Romans 13:8
“Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

We rather blissfully ignored this admonishment from scripture when we took on a business loan recently.

Over the last few months, we have watched our plans slowly disintegrate. What sounded like a good idea has proved to be pretty foolish. We thought we had a big account in the bag, and by a divinely orchestrated turn of events, lost it. And now we have this debt hanging over our heads.

So we decided we’d buckle down this summer and work hard to pay it off. Three farmers markets a week we are selling soap. And it’s hard work, ya’ll! Getting prepared with small children at your feet, loading the car, unpacking the soap onto the table, smiling in the heat for hours at prospective customers while also trying to juggle the kids around, packing back up, unloading the car at home, feeding everyone, etc etc. It feels like punishment. It feels like I have been locked in a dungeon and someone is demanding that I spin gold out of straw. Debt is a curse.

I do enjoy some aspects of the markets, don’t get me wrong. But we’re tired! And ironically, the harder we work, the more stuff goes wrong!!

For instance… we’ve had an AC repair, some crazy plumbing problems, water spraying from the back of the fridge, two car repairs (with another threatening), and now the washing machine is broken for good. (Did I mention I couldn’t even drive to the laundromat if I wanted and I have FOUR poopy cloth diapers sitting in the pail? And no clean dish towels?)

So you can see why I laid on my bed and cried today. =) I’m not bothering to record any of this for pity’s sake. I’m writing this down because I fully expect to come back and report the wonderful things that the Lord has done in our lives. Not to mention, we deserve the stress we are under right now.

My first reaction, really, was to call my Mamma!! But I knew that I needed to call my heavenly Father instead. I have a tendency to forget that He’s very much aware of my need and very much interested in hearing what I have on my heart. Just telling the Lord my fears, my frustrations, and my perceived inadequacies…leaning on His everlasting arms, even though He is the one disciplining… I trust Him.

We were foolish, and by His grace He is molding us and shaping us. What kind of a fools would we be if we despised the discipline of the Lord?

Job 5:17
“Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.”

Deuteronomy 8:5

“Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you.”

Proverbs 12:1
“Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid.”

Hebrews 12:5
“And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you…”

Hebrews 12:8
“If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons.”

Hebrews 12:11
“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

Painful is right! Every member of our family is bearing the brunt of this whole mess. And at the same time I know that Jesus will give us the grace to bear up under it all.

Moral of the story: Debt is bad. Oh, and Dave Ramsey was WRONG. Having an “emergency fund” does not create a bubble around you in which you have no emergencies. Our “emergency fund” has been really really necessary lately.

Our very biggest problem was that we totally ignored our own boundaries because we were so excited about the largeness and high profile- ness of this request for dog soap.

Tip #1: Know your boundaries and state them plainly. Soap takes 4 weeks to cure. Period. There is no getting around that. When a customer calls and requests thousands of bars of soap in less than three weeks, my response should be nothing short of “NO”. It’s impossible. I knew that was a boundary with handmade soap, but I also didn’t want to lose the order. I figured that if I made it all in the first week, it could sit for two weeks with a dehumidifier and be fine. I also knew that it would have plenty of time to cure before it actually made it to anyone who was going to wash with it.

One other small boundary we ignored: my current handicap, aka pregnancy. Small detail, I know. But we forgot to calculate that a very very pregnant lady cannot lift heavy jugs of oils or heavy pots of soap or heavy molds filled with soap. And even if I could, doing all that myself would take way more than 3 weeks because I’m big and slow at this point.

What are your boundaries? Timelines, pricing, minimums, payment schedules, details, details, details. Think about it and write it down! What is a reasonable time line for your business? What is the best competitive pricing you can offer (remember to pay yourself!)? What is the smallest amount of work/product that will make the project worth your time? When and how do you expect to be paid? What are you going to do if you are paid late? To establish boundaries, go through a project for your business, in your mind, start to finish. If you know any super anal retentive people, you should enlist their help in this. Try to imagine every little detail that may need to be covered and cover it. This will establish good communication between you and your client. You can never assume that any small detail is common knowledge for anyone. People are crazy.

