Shave Soap

Shave Soap

Finally I've started making a natural shave soap for my customers. I was asked awhile ago to give it a shot & didn't have much time to do it. But a few weeks ago I made my first few batches and handed out a bunch to people in order to get some feed back. So in the next week ill be putting up all the products on my website and etsy. The scents will be Barber Shop, Pine, Tea Tree, and Lemongrass. But because of the sizes of the batches - ill be doing a lot of unique scents.

Other odds and ends

On October 17th ill be doing the Italian festival in down town Vacaville.

I've also been busy building new displays for my entire booth. I got to that point where I was sick of small upgrades, and never designed the entire thing. Each table takes me about 3 days of work.

The Change.

The new display

So for the past two weeks I have been hammering through new retail displays. My previous post was largely about that. Through this time I was attempting to figure out how to increase sales while doing shows in order to build more capital. So I could expand my business and move into different areas, storefront, or more wholesale. I think I had some success with that, but it was very hard to tell because the size of the craft fair was very small. 

I will be doing another in a few weeks so hopefully I can see a pretty good bounce on sales. I limited my scents down to Lavender, Citrus, Vanilla, Lemon Verbena, and Coconut. Also take a look at my Etsy store front, I have posted a lot of new pictures up there of the products.

The Change

What really changed in my life that has given me more direction, or less direction depending on how you look at it - was the finding of God and the belief in Jesus Christ as the savior. It sounds funny still saying that. Recently my wife and I started to take our family to church, searching for some guidance and meaning to some the struggles in our lives. We entered with a huge scoop of skepticism despite being invited by numerous people to The Fathers House in Vacaville. Here I am a libertarian, burnt out on society from my previous job working on the ambulance. Trying to build a future for ME and MY family. Noble as it is, I had no center for what to build my life on. Just the self serving attitude that seems to easily infect our brains. Jenna and I were pretty good (we never made it known... because thats how we are) with giving donations and trying to do right. But always with self interest in mind, donate to this cause and immediately pat ourselves on the back. That self gratification is powerful. I have begun to build a powerful tool to do good in the world by creating a business and producing a product that is necessary for good hygiene (homemade natural soaps). But lacked the humble more important cause then ones self. 

Business has fundamentally changed to something else. How I go about using my business to spread the word of God, I don't know. I will have to figure that out in time. Tithing or donations to Christian causes (without thought of my own interest) is going to be key. But I am excited. God I believe has a plan for me. I guess if I knew what that was it wouldn't be exciting.

Displays and Wholesale

I started to tackle the time consuming job of building some displays. This is one of the paths that building a natural lotion and soap company that I neglected. To be fair to myself, I surprise myself when I do these things. Hours of debating and researching, frustration and doubt - I finally jumped in. I spent a whopping 30 bucks maybe on the first display (keep in mind some of the nails and stain etc are left over)  and a few hours I was done. 

Hopefully I will be putting it in a local business in vacaville over the next a few days and selling some natural handcrafted baby lotion there.

A few more finishing touches and it will be done. It isn't the worlds best display, but its a start. I'll be doing a soap display and if I have time before the craft fair on August 22nd / 23rd I'll also do a few lotion displays. I'm also going to create a few different gift packs for the website, along with a lot centering around sensitive skin. We have a great line up of fragrance free lotion and soap made with organic oils. 

Very well - Carry on.

Shave Soap

This is the next project on my list of stuff too make. It is something that I was asked for a few months ago. Now that I've finally finished or at least got the website/etsy to a suitable level I decided to get the few ingredients needed for producing a "shave"soap. The bentonite clay should show up tomorrow, so hopefully by Tuesday ill throw down a batch of men & women shave soap. I've been doing a lot of reading on forum, and lather is the single most important thing in the soap. I'm going to try a few different recipes - so if you know me personally, just ask and ill give you some of my initial batches for some feedback. Then hopefully within a month ill have it all up on the website and ready to go. 

Paw Cream for pets

This has also been on my mind for awhile now, and is going to finally come together soon. I'll be getting some help with the new labels on the products from Shannon - who runs a great etsy shop that sells tons of decals for pet lovers. 

Retail Displays

This may be the most important thing I start to tackle. I'll be actively working on building some displays for my wholesale portion of the soap business. Now that I've suffered through creating some of the social media platforms for my business - I can use them to my advantage. Pinterest is great for ideas on how to create some of these displays for the natural soap and lotions. 

Carry on - thanks for reading. - Joe.

Homemade Soap

How can I take a bunch of oil and turn it into something that not only mixes with water, but also cleans? Honestly that was what puzzled me. I stumbled across a blog post on survival blog that planted the seed of starting this business. I had one major aspect of beginning - a lot of olive oil and no way to sell it. 

