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Still-Point Soap: Mary Post
Profitable & Creative!
A desire to have some quiet, creative time alone was the inspiration for StillPointSoap.com, Mary Post’s home-based business selling high-quality handmade soap. Mary has taken the slow approach to growing her business as she also had to balance the demands of motherhood, but now she is experiencing the rewards of her patience.When she had twins and was at home taking care of four boys all under the age of 4 years old, Mary needed some time to herself to do something unrelated to her daily life as a mom. “I started making soap as a creative outlet and really enjoyed that,” she says. “Several months later I had a hundred pounds of soap on my hands and had to figure out what to do with it.” She took her soap to a holiday bazaar with a great response. “I started to think, ‘Hmmm…maybe there’s a business possibility here! I was at home reevaluating where I was at and where I wanted to go. If what I was expecting to work wasn’t working anymore maybe I could go in some direction with the soap making.”
Mary began to take some classes at the nearby small business center in Portland, Oregon, but still the business process took years. “My business startup was prolonged, so what business textbooks say you can do in a matter of weeks or months was oftentimes a matter of months or years for me,” she says. “The first 5 years was mostly business development. I did a lot of market testing.”
Then Mary’s family had to relocate to Eugene for her husband’s work. Due to the fact that Mary’s husband’s work often requires relocation, it made sense to focus on website sales over traditional retail. “Home-based businesses are vulnerable to changing structures in the family,” she says. “I needed to create a marketing venue that would be independent of all of that.”
“Leaving Portland my business was growing at 50% a year. I was reaching the break even point and was really feeling good about it,” says Mary. But the transition was a difficult one, because it took a long while to find a place that could accommodate four growing children and a business. Once in Eugene, Mary met MightyMerchant co-owners Staci Schipporeit and Michael Stearns through the middle school their kids attended. Through the, ‘So, what do you do?’ types of questions, they discovered that MightyMerchant hosted ecommerce websites, and that Mary needed an ecommerce website.
Mary knew that her current website wasn’t working well for her. “During the transition process it became real clear to me that I needed some more flexibility than I had. The other company . . . didn’t have the site manager so that I could go in and make adjustments myself. I always had to work through another person. MightyMerchant has worked really beautifully for me,” says Mary.
Mary creates premium soap made from scratch with 22 fragrances and four different sizes of bars. She hand wraps each bar, and packages gift ensembles that mix and match fragrances and sizes. She needed a site that was flexible enough to highlight the many choices. An “interesting dilemma” is how to sell something that appeals primarily by scent over the Internet. “I needed the site to let me be as descriptive as possible about how the soap smells, how the soap is made, what the ingredients are, and how it’s packaged. I had far more fun building the site with Kathy than I ever thought I would.”
While mixing and measuring the ingredients for a batch of soap may take only an hour or two, it is several weeks from start to finish before a bar of soap can be hand-wrapped and shipped. It can be challenging to educate consumers about the differences between “melt and pour” soaps that are commonly sold as “hand made,” and her soaps, which she blends herself from raw ingredients.
The name Still Point Soap was inspired by the quiet time she found when making soap. “When I was first playing around with soap I didn’t want to do it around kids because it uses lye and there might be some splashing,” Mary says. “I needed uninterrupted time, because once you start you risk losing the soap if you quit.” Mary would stay up after her twins’ midnight feedings, because she knew she would have roughly three hours to make the soap. “It would be done by the time they needed to be fed again. It became my “still point,” my quiet time to recharge and do something purely creative.”
It’s been 13 years since Mary first germinated the idea for her soap-making business. As difficult as those first years of prolonged business development were, having a long-term focus helped her to realize that one day the business would be self-supporting. “I believe I am at that spot now and am so excited about what the next few years hold,” Mary says. “This web site is, in many ways, the culmination of those 13 years . . . condensed onto one web site!”
Thanks for choosing MightyMerchant to help your business grow, Mary!