For instance: a photographer should have already written out and stated their sitting fee and how many photos/poses that includes. That’s the very bottom line. But what if you have a client that wants all ten poses to be in different outfits for their one year old? Have you already established a limit on the number of wardrobe changes permitted for a photo session? If not, you may be looking at a very long afternoon that will end up not being worth your time. What if they want you to meet them an hour away? It can be awkward when you’ve already stated your fees, and then the client mentions they would like the location to be far away. Now you have to figure out how much you are going to charge and change the quote on them. If you know your boundaries, you would have already stated, “My sitting fee is x for on location, x hours, x number of wardrobe changes, and an additional x for distance locations, an additional x for every x minutes, an additional x for x or more wardrobe changes…”

Tip #2: Be Firm

I’m not trying to toot my own horn or anything, but I have a really high quality product that I’m offering. I have chosen the top rung and don’t do any part of it cheaply. This is a big deal, and I should be confident in it. Without me, these people have no wonderful awesome dog soap on a rope. They are paying me, so they call the shots, but I respond equally as aggressive with my limitations and requirements as well.

Now, I’ve done business before with folks who had a list of policies a mile long and rather sassy quips all throughout their FAQ section. It was a real turn off and I wondered what made them so grumpy and difficult to work with. Now I know. My soap studio became a sweat shop over the last two weeks, and it was rather unpleasant. Don’t get me wrong, I think that we should bend over backwards for our clients and customers and duh, work is hard sometimes. But even that can go too far, and it sure did with this project.

I should have responded and said, “NO, but I CAN do this in 6-8 weeks for you.” What other option do they have? They’d have to find another soap maker equally as skilled enough to even figure out how to get rope into that many bars of soap, and formulate a recipe specifically for dogs. I guarantee you there are not many others out there. That makes ME the commodity, not just my product.

Going back to the photography example: If the person cannot afford to pay the extra for the distance location, you will have avoided their embarrassment of having to state that to you if you told them up front of your extra charge, before they even asked for it. You give them your policy statement, and they can gauge their request to what they can afford. You don’t go to a restaurant and order from the menu and then find out how much the food costs, do you? No. You know exactly how much it costs to get cheese on that burger or extra guacamole with your burrito because it’s written for you right on the menu. And if you can’t afford it, you don’t order it.

Mammas, take pride in your work and be confident. Yes, we are little mammas churning out wonderfulness from the comfort of our own homes. But if you let someone walk all over you, it will very quickly become un-comfortable.

Now, for the story….

The very first thing that went wrong was that it took forever to get some of the pertinent ingredients to me. I did not have enough essential oils on hand to do 2500 bars of soap. And most essential oils cannot be overnighted due to their flammability and combustibility (can you believe that’s a real word?) So, I had to wait for them to make their way here, all the way from Ohio, via UPS truck.

Then, since I had to go with a different rope company in my hurry, the rope I got was all wrong! When I cut it, it frayed like cotton balls and was so fat and hairy I couldn’t force it into the soap. I had paid a LOT of money to have this rope practically overnighted from Chicago. I had my mother and grandmother come to town to watch the kids for a very limited two days. I spent most of that time troubleshooting the rope issue. By the time I found the local rope company that solved all my problems, it was time for my helpers to leave!! I had solved one problem, and now had a new problem on my hands…

Which I solved by enlisting Aunt Ellen, who lives 10 miles away, as honorary soap maker… for four days. Her muscles were strained, her skin was burned, and I don’t think she totally comprehended how much work it was to make soap up until that point! (I hadn’t either!) She and I worked side by side for about 30 hours in those four days. My fingers were literally bleeding from inserting so many pieces of rope into raw soap. It was hard to get the rope in right with gloves on, and my fingertips kept grazing the surface of the soap. I finally did find some gloves that were tight enough on my skinny fingers to not be bulky.

I managed the last few batches on my own last weekend when Brent was off all weekend. Then I had to start slicing. It was too much. I was exhausting myself and almost literally went into labor at one point. Midwife demanded I slow down…way down. That wasn’t so much of an option, because if they didn’t get the soap on a certain day, I wasn’t getting paid. And we were in it for good now. So, we bought more slicing supplies and Brent and I sliced together while our kids got educated and doted on by Dora and Steve (from Blue’s Clues). I think their brains actually shrunk and fell out of their heads, but we’re working on fixing that now.

