Last week I started telling the Right Wing Naturals origin story.
What I knew from the beginning is that I wanted to create a brand for people like me, what I call the Modern Conservative - this was in Chapter 1.
But how the heck did we start selling soap?
Well, it didn't at all start as a business idea...it started much more as a personal product I began to use in my everyday life.
Sometime in 2020, I started to become aware of natural soaps that smelled great.
They were better than any of the grocery store stuff I used to buy for like $1-$3 a bar.
Little did I know then, the Big Soap stuff that’s pretty cheap has lots of stuff you wouldn’t want to put on your body.
Here’s a tip: sometimes the cheapest sh*t out there is not good for you.
Hot dogs? Pretty cheap.
Lead-based paint, bleach, fast food…cheap, but no bueno.
There’s a correlation here.
Just a few of the nasty ingredients you find in grocery store soap are parabens and sodium lauryl sulfate.
Parabens, which are artificial preservatives that extend the shelf life of (you guessed it) lots of cosmetic and pharmaceutical products, are bad because they can cause you to have low testosterone and disrupt hormones in your body.
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate- which is put in many personal care products to help them lather and clean- is bad because it strips the skin of its natural oils and causes irritation and allergic reactions.
Probably the best thing you can do with these soaps is to throw them in your yard to keep the deer from eating your flowers (that's a tip for another day).
Now, where was I?
Oh yes, natural soaps...
I loved my newfound natural soaps, but mainly because they smelled good and left my skin feeling smooth.
No irritation. I didn’t have breakouts. I even threw my clear skin face wash away - the soap was regulating my body’s oil production just fine.
(side note: many face washes will take all the oil off your skin. They kill bacteria, cleanse the skin, and reduce your oil production…that sounds like all good things, but then your body can turn up your oil production and you have to use the wash 2x per day to keep fighting the oils.)
So, I knew I wanted a brand that would serve The Modern Conservative.
And in my bathroom I was creating quite the collection of natural soaps to use in the shower...
But at the time, I hadn't put the two things together yet.
I was just, you know, scratching my own itch as they say.
In a couple of days, I'll tell you what happened next that took this personal interest and changed it into a business.
Talk soon,
Taylor