Making Clean Deals in the Soap Business When Moumouni Konate was laid off from his job of 18 years, he took his meager compensation package and directed his money, ingenuity and skills to establish a viable business in Burkina Faso. His small soap company, Savonnerie Parfumerie de Houet, is now over a decade old.
Determined to serve their needs, Konate located an Ivorian company through the Internet, capable of providing him small plastic containers for shampoo and body lotion. “That’s when the four-star hotels began expressing interest,” said Konate.
Konate realized, “Soap is a good choice for a business because this is a country of dust and heat. We always need to wash ourselves and our clothes. Anyone is capable of paying me five francs for their soap needs.”
“Today, I am investigating ways to bottle my own products, using my own equipment,” said Konate. He is certain that once he does this, he will eventually lower his production cost and obtain additional larger hotels as customers.
Constant ingenuity
When he first began producing bars of soap, they were handmade, using locally produced shea butter, a popular ingredient in the West African market. Determined to generate the most revenue, Konate soon realized that minibath soaps were his most profitable product.
and high quality helps a small manufacturer
overcome hurdles to selling locally made
“I thought to myself, ‘Who uses the small bars of soap most?’ and quickly realized that my best customers would be hotels in Burkina Faso and Mali.” In search of new customers, Konate methodically approached all the hotels he knew. He emphatically promised managers that he could “produce high-quality bars of soap embossed with the hotel’s name for much less than the foreign companies charge for cheaper quality imported soaps.” He also reminded them that foreign soap companies required minimum orders that far exceeded the 2,000-3,000 small soap bars Burkinabe and Malian hotels could afford to purchase at one time. As his customers increased, Konate discovered that more upscale hotels desired more than just bath soap. They wanted other well-packaged and reasonably priced bath products, such as shampoo and body lotion.
Through the support of a nongovernmental organization, TechDev, and the French company L’Occitane en Provence, Konate discovered another Burkina-based company, CITEC, which generously shared an improved soap formula with him. CITEC now supplies Konate with high-quality raw materials for his soaps.
Konate’s latest challenge is to further expand his market by convincing the international hotel chains operating in the sub-region to use locally made products. He hopes to encourage national policymakers to promote locally made products and persuade the large hotel chains that their customers will appreciate and prefer the locally made soaps over costly low-quality imports.
shea soap.