Oh, and did I mention that we hadn’t been paid one pretty penny for any of our work clear up to the day the soap got shipped out?!? I kept asking for a check and they just kept either totally ignoring my requests, and eventually saying they had mailed it. We did finally get the check, and it wasn’t even for the original amount I had quoted them. What moron makes and ships out $9,000 worth of soap without getting paid first?!?! Me. We haven’t been cheated, don’t worry. They understand that they have to pay the rest within a certain amount of time. And if they don’t, I’ll be tacking on late fees. I don’t mind working with people, but I went way over the “favor limit” with this one.

Even boxing it all up went wrong. We stayed up late the last night, wrapping stacks of soap in bubble wrap and brown paper bags when we ran out of the bubble wrap. We had totally gotten shafted on boxes, and paid like $50 for 9 or so of the strongest ones around. They started falling apart when we went to move them to the driveway for pick up (each box had about 150 pounds of soap in it). We had to buy more boxes and repack them in the driveway. And by “we”, I mean “Brent”. He spent about five hours in the heat repacking all the soap, when the 18-wheeler was set to be there at any moment that day. Fortunately, he finished in time, with a couple of hours to spare, and the trucker got there right before the rain began!

The entire thing was miserable and we never should have attempted it. It literally ruined my life for three weeks straight. I started to feel like I was stuck in a nightmare or something.

Yeah, the profit is still really great, but was it worth it? Yes and No. Yes, in that we really learned our boundaries and can plainly state them now, as requests continue to roll in for other projects. Yes, in that we are thoroughly equipped with molds and such to handle any size order.  No, in that it really disturbed our peaceful little life here and ate up the last few days of energy that I had left to get my life in order before having a baby. I may never recover by the time I go into labor!

Now what?

I have typed up a very detailed policy statement for whole sale, bulk, and custom orders and will be contacting all of our whole sale accounts this weekend with the updates. Life is changing for us. Baby #4 is very quickly on the way, and I’ve always said that if anything becomes a burden, it will be the soap, not my family. They are first. Very first. And this project put them second and it made me mad. Totally my fault, and now we will fix that so that it doesn’t happen again. I’m sure that most of them will be very happy to comply with some of our new minimum requirements and such.

There are two versions to this story. I will start with the happy one.

Somewhere around a year ago I had a doggie company ask me about making a dog soap on a rope for them. It sounded really fun and I created two bars of dog soap that they really liked. They took the samples to some trade shows and mentioned that a national retailer was interested. My mind couldn’t comprehend at the time what that meant… 500 bars of soap? 1,000?? When the economy looked perilous, evidently this retailer’s interest waned and the entire project was put on the back burner.

Meanwhile, we renovated the soap room and I got pregnant. Really, really pregnant.

About three weeks ago I got an email that this national retailer (anthropologie) was ready to go and needed 2,500 bars of soap in three weeks. At the time, I was working on building up my own stock of soaps so that I wouldn’t need to worry with making much at the very end of my pregnancy and shortly after baby came. It’s important to know that soap takes at least 4 weeks to cure after it’s been made. If you are really tricky you can make it 3 weeks, but a minimum of four is best. They drove a hard line and said three weeks or not at all. My mind quickly calculated the profit, the time, the supplies I would need to order. Then I wrote it all down and talked it over with Brent. We knew we’d be crazy to miss this opportunity. We estimated that with enough soap molds I could manufacture 2500 bars of soap in about 4 days.

Brent began making the molds.

Each mold was comprised of three log cavities. Each log cavity held a 5 pound recipe and would produce 15 bars. So, each box would produce 45 bars of soap. We already had 2 boxes, and Brent made 16 more for a total of 18.

My mom came to help tame the kids… more like they tamed her!

In case you didn’t realize, it takes about 1000 pounds of vegetable oils to make 2500 bars of dog soap, and slightly under 100 pounds of essential oils. Throw in about four pounds of ground oats, 2 pounds of spirulina, almost 150 pounds of lye, and about 4,000 feet of rope and you’re all set!

Orders started rolling in. I swallowed hard when one person on the phone asked if my neighborhood could accommodate an 18-wheeler.

Folks, THAT is what 1300 pounds of vegetable oil looks like. There’s a 55 gallon drum of coconut oil hidden behind those boxes. It’s still on the front porch until we figure out what to do with it! My mom and grandmother had to help the trucker tote the pallet up the driveway, which sits on a slight incline. Now you know where I get my super human abilities. My mom hoisted each bucket and box of oils (each weighing between 35 and 50 pounds) onto a little red wagon and together we toted them back to the soap room. I really can’t think of anyone else who would be willing to do that for a crazy pregnant lady! Thanks, Mom!

