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Help our soap startup legitimize!

Equipment/licenses/insurance/space rental would take us years to afford, but The Crowd could fund us in a few weeks! Then we can make you great soap!

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Help our soap startup legitimize!

Help our soap startup legitimize!

Help our soap startup legitimize!

Help our soap startup legitimize!

Help our soap startup legitimize!

Equipment/licenses/insurance/space rental would take us years to afford, but The Crowd could fund us in a few weeks! Then we can make you great soap!

Equipment/licenses/insurance/space rental would take us years to afford, but The Crowd could fund us in a few weeks! Then we can make you great soap!

Equipment/licenses/insurance/space rental would take us years to afford, but The Crowd could fund us in a few weeks! Then we can make you great soap!

Equipment/licenses/insurance/space rental would take us years to afford, but The Crowd could fund us in a few weeks! Then we can make you great soap!

Richard Keorkunian-Rivers
Richard Keorkunian-Rivers
Richard Keorkunian-Rivers
Richard Keorkunian-Rivers
1 Campaign |
Palos Heights, IL, United States
$41 USD 3 backers
0% of $21,510 Fixed Goal Fixed Goal
Choose your Perk

Every little bit helps!

$1 USD
0 claimed

Two bars of soap!

$8 USD
Est. Shipping
October 2013
0 out of 1000 of claimed

Six bars of soap!

$20 USD
Est. Shipping
October 2013
0 out of 300 of claimed

16 bars of soap!

$50 USD
Est. Shipping
October 2013
0 out of 100 of claimed

40 bars of soap!

$100 USD
Est. Shipping
October 2013
0 out of 15 of claimed

Angel investor

$1,000 USD
0 claimed

Update: Upon request, we will stamp any name/word you want on the soap you buy. Any text you want that can fit into a 3" diameter circle!

 

Our Story

We are Kristi and Richard, and we make soap.

It began with a conversation at Michaels arts & crafts store, where Kristi thought it would be a fun project to buy a soapmaking kit. Richard pointed out that the kits already contain soap, and we'd just be remelting it. Richard (who is currently trying to get into medical school) then commented that the chemistry of soapmaking isn't that complicated, and if Kristi is really interested in it we could actually make our own soap from scratch.

Our first batch failed, and ended up looking like mushy orange goo. Our second batch, made of pure coconut oil, solidified into excellent soap. Kristi loves everything coconut, and began reading about possible health-and-wellness benefits of coconut oil and the soap made from it. Many friends and family surfaced who have skin conditions that are either made worse by or just not made better by their current soaps. Many more surfaced who are not satisfied with the quality of store-bought soap, or who ethically object to the beef tallow in almost all bar soaps.

We've since discovered that generally speaking, vegetarians, vegans, eco-conscious individuals, people with sensitivities to the harsh chemical additives of industry soaps, and people who are aware that store-bought soap is generally low quality, all have very few places to turn for their soap needs.

Our current Etsy store is stocked with only a dozen bars of soap, because currently we produce only about that many per batch, and we're making soap at night in a relative's kitchen and curing the soap in their basement. We have already received enough interest and intents-to-preorder that we can't meet demand. It would take us a lot of time to gradually increase our production ability as each batch sells out, and in the mean time we'd have a lot of disappointed customers having to wait months for their soap orders. Therefore, we're asking the masses (you!) to fund our expansion through the sale of discounted pre-orders.

What We Asking For

$20,000 after all fees. We've tried to painstakingly itemize everything we think we need.

  • Equipment: $14,652.82 plus s/h, everything physical needed to get our operation running, except space and ingredients. This would allow us to process one 400-lb drum of coconut oil every two days, if demand went that high.
  • Ingredients: $1,864 plus s/h, should be enough to make about 6000 bars of soap, which we will then give to those who bought our Perks.
  • Liability Insurance: $625, Commercial General and Product Liability coverage courtesy of Handcrafted Soap & Cosmetics Guild membership. Unclear whether it includes coverage of non-portable property.
  • Business Property Insurance: ???, possibly $0 if the Guild insurance is adequate. If we could find a favorable Business Owner Policy (which typically includes product liability) we'd buy that instead of Guild membership.
  • Business License: $100, approximately.
  • LLC Articles of Organization: $500 in Illinois, thanks a padload Jesse White.
  • Business Space Rental: ???, tends to be offered in at least one-year leases. Luckily we only need a few hundred square feet.

The quantifiables above add up to just under $18,000, and we hope/expect the unquantifiables (the ???'s), s/h fees, and other incidentals to be no more than $2,000.

We must emphasize that absolutely none of the money we're asking for here is going directly into our pockets. None of it will pay anyone's salary. If we end up receiving more money than we need, the surplus will go towards buying more ingredients (more ingredients = more soap). We want to run a self-sufficient business and we're not drawing an income from it until that happens.

Why You Should Want To Fund Us

Because we're giving all the money back to you, with interest! Your $20,000 lets us produce $30,000 worth of soap, which we will then give back to you in the form of the perks you paid for. Overall, every $2 you donate will give you a return of $3 in soap. If soap were money, this would be free money!

Every donation tier above $1 buys future soap made by us at some as-yet indeterminate time in the future. If we're fully funded in 45 days, it may take another month to iron out all the things we need to do to make our business fully legal, and then (75+ days out) we'll be in a position to produce the soap you bought from us! It will then require another month to fully cure (i.e. lose its water weight and become pH neutral).

If all of our donation perks are bought, we will fully sell out of soap (using the ingredients you funded) and just barely exceed our funding goal, having sold our soap at an average price of $3.26, well under the retail price of $5 + shipping. The more you buy at once, the better the discount you get: the $100 perk offers our soap at wholesale price, and is ideal for anyone interested in stocking our soap in their retail establishment. For those businesses, we will gladly give you higher priority on future orders.

Your donated dollars, aside from buying you excellent soap at a tidy discount, are being spent in support of a small (tiny, even) business producing soap from organic, sustainably-produced coconuts.

We also hope that the things we've read about the natural compounds in our soap are true, so that we can provide a high quality soap to people with skin conditions that make most soaps unacceptable, in addition to being beneficial for everyone else.

Finally, if everything goes according to plan and our business succeeds in its production goals, we will re-invest 10% of our first year profits back into indiegogo projects. It's only fair. We have no idea how much money that will be, but we hope it's a lot!

We've selected Fixed Funding because we can't begin making soap on a commercial level unless we're fully funded. All of your money goes towards getting us running. Unfortunately, we can't 50% lease the property, 50% insure the business, or 50% own the necessary equipment, so we can't do anything useful with 50% of our funding goal.

Please pre-order with confidence. Our soap is pure, gentle, highly cleansing, skin-conditioning, and confers all of the benefits of coconut-based products (which we believe are quite considerable).

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