it's a waiting game. We have to see how November sales are. Which kind of sucks, because November of last year was a busy month for us. It's one of the main reasons I'm down in Florida right now. We're making as much soap as we can, so that when the orders do start coming in, we can get them out without having to stop everything, just to make a loaf of soap.

Tomorrow, we put in a big order for soap base. We put in an order for some extra molds, a new mold for shaving soap (we've been getting plenty of requests), and some fragrances.

Then it's Keep on Truckin', making soap, wrapping it, labeling it, and storing it for the rush.

If you had a good relationship with your mother when you were younger, then the amount of respect you had for her will change, as you grow older. It might go lower... that's probably when you come to see some things about her, as an adult, that you might not agree with, and what have you. I hope that's rare.

Or, it might go higher.

For me, it's clearly gone higher. I've seen my mom fight her way through some personal issues, over the last five years or so, that would affect others in a much worse way, and come out damaged on the other side. Clearly, my mom can be defined as a fighter. She has high standards for things that actually matter, and it's one of the reasons this business has done as well as it has, this past year.

So, to all of you who are fans of our soap, your thanks should go directly to Linda. She's the driving force behind this company, and I'm going to do all I can to take the burden off of her shoulders.

We'll see how Soapier fares after this holiday season. I think that, at some point, I'll have some wonderful news for you, in the realm of our growing business.