Surprisingly, it all fit into my work space. We had to purchase shelves for the soap to cure on and began putting those together.

We  immediately ran into our first problem. My supplier for rope was not able to accommodate my urgent need for (what I thought at the time was) 2500 feet of rope. I went with a new company and paid big  bucks to have the rope shipped in from Chicago. Big mistake, but we’ll go more into detail in my follow up posting on this adventure. The rope they sent me was horrible quality and frayed everywhere, like giant cotton balls. In other words, it was not going into the soap. After an entire morning of talking to rope guys who clearly thought I was insane, I found a local rope company that had enough rope and a rope cutter on hand for what I needed. A short 45 minute drive brought me to rope paradise. Ya’ll. I know a LOT about rope now. If you’ve got rope questions, I’m your girl. So, we bought this handy dandy rope cutting machine that sears the edges all nice and stuff. We had to make a couple more trips for rope after that, and I think the grand total was 4,000 feet that got cut up into around 18 inch strips to be inserted. This was a group effort. I cut a little, Brent cut a LOT, my mom cut a little, and Brent’s aunt Ellen cut some too.

Next it was time to start making the soap!

Once all the oils, lye water, and other additives made it into the pot, it weighed somewhere around 25-30 pounds. After making around 500 bars of soap (filling 11 boxes) it was becoming clear that I could not make all this soap on my own. Aunt Ellen came to save the day…actually about four days, hefting those big jugs and boxes of oils and measuring them all out for me. All I had to do was stand up, mix, pour into the molds, and sit back down to insert the ropes…one by one. Thanks, Aunt Ellen!!!

Each filled box got stacked on the floor and pretty soon we had some pretty tall towers going. It’s best to insulate the soap in the molds for at least 24 hours to make sure that it has thoroughly and evenly begun to saponify.

Once the soap cooled, usually around 36 hours later, it was unmolded and ready to slice.

Eventually, we had to buy some more slicing supplies and Brent and I sat and enjoyed many hours of each others company while slicing soap.

We ended up fitting almost all of the green soap (1250 bars) onto one rack, but the lavender oatmeal soap got spread out pretty much everywhere…

Some of it got to sit and cure for a while, and some of it just had to be shipped raw. It will have plenty of time to cure as it goes through the packaging phase and the shipping phase and the warehouse phase, I’m sure. We really weren’t that comfortable with such a short deadline, and for sure won’t do it again!

We rolled stacks of soap in bubble wrap and brown paper and packed it securely in boxes. Brent spent several hours getting it all onto the pallet and ready for the 18 wheeler to come back to pick it up.

This project literally took over our lives for 3 weeks and we are so. relieved. it’s. done.

We made a lot of mistakes, did a lot of troubleshooting, and learned a lot of lessons (which will be maybe tomorrow’s post). There should be an awful lot of clean and pampered pooches out there though.

One of the first things I did was buy a giant area rug to cover the old garage floor. One of the first things the kids did was spill an entire bucket of paint on it. Can I be really candid here and admit that I cried like a baby as I attempted to scrub the paint out? I did. I was so frustrated! This was just like the time last year that I decided I was going to do a bunch of craft festivals and bought a fancy tent. I was doing a trial run of setting it up in the backyard…by myself…with all three kids underfoot. A big wind blew up and nearly took the tent, and me hanging onto it, into the side of the neighbor’s house. The tent got all bent up. “How am I going to go do this in public by myself with the kids?” Was my first thought. Obviously, I couldn’t. I sat in my yard with my crumpled tent, totally frustrated that once again I was going to have to give up my hopes and my dreams because I had kids. As I scrubbed the paint out of the carpet, I pretty much reconciled my mind to that all over again. “Who do I think I am? I can’t run a business AND keep having all these kids. I should just give up now!” Then there was the added pressure of the rather growing expense of renovating the garage- it was time to put my money where my mouth was.

