Name of your website?Sacred Showers Handcrafted Soap
Your name?
Cheryl Stroup
Your Location (city, etc)
Sparta
Please give us a short summary of your website?
We design and produce some of the most refreshing all-natural soap blends available anywhere. Not only is gentle skin cleansing a priority, but products with a flair for elevating a daily routine to a sacred ritual as well. Skin-loving & heart-nourishing, this is my mantra when it comes to product design.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
I decided to craft my own soap after an introduction to handcrafted soap. Prior to this first bar, it had been at least 25 years since I'd used what I thought was soap as a cleansing medium. I enjoyed the entire process so much, from design to production, that I began crafting a series of soap blends. The sheer volume of inventory I was producing coupled with limited storage space encouraged me to either open a business to keep inventory moving, or back off the creative process.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
My first web site was launched in 2003 and it was my home page with my early Sacred Showers soap offerings.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Because all life comes from water and water is renewing as well as cleansing, a "sacred shower" if you will, it seemed the natural choice given my objective and the influences inspiring my product line.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
I craft truly all natural bar soap, no fragrance oils, melt-n-pour soap base, and no dyes, not even micas in the soaps. I have a full line of beer soap offerings, along with wine soap and champagne soap, too.
I've worked in the healing arts for over 15 years. Because so many of my healing workshop students and clients repeatedly mentioned how little time they had for self-nurturing, I decided to incorporate my healing knowledge into my soap blends. Not only do my bar soaps include botanical ingredients and herbal infusions, there are several blends with flower essences and energy work techniques to add a soul-soothing element to the cleansing experience, something everyone engages in on a daily basis.
My knowledge base of energy bodywork and healing enhances the aliveness of the ingredients, so my products carry an aura of reverence and sacredness. Flower essences are an energy therapy used for decades to aid in the easing of emotional challenges. Incorporated into soap as a daily routine, these energy patterns help support daily emotional challenges as well as energy movement, an important ingredient in energy health. To the best of my knowledge, these are the only cold-process soaps with flower essences.
All my products have an eye towards holistic well-being as well as physical comfort. To this end, I also craft the only soap in the world using genuine Lourdes grotto water, a distinctly loving, nourishing experience to be sure.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
In the short term, I look to Sacred Showers to support my return to school. My eventual goal is to allow this business to grow into a viable part of the healing arts industry. Nothing is more simple, nurturing or self-supporting than bathing with a soap that doubles as energy therapy. Life is a series of changes. Personal and global change is encouraged and supported by consistency and courage.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
While my soap business does fairly well financially, for now, my time and money investment still exceeds my financial success.
On the other hand, these products are a direct outpouring of my personal growth. In this respect, Sacred Showers has been extraordinarily successful. Never once in my life was I encouraged to follow my heart, my dreams or develop my talents. Sacred Showers was my first real foray into the heretofore forbidden realm of real-world success, personal daring and endless possibility. This experience has given me the courage to pursue other previously "out-of-reach" possibilities, like returning to college to pursue a law degree, something I am currently exploring.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would develop and add a Natural Soap Co-Op area to my site and business. This has been a dream of mine for a few years now. I may work on developing this idea into reality in 2008.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes. I offer nearly 40 different soap blends. "Stock on hand" is often a simple matter of increasing manufacturing batch sizes. If I grew really big, there are a lot of resources on the Internet that can help support growth, especially in the handmade soap manufacturing area. Handcrafted soap manufacturing is actually a rather flexible area.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
A surprise for me was the rapidly changing essential oil prices. Since essential oils are "commodities" and traded on the commodities market, the prices fluctuate. Depending on harvests and things, the cost of re-stocking raw materials can be a real surprise and challenge to cash flow if there is a shortage of a particular essential oil for some reason, like patchouli is currently experiencing.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Marketing. With hundreds of new soap web sites showing up on the web every month, making my website stand out has been difficult. This coupled with the fact that soap is an intimate, personal product, it is challenging to use words to adequately describe a product and convince someone that it is worth their hard-earned money. My products sell extremely well at craft shows and street fairs where people have the opportunity to personally meet the soap, salves and butters before purchasing.
Another challenge was bringing my site traffic from my old, free home page to my current paid hosting service. After nearly a year, my traffic still suffers from the move and my old free homepage does not allow for a 404 redirect for the search engine spiders.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
I find links have been the best promotional tool to date. Too many soap websites to consistently standout on search engines or the "sponsored ads" area. The one exception here is my beer soap line. It is consistently ranked in Google's top 5 search listings.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
It is a lot more time consuming than I expected. On the other hand, with the Zen Cart e-commerce engine I use, there are a lot of possibilities I did not previously have access to and at times, I think this influences how much time is spent in maintenance and such. I wouldn't trade Zen Cart for the world though because it has allowed me to have an affordable, professional e-commerce web site with everything I needed built right in, and under the GPL, it is available to everyone.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
My first website was launched in 2003, my current site was launched in January, 2007. As long as I offer soap for sale, I will maintain a web presence to a greater or lesser degree. I think that even at craft fairs, a website address adds an air of professionalism and credibility to my business and products, while allowing for re-orders.
What do you consider to be your most important or biggest impact on the public through your web site and products?
For me, I find educating the public about real soap to be the best and most consistent public service I perform. It is amazing (though not surprising) how many people simply assume bar products in the cleansing aisle at the store are "soap" -- it isn't. I spend a lot of time at shows educating about what real soap is, and why most skin-types will have a favorable response to it. Those with "sensitive skin" show the most concern though with some information, encouragement and a sample, these folks will often feel comfortable enough to give natural soap a chance to love their skin. Nothing could be better for your skin or the environment (real soap is biodegradable) than a well designed bar of all-natural soap!
What is your website address?
Sacred Showers Handcrafted Soap
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