The Edinburgh Natural

How did it all begin? When I was an art student in the 1980’s I’d seen a very large transparent soap bar in an Edinburgh shop, and it had a honeycomb suspended within it. As a student who saw art in everything, I was struck by the sculptural beauty of it and for years, from time to time the image of the big golden bar with the honeycomb would pop into my head.

The beginning of the adventure of starting the company came later in 2010 with the simple concept of only using the best natural ingredients I could find and leaving out all the nasty synthetic stuff which to this day, remains our ethos.

At the time, in Britain, the country was suffering the after-effects of the 2008 financial crash, and we, my family, were struggling financially to the point where we only had enough funds to heat one room in our house and, to make things even tougher, we had a one year old baby boy so I needed to quickly find a way to dig us out of what was beginning to look like a very precarious situation to be in for a young family. And so, in 2010 I decided to start up “The Edinburgh Natural Soap Company”, as it was called back then. I didn’t have a clue how to make soap but as I’d been to Art College to study Fine Art, I was deluded on many different levels and so was blindly confident I could make a very high-quality product which everyone would love, and it would only be a matter of a very short space of time before my enterprise became wildly successful.

Yes, we started in the kitchen at home, experimenting with the cold-processed soap- making technique, which is a craft in the truest sense of the word. It’s a dangerous process and as we had a baby boy climbing everywhere he could, I had to wait until he was tucked up in his cot so I didn’t start working until after 7pm most nights.

The first soap I made was Honey Soap, probably in honour of the big transparent bar I’d seen all those years ago. Anyway, when I took it out of the mould, it was oozing a black liquid which turned out to be Honey that had turned into Toffee! The strange thing was that even although my first batch was a complete failure I said to Lynne, “I’m going to keep that for the display case in the board room for when we’re really successful”. I meant it.

Fast forward six months to our first Christmas Market. After many failed soap batches and navigating all the safety assessments and insurance policies that I’d been blissfully unaware of needing, I set up our stall in a big freezing tent on Edinburgh’s Princes Street. On day one, which was a Saturday, we sold out and I arrived home with £1200.00. Lynne couldn’t believe it; this was 2010 remember.

For fourteen days I stood at that freezing stall from 10am until 6pm. December 2010 in Edinburgh was shockingly cold, I can remember meeting customers while my feet were freezing up to my knees and selling all the stuff I’d made the night before. I worked one night until 4.30am then got on the train the next morning at 8am to set up the stall again. The average time before I’d get to sleep during that two-week period was 2.30am but the products were so popular that I had no choice but to get home at night, make as much stuff as I could then grab a few hours’ sleep before catching the train to Edinburgh the next morning.

How did it all begin? When I was an art student in the 1980’s I’d seen a very large transparent soap bar in an Edinburgh shop, and it had a honeycomb suspended within it. As a student who saw art in everything, I was struck by the sculptural beauty of it and for years, from time to time the image of the big golden bar with the honeycomb would pop into my head.

The beginning of the adventure of starting the company came later in 2010 with the simple concept of only using the best natural ingredients I could find and leaving out all the nasty synthetic stuff which to this day, remains our ethos.

At the time, in Britain, the country was suffering the after-effects of the 2008 financial crash, and we, my family, were struggling financially to the point where we only had enough funds to heat one room in our house and, to make things even tougher, we had a one year old baby boy so I needed to quickly find a way to dig us out of what was beginning to look like a very precarious situation to be in for a young family. And so, in 2010 I decided to start up “The Edinburgh Natural Soap Company”, as it was called back then. I didn’t have a clue how to make soap but as I’d been to Art College to study Fine Art, I was deluded on many different levels and so was blindly confident I could make a very high-quality product which everyone would love, and it would only be a matter of a very short space of time before my enterprise became wildly successful.

Yes, we started in the kitchen at home, experimenting with the cold-processed soap- making technique, which is a craft in the truest sense of the word. It’s a dangerous process and as we had a baby boy climbing everywhere he could, I had to wait until he was tucked up in his cot so I didn’t start working until after 7pm most nights.

The first soap I made was Honey Soap, probably in honour of the big transparent bar I’d seen all those years ago. Anyway, when I took it out of the mould, it was oozing a black liquid which turned out to be Honey that had turned into Toffee! The strange thing was that even although my first batch was a complete failure I said to Lynne, “I’m going to keep that for the display case in the board room for when we’re really successful”. I meant it.

Fast forward six months to our first Christmas Market. After many failed soap batches and navigating all the safety assessments and insurance policies that I’d been blissfully unaware of needing, I set up our stall in a big freezing tent on Edinburgh’s Princes Street. On day one, which was a Saturday, we sold out and I arrived home with £1200.00. Lynne couldn’t believe it; this was 2010 remember.

For fourteen days I stood at that freezing stall from 10am until 6pm. December 2010 in Edinburgh was shockingly cold, I can remember meeting customers while my feet were freezing up to my knees and selling all the stuff I’d made the night before. I worked one night until 4.30am then got on the train the next morning at 8am to set up the stall again. The average time before I’d get to sleep during that two-week period was 2.30am but the products were so popular that I had no choice but to get home at night, make as much stuff as I could then grab a few hours’ sleep before catching the train to Edinburgh the next morning.

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