The Decision To Sell On Ebay!

Most soapmakers have this problem of leftover soaps and the dilemma of what to do with them. With my style of soapmaking you just can't always judge how much soap you are going to need so it happens that you have leftovers.

While we concentrated on our wholesale orders and keeping our store supplied our scrap soaps grew and grew to a point of it taking over our studio. Now I'm not one to keep everything, I do pretty well with throwing things out, but these leftover scraps of soap represent dollars to me.

So I decided to make some loaf soaps with the scraps and call them Jumble Bubbles. I realized that because they were a jumble of different soaps I couldn't sell them for the same price as my other loafs so I had to come up with a price that would benefit both the consumer and me. We put them in our store for $3.00 each or 4 for $10 and they did very well. Only problem was I didn't think we were selling them fast enough. I like to move product quickly.

Then I thought I should try selling on ebay at a starting bid of $14.95. I was targeting companies looking to resell so they could also sell these at the $3.00 price. At this price I was breaking even but I would be getting my money on soap that was just sitting there doing nothing.

I jumped in with both feet, listed the loafs and waited and waited. About every hour I would check and see if there were bids and if not see how many people looked at my listing. Each hour that passed I got more and more discouraged. My initial reaction was that I'm unlucky and just don't have what it takes to sell on Ebay. But I realized that the successful powersellers just have knowledge that I don't have and I'm out to find out what that is.

I've done some searching about selling on Ebay and found useful info and will be making changes this week. I'll just keep building on new knowledge that I get.

When design season comes around for us we end up with loafs that just don't make the grade, like the one pictured. So again not to waste them we decided to offer these also on ebay.

Anyway if you are in the market for great soap at even greater price check out my listings. Click here to see my listings on ebay

What's New For Fall!

It's the beginning of July and we may be a bit late in creating our fall and winter soaps. We focused that last couple of days talking about what we wanted them to look like. Today was the day we put those ideas into soap. We created one Works of Art Soap called Fall of Colors (picture to the left) During the colder months the warmer scents become very popular like our Oatmeal Milk and Honey soap during the winter we can't keep it in stock, now it's just sitting on the shelf. So creating soaps for the fall and winter is not only about the look to emphasize those months but about the scents. So we decided to do a smores soap, now that might remind you of the summer, Barbequing but the scents we used to create it is totally warm winter. We used a hazelnut for the graham crackers, marshmallow for the marshmallow and chocolate fudge for the chocolate. Yummy! We haven't cut into the loaf yet but will post a picture tomorrow. I do know that the soap smells great.

It wouldn't be fall without a pumkin so we created one to add to our line of loaf soaps. With creating soaps especially loaf soaps what you think might be a really great design doesn't translate once you make the soap. This is what happened with our pumkin soap. We did make two different designs and this picture is our second try and I'm not 100% happy with it. I love the colors I love the abstract interpetation of a pumkin but I think the pumkin might need to be a bit darker. Tomorrow we'll do the tweaking.

Designing new soaps is what I love the most but I have to tell you that it takes a lot of energy and at the end of the day I'm pretty tired.