I make all of my soaps with three very basic ingredients; oil, lye, and water. Lye is mostly referred to as sodium hydroxide on product labels, as the word "lye" tends to scare people. We all know what oil and water are, but lye is a different story. Lye was first discovered about 2800 years ago, by pouring water over wood ash and collecting the water. It produces a alkaline solution which neutralizes the fatty acids from the oils. In the prehistoric days soap had a much different appearance and texture. But with modern procedures we are able to get 99% lye. Lye is some scary stuff, and you have to be careful anytime you are working with it. Within my bars of soap I leave a 7% superfat, what that means is once the lye has reacted with the oils 7% is remaining oil is left in a bar of soap. So when you wash your body with the natural soaps it doesn't dry you out and leave your skin chalky. 

What I do is well efficiency. That is how my brain works. I figure that time is money and in order to keep my homemade natural soaps affordable is to make a lot of it, and fast. I usally make 384 bars of soap in one setting, which takes me about 3-4 hours start to finish. That includes my time waiting for the lye to cool and oil to heat up. Not to mention the never ending washing of buckets and pots. Plus cutting and laying out on racks to cool.

Please feel free to visit my site or email me with any questions about different aspects of soap making. I will end up doing a periscope and youtube video of me making soap soon. It is a lot for me to type our, sometimes its just better to watch and listen to me narrate through the process. 

Farmers Markets and Craft Fairs

What a hustle those were last year. I was lucky enough to get into the Davis Farmers Market on Wednesdays for about 6 months. The big key to any farmers market was being a certified producer, which means you have to have an orchard or farm. It was a great learning experience, even if there wasn't much money in it. I was able to over and over again change little things about my booth to see how sales were effected. This is the original Booth that I created on the first day of selling.

Everything was purple, and everyone thought I was only selling Lavender scented products. So I had a lot of correcting to do. It took weeks to change all my labels and untold amounts of money having them all reprinted. Not to mention my beautiful sign (which is still my favorite) had to be reworked. No one understood I was out of Vacaville. It was a misconception that I was selling commercial products. 

I morphed into having individual boxes try to distinguish each scent, with a label indicating every single one. It was still too much purple. 

That is were I ended up last year, with a sign and building some shelves. You can also see the new banner in the background. Check out the instagram feed for a constant update on pictures and what I'm doing. I'll being doing some craft fairs this year (most likely) and will keep the blog updated with what and where.

Live Broadcast.

Tomorrow on 7/3/2015 at around 11am pst. I'm going to make my first attempt to make a bunch of products while broadcasting on periscope. I'll be letting everyone know on instagram, facebook and the twitter machine. I've had a few people ask me about the process of making natural lotions and vegetable oil soaps.

I'll spare everyone a long detailed tutorial on how to make soaps and lotions. There are plenty of site that specialize in that, and tons of ladies (mostly ladies) that are excellent soap makers that produce great blogs that are accessible via Google. Same goes for homemade lotions you can find that information almost anywhere. What I guess I do really well is being efficient at making these things. 

I have baby lotion, body lotion, hand & foot cream, and maybe a few scrubs to make tomorrow. 

I also was able to trim about 4 seconds off the load time on the website, I know exciting. But in the effort to work on all the search engine stuff, I've become much more interested in the small details of my site.

FYI anyone is welcome to email me: [email protected] - with soap, lotion or business related questions. I hate being in the social media eye, but love to share information on a smaller level with people who ask .

Introduction to Squashed Olives.

 

Welcome and thank you for visiting this blog or my business website. I am Joseph Giottonini, and the owner/founder of everything you see here. I mostly have no idea how I got started on this project, or what drove me to continue after the first batch of soap I made. 

I believe I am as pragmatic as they come, and that was the driving factor in starting and maintaining this business. I happened to stumble upon a blog years ago about making natural soap using olive oil. One thing I had a lot of was olive oil. My family are natives to Solano County and a successful building contractor (www.suttonconstruction.net), who built a olive mill for the wonderful Mark and Ann Sievers at http://ilfiorello.com/.

After that first batch of and the realization that making a product has a certain serenity to it, I was hooked. No business plan, no money, no real background into developing a business, just the perseverance. It's nice because I go where the wind blows. I started with natural soaps and almost immediately moved onto making a fragrance free natural lotion.

The Olive Oil portion of the business is mostly controlled by Steve and Lisa Sutton, who do everything themselves. They use a beautiful blend of mission, pendolino, and arbosana olives. If you know my in-laws, you understand their overwhelming eye for perfection within the construction business. That same attention to detail and care is put into every bottle of the olive oil, it truly is worth a try. (http://squashedolives.com/extra-virgin-olive-oil.html)

 

I'm a blogger now, which is great. I needed one more thing to focus on.

Simple plan for this blog, it will be me writing about my little business Squashed Olives LLC. Mostly this will be my ramblings about starting a small business. I will try to be as active as possible with the behind pictures and information.

Basic Information: 

We are out of Vacaville, Ca
I make soap, lotion, lip balms, scrubs, baby lotions, and a great extra virgin olive oil.
We grow our own trees, and product the oil on solar.
www.squashedolives.com