Yesterday Brent went to the big meeting where they (Whole Foods Market) revealed all the new product they are bringing in for the holidays. I won’t lie- I get some of my best holiday ideas based on what he comes home and tells me. In this business, you start preparing for the holidays in May (I start in July). He informed me that they were bringing in a line of soap- created by my idols. That’s right- I aspire to be like…other soap makers. (LOL) Mind you, their soap is not better than mine- I know because I’ve tried it. (Random tip here: Know you competition! If you are going to be successful you’ve got to know what other people in your field are doing and offering and how it compares to what you’ve got. I find this out by ordering soap from others.) Anyway, these gals have done a stellar job with marketing their product. (It helps to know that one of them has a stinkin’ degree in marketing.) I quickly got online to find out the scoop and realized that they were going NATIONWIDE in all Whole Foods! While I’m so super excited for them (truthfully, they have worked very hard), I was really…well, jealous I guess. These ladies started the same way as me. Their standards and style are the same. But neither of them have children that I know of, not to mention there’s two of them. They recently announced that they were taking their soap business out of their parent’s basement and into a 2,000 square foot warehouse! (My next step after I outgrow the new studio.) 

The new studio. With the paint stain on the carpet, which is currently buried somewhere under a pile of giant legos and other random toys.

I started to feel that nagging feeling again. These ladies had spent the last five years making soap. I spent the last few years making….babies? people. “I’m going to work harder! I’m going to stay up late and work my fingers to the bone! I’m not going to let the fact that I’ve got children hold me down!”  were my immediate thoughts.

I said as much to Brent, my wonderful awesome encouraging husband, who responded. “They spent the last five years building a soap empire, but YOU spent the last five years building castles and kingdoms in the hearts of your children.” I wanted to cry. My discouragement and frustration was quickly wiped away when I glanced down and saw some sweet little monster paper dolls that Arwen had quietly made that day and slipped onto my desk. They had sweet toothy monster grins, and she even gave each one a belly button. 

It’s easy to get overly ambitious. We all have different paths to travel and mine involves lots of little people. Brent pointed out that we only need enough for today. I don’t need to have my soap in every Whole Foods Market in the nation! I only need it in a few stores. Seriously, that would set us financially, just that little bit. 

It’s easy to take our eyes off of our real job and our real business- sculpting souls and nurturing spirits and minds. These kids are the most important thing I can do today. Yesterday I did nothing but hang out with them, coloring, singing, reading, going to the library. They reciprocated with gifts showered on me (like the monster paper dolls and wooden hard boiled eggs from their kitchen)… and Ezra body slammed me repeatedly, which is apparently his official love language. =/ 

And of course, I’m not giving up! These kids are not a hurdle to my success. They are stepping stones! They inspire me (you may not know that Arwen helped me create the Happy Thoughts soap, and it’s named after her- her name means “happy thoughts”, and Charis was the inspiration for the Hello, Sunshine! Soap.), and one day they will (hopefully) be my faithful apprentices and make it all their own.

Having a huge successful business is not the be-all and the end-all, mammas. We just need enough and if we end up with more than enough- that’s great too! We work from home for a variety of reasons- I do it because it’s important to me to be constantly influencing and teaching my children and to help take the financial load of an always growing family off of my husband. It helps to be busy with my hands- it keeps me out of trouble. And I do it because I like it! 

It takes time. Lots of time. And lots of hard work to build a business. Years. Mistakes. Restarts. Slow down and don’t forget to enjoy your children and your family along the way.

It’s the computer.

This week tip: You’ve got to set boundaries. Know when it is time to work and time to play, and know when to shut it down.

Trying to start a business is consuming. There is always something that needs to be done and always the nagging feeling that if you don’t do it your business is going to fail. I could work nine hours a day on Cheeky Maiden Soap and never run out of things to do. But that would sort of be missing the point of being a Work At Home Mom, right? I work from home because I believe it is vitally important that I am investing in my children’s lives for more than just a couple of hours a day. I don’t want strangers to raise them and teach them about the world. I work from home because I enjoy working for myself, and honestly don’t respond well to being told what to do. (Shocking, I know.) Working from home also fits in with my beliefs about the way that God designed the family to operate best.

Up until recently, I didn’t have set working hours. I worked all the time. Here a little, there a little. It was difficult to know when I should be spending time with my kids and when it was okay to let them watch a quick video so I could answer emails. Some days I would get sucked into the mass of email in my inbox before I even had a chance to make breakfast!  Other days I would get so caught up in their cuteness or what was on t.v. that night that not much work would get done at all and I would get behind.

