Could Selling Soap, Maybe Even Organic, Be A Good Idea? Could a person really make any money trying to sell soap? And in particular, is selling organic soap likely to be a money maker? Those are the questions under consideration in this article. Let's talk about organics. My family grows quite a bit of food. We raise cattle, poultry, dairy goats and garden quite seriously. We are part of a long-running local organic food co-op. We have friends/neighbors who are serious organic, though not certified, farmers. We eat as much organic stuff as we can get our hands on. The ladies in my family use mostly organic skin care stuff and we use mostly organic soap products. With that said, the organic market for soap is a tough nut to crack. In general the public does not much care whether soap is organic or not. What mostly sells is smell and looks but the people who come back to buy more are the people who like the way soap performs. They like the way it feels and lathers and what it does for skin. Those people are the volume purchasers and will love you if you make it organic but there may not be enough of them to make it so you can make a business of it, at least around my part of the country. Whether you can make a soap business lucrative depends on whether you can sell in volume and whether you can make a quality product at a reasonable cost. Selling organic products sounds like a great idea but I personally question whether you can sell enough at what will have to be a premium price to make it pay. Consider this though... I just did a cost calculation on current prices to make Lavender soap using normal oils, not organic, and using essential oils for scent. What I get is a cost of about $1.10 for a bar of soap. That is buying in 50 pound batches of the soap oils and 16 ounce bottles of essential oils. By the way, well over half that cost is the scent oil, the Lavender essential oil. Now I happen to know that the going rate around here for soap at craft fairs is between $5 and $6 per bar. So these folks selling soap at those rates are getting a gross profit of about $4 per bar. It could be with some smart buying you could sell "organic" soap at the same price as the competition sells regular soap and therein lies a huge advantage, maybe... My better shows I have sold about 500 bars at a show. More typical is to sell 300 bars in a weekend.
Could Selling Soap, Maybe Even Organic, Be A Good Idea?
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