A Clean Sweep

SOMETHING IS STIRRING IN AN OLD CHICKEN COOP SET AMID THE FLAT LONELY FIELDS OF western Ohio. Barbara Bobo and her family have gathered to concoct a mysterious brew. Her husband, a bank manager by day, now stands over an eighty-gallon honey tank in plastic goggles, blending lye into oil with a canoe paddle. He decants the viscous syrup into fifteen buckets, then Barbara approaches, armed with an assortment of bottles and vials. Into one of these, she dumps a beaker of basil oil and a coffeepotful of warm chlorophyll. Into another, she tosses a scoop of ultramarine pigment. Almond oil and cinnamon are added to a third. Next, they blend the fragrant batters. Then it's wash-up time.

From this strange choreography emerge thousands of astonishingly pretty cakes of soap each year--part of a business called Woodspirits, which grossed more than half a million dollars in 1999.

Woodspirits soaps are deceptively simple things. These rough-hewn slabs of pink, blue, beige, green, orange, and brown, bearing funny names like Zanzibar, Salad Bar, and Phome, actually reflect some very idealistic notions about the world. "Soap is sneaky herbal medicine," says Barbara, who trained in the subject at Dominion Herbal College in Vancouver, British Columbia. "If you can't get people to swallow herbs, you can at least get them to marinate their bodies in something good every night." Her soaps are biodegradable and minimally packaged in recycled paper. And they're made entirely with food grade ingredients, such as olive oil, paprika, and poppy seeds.

It wasn't until she was pregnant with her first child (of four) that Barbara became concerned about health issues. "When you start a family your whole focus kind of shifts," she says. In the spring of 1975 she bought a few pots of herbs with $100 she had earned the previous Christmas by carving pull toys from wooden shipping crates (the name Woodspirits is a reference to the sheep, ducks, and pigs that emerged from that lumber). She started a small herb shop at home, and began selling baskets and books alongside the live plants. "We made a little profit," she says, "and we also had an enhanced lifestyle because we had all these fresh herbs to use for cooking."

One aimless afternoon in 1986, Barbara cooked up her first batch of soap on the kitchen stove. "I was totally hooked," she says. "It was this wonderful alchemical process--taking this greasy stuff and this clear stuff and transforming it into something that was wonderfully useful and luscious." She began selling soap in her store, although it was only moderately popular. "But nothing I did here was a runaway success," she says. "I was pitching to the wrong market." It took a trip to California for Barbara to find the support she needed transform her modest production into a thriving business.

Turning points in a lifetime often come disguised as ordinary events. Woodspirits owes its success to one simple act: Barbara gave a bar of her soap to Jeanne Rose, a San Francisco-based author, teacher, and herbalist. Rose adored the soap and insisted that Barbara market it out west. "The next time I went to California." says Barbara, "I had a little satchel full of soaps which I took them to a few select health food stores. People placed orders on the spot." From $15 worth of samples, she generated nearly $400 in orders. Suddenly Barbara had a lot of work to do.

For the first year, her kitchen and basement were the center of her business. Then in 1989 she got a call from a woman who wanted to become her West Coast sales representative, and she realized it was time to shift into higher gear. "When I hired the first person," says Barbara, "l had a responsibility for lives other than my own. Now I had a serious business." But she needn't have worried. She replaced her cooking pots with the honey tank and moved out of the kitchen. Woodspirits profits more than tripled every year for the next four years, going from $l to $l,000 in 1989 to $538,000 in 1995. Soon Barbara had sales reps pitching her soaps to retailers across the country.

Throughout it all, Barbara never took out a loan; each small step generated enough profits to pay for the next. "For a long time it was really slow going," she says, recalling years when the shop barely made a profit. "If I wouldn't have had a supportive husband with a modest income, I would not have been able to stay in business without financial help."

By 1991, demand for Woodspirits soap had outstripped the family's ability to keep up with it. So Barbara began to set up regional soap-making contractors in Nebraska and California, and more recently opened manufacturing sites in England and Canada. Since the soaps natural ingredients begin to deteriorate after three months, this arrangement also meant that less time was lost in shipping. "It's sort of like a produce farmer who wants to be as close to market as possible," says Barbara.

Barbara receives few complaints about quality. The most common letters are from customers who wish her soaps were more widely available. Her favorite letter came from a woman who wrote that she had just replaced her white washcloths with brown ones. "She didn't like the way Zanzibar looked on white," says Barbara, "but she didn't want to give up using the soap."

Why do Woodspirits soaps earn such acclaim? They're only soap, after all--but made according to the same formulas that were used by American pioneers and the ancient Greeks. When oil (or any fat) is combined with lye, a chemical process is triggered that creates soap; glycerin is a natural byproduct. Since the turn of the century, most soap makers have been removing the glycerin in order to create a bar that's hard enough to be boiled and milled--a process in which the soap is chipped and blended with scents and colors. The leftover glycerin is then turned into hand lotions or mixed with alcohol to make clear glycerin soaps. Barbara doesn't remove the glycerin from her Woodspirits soaps, which are made with rich coconut and olive oils. "My soap is too gummy to be milled," she says. But the payoff is that it creates a lather that is soft and creamy, and it doesn't dry the skin.

There is a downside to Barbara's way of doing things, however. In one room of the chicken coop sits a batch of Salad Bar that turned greasy and mushy for reasons that mystify its maker. "After working with natural ingredients for a while, you realize why the whole chemical industry came about," says Barbara. "A lot of modern manufacturing processes are about getting consistency every time."

But serendipity, not control, has been at the root of Barbara's most successful ideas. She was inspired to marbleize some bars, for example, when a friend mistook a carob almond cheesecake she had baked for a slab of soap. The name Zanzibar came from a game of Trivial Pursuit. Even her packaging has turned out to be a lucky accident. Barbara wanted to use as little paper as possible, so she designed simple bands with images she found in a book of old engravings. In 1991 these black on ivory labels were featured in DK Holland's Great Package Design.

One aspect of Barbara's business has been far from accidental. She has included her family in the manufacturing process because she believes that success is taught at home. "By showing kids how to work, they see that everything you do contributes to an end product," she says. "In the old days the kids helped out, so they knew how the families earned their livelihood. Today many young people have no idea what their parents do to make money."

Beside the sink sits a bar of soap--a hideous green lump, actually, with tufts of black poking out of it. It's the result of an experiment with balsam-fir needles, an unsuccessful one in the eyes of an ordinary observer. But Barbara doesn't see it that way. "I love that soap," she says affectionately.