Things have changed. I have a set time for answering business emails. I have a set time for filling orders. I have a set time to make soap, and it is all designed around my family’s daily routine to fit in so naturally that I usually don’t notice I’m even following a schedule.

When I finish checking my email and I click on “Shut Down” I feel so satisfied…and excited! I’m excited that it’s not work time anymore! I can go outside and blow bubbles, bake bread with my four year old, or lay down and take a nap without any concern of how many orders have come in or who emailed with questions, etc. 

There is a black screen and no hum of an idle computer waiting to entertain me. It’s liberating. 

Put your work away when it is play time! If it’s not the computer, but something else that lures you- put it away- out of site! Make it inconvenient to have to get it out again or turn it on again. If all I have to do is plop down and jiggle the mouse to read new messages, I’ll do it every time I walk past the computer with the thought of “Oh, I’m just going to check…” But really I end up sitting there for 30 minutes. If I know that I have to sit down, turn on the computer, wait for it to boot up, and then open my email client, wait for emails to download, etc., I’m way less likely to even start the process.

Set reasonable, realistic times for yourself to work in and stop when that time is over with. You won’t get burnt out and your work will be more purposeful and accurate.

You can read more WAHM Tips by clicking on the link in the Categories section to the right.

Now, get back to work!!

Depending on how many kids you’ve already got, and whether or not you have already mastered your craft, starting up may take some time. Just remember- Haste Makes Waste!  If you try to rush through things, you are going to regret it! It takes at least 2 years to get any business off the ground, and can take even longer if you are not able to work at it full time. Set yourself some reasonable goals. Make sure that you learn the ins and outs of your craft and make yourself an expert at it! Give as much of it away as you can! Generosity never goes unpaid!!! Just give your stuff to folks and don’t tell them you are thinking about selling it. You’ll get the most honest responses and critiques that way.  

My business has taken off faster than I ever expected and I’ve been scrambling to keep up since day one! So, possibly you should plan for this! Don’t put your name out there until you can keep up with the demand. I had no idea how many dirty people there were on this planet that needed hand made soap. On the web, there are so many sites to buy handmade soap from that it just baffles my mind how anyone finds me! With the exception of blogs of loyal customers who have put my link on their sites, I really don’t advertise. I don’t advertise because I can’t keep up with the demand of just returning customers, let alone seeking out new ones! It’s all surreal to me, still. I’m getting sometimes several orders a day right now and I feel overwhelmed with gratitude! 

Setting a Price

This really varies depending on what you are selling or what service you are offering. The number one raw material that gets used up by WAHM is TIME. TIME TIME TIME. Hopefully, you are not sacrificing time with your kids to do your work, but any time you spend working on an item or service is precious. Most likely, you are giving up some sleep even, and sleep to a Mamma is important time!! You need to be compensated for your time.

If you are, say, a photographer and you spend 1 hour doing a photo shoot and twice that (2 hours) editing the photos, you should charge for 3 hours of your time. Depending on what skill or service you’ve chosen, and how important and thinly stretched your time is to you, you will come up with a different dollar amount. I’d say a photographer is worth at least $50 an hour. You’ll need to charge at least $75 dollars as a sitting fee for a one hour sit. If you are able to do really fantastic special effects and such in your editing, or have some aspect of your photography that really sets you apart, you should charge more. Poor people do not hire photographers to take their portraits. Period. Don’t feel bad about charging a fair amount.

Personally, I consider my time spent making soap to be worth $25 an hour. If you are making a commodity item, here is where it gets beautiful: The better and faster you get at making the item, the more you can do with your time! So, while the quality of my soap has increased greatly since I started making soap, I haven’t really had to raise my prices all that much. I can make 20 bars or 60 bars in thirty minutes, and I’m figuring $25 into the price of that batch of soap, so I might as well make 60 and up my total profit margin. For only 20 bars of soap I’m at $1.25 per bar just for my time, not counting other raw materials. Making 60 at a time cuts it down to a cost of $.41 per bar for my time. I charge $5.25 per bar all the same, but my profits are greater when I make more soap at one time, because I’m spending less time.

You’ll need to consider your overhead. Eventually you’ll have a website which will incur hosting fees, fees for processing credit cards, etc. You can even consider water or energy usage in your home as overhead. Office paper, ink/toner, etc also factor in here. You need to roll these costs into the price of your product or service. I did this by estimating how much paper/toner/water I used per month, in addition to my monthy fees for web hosting, shopping cart, and credit card processing. I added all that up, and divided by the number of bars that I thought I would reasonably be making per month with those resources. That gave me an amount (at the time, now it’s much much lower because I’m making more soap and using a more efficient printer) of $.60 per bar. So, once I figured out the cost of my time and raw materials, I added $.60 per bar to cover all my bills and label expenses. Make sure you’ve covered it all, or you won’t make a profit.

Of course, in the beginning your profits may not be that great. To some women, it is important that their family finances not take a hit for the sake of their WAHM business, but that is up to you. We spent our spending money getting me starter supplies, and I even requested soap making equipment for my birthday one year! (It should go without saying that you shouldn’t even try to do this without your husband’s support!) In my business, I save vast amounts of money by ordering my supplies in bulk, and I really imagine it’s that way for most businesses. Once you get going and have an idea of the demand on your product or service, you’ll be able to order more supplies at one time and up your profit.

That’s all I’ve got for today. You know you can read all the WAHM Tips by clicking on the “WAHM Tips” link to the right. =)

When I first realized that I wanted  needed to work with my hands creatively I began getting a lot of opinions. Some told me that I shouldn’t try to start up anything like that while my children were small (Arwen was under 2, and Charis was either still in the womb or a newborn at the time… my memory is fuzzy). This, for me, turned out to be the worst of the advice I got. 

Turns out that while my kids were so little they napped a lot. Really, when they are that small it’s mostly play time and nap time all day. I’m so glad I didn’t wait until I was in the throws of homeschooling, or mother to five to get started! (That’s not to say that you couldn’t get started now, if you are in those positions!)

When I say that I needed to work with my hands I don’t want you to think that mothers who do not operate a creativity-intense business from their homes do not. Mothers have always worked with their hands, we just do it a lot less now. We have machines to wash our clothes, machines to wash our dishes, machines to bake our bread, etc. Mammas almost have to be trying to be creative on purpose these days! I ignore my breadmaker most weeks and kneed the dough with my hands. I ignore my dryer and hang at least the diapers out to dry. I shun the idea of buying a mass produced bathroom rug at the store and opt instead to make my own (which is why the kid’s bathroom has no rug yet). We are made in the image of a Creator, and we are by definition “creative.” Every single one of us! I had this intense longing and need and desire to make something. And if someone wanted to pay me to make it… even better!

A Good Idea

So I thought a lot about what I wanted to make. I considered raw materials, I considered time and maximum output. I considered the space I had to work with (which was actually a lot bigger than I have now!). Think about what you love. If you don’t love what you are doing it will be hard to be successful at it and to do it long term. Consider whether you want your children to be involved in your work, and if it is something you see yourself passing on to them one day. Consider your time- your time is precious and you should be compensated for it. If you can’t get compensated well for the amount of time that a craft is going to take you (unless you just really REALLY love doing it), then you might not want to pick that one! Lastly, and most importantly, consider whether people really want what you are offering for sale. You can make all the beautiful toothpick bird houses you want, but if no one wants them they are not going to buy them! Check out etsy.com or ebay to see what is selling and how much it is selling for (you can check on ebay by clicking on “completed items” in the search terms). Even better, do an internet search for the item and check out the websites of those already doing it. If the web design is poor and the pictures ugly, you probably don’t want to take much information from that site. Look for sites that appear professional, and even better, ones that are sold out of stuff- that indicates people are buying it all up! These sites will give you valuable ideas, but please be respectful of the creativity of the owner of said site. Don’t go stealing ideas!

A Good Name

Accidentally, I started making soap. A lot of people liked it and a friend signed us up for all these craft shows. I needed a name, so I turned to my trusty thesaurus. I knew that my soap would be “pure” and “natural” but also a little bit “sassy.” I didn’t want to give off a stinky vegan vibe, if you know what I mean. As it were, “Cheeky” is a synonym for “sassy” and “Maiden” is a synonym for “pure”. And Cheeky Maiden Soap Company was born! Brand identity is super important. It’s how people will remember and recognize your product. If you want to do an array of items, try to pick something broad enough to cover all items and/or services you wish to offer.