Nithya Manoj is in her lab — a narrow hallway to her bedroom. Her workstation has a long table that holds an electronic weighing scale, a hand blender, mugs, bowls, spatulas... She is carefully measuring different ingredients. “I am making charcoal heart soap; it is suitable for those with normal to oily skin. Soap-making is a simple process as long as you have oodles of patience and a precise weighing scale,” says Nithya as she blends activated charcoal, betonite clay, olive oil, shea butter...
Ylang ylang oil, tea tree oil and geranium oil are added to the mixture for fragrance “and also for its therapeutic properties and various skin benefits.” She then pours the dark aromatic mixture into heart-shaped silicone moulds and carries the moulds to her bedroom where she labels them. “The soaps need to dry out for four weeks or more before use. I am labelling it so that I know when one can start working up a lather.”
The shelves of her bedroom contain rows of essential oils, carrier oils, various bottles of butters..., while soaps such as sea salt soap, oatmeal and honey, triple milk and citrus mint in fancy hues and shapes are neatly placed in plastic racks on the shelves.
Nithya runs Wild Goose, an online bath and body boutique. Right now, the website offers 22 varieties of soaps and other bath and body products.
Himalayan Pink Salt soap
Among her range of goods, Calamine milk soap, Citrus mint soap, lemon curd whipped body butter and vanilla soapy sugar scrub are the ones that sell like hot cakes, she says.
Fond of Do-It-Yourself projects, Nithya, a former employee at Malaysian Tourism Board in Chennai, decided to make her own cleaning agents when her mom sent her an article that stated that fumes from cleaning agents were injurious to health.
Nithya says, it was Rahul Joseph, a friend, who encouraged her to try her hand at soap-making. “Rahul and I are always on some perpetual goose chase. We have tried forming several businesses together – right from promoting local artisans to selling lamps hand-crafted by Rahul. By the way, that is why we decided to brand our range of bath and body treats thus – Wild Goose; it’s a dig at all out wild goose attempts. Anyway, he suggested I try soap making since I made my own cleaning agents.
And Nithya took it up as a challenge. YouTube was her guru. Nithya started off by melting a bar of a popular organic brand soap, adding a bit of cornmeal to it and pouring the mixture into a mould. She has since experimented with exfoliants, fragrance and more and has come up with some unique blend of soaps. A lot of research goes behind each variety of soap, she says. “Each soap tends to contain essential oils that carry healing properties. For instance, neem heals the skin, aloe vera is great for the complexion and so on. Loofah soaps come with an in-built loofah that surface after a few washes.”
Loofah Gardenia soap
Family and friends are her guinea pigs. “After making a new variety of soap, I usually hand out testers to family and friends,” says Nithya, who adds that is how she first started the business. “It began with me gifting my family and friends my experiments. It grew by word of mouth.”
However, unlike in the West, artisanal soaps is still a budding market in India. “For most people, a soap is a soap is a soap.” But, many soaps, according to Nithya, is often made with chemical detergents, hardeners and synthetic lathering agents. Some of the ingredients, she says can dry or irritate the skin. So there are people are gradually preferring hand-crafted bath and body products, says Nithya, who lists the main ingredients and its benefits as descriptions to her products on the site. “At the end of the day, people are willing to buy that nice-smelling bar especially when they see that it benefits their skin. The fact that the products are handmade, natural and chemical-free are added bonuses. Nearly all my clients are repeat customers,” says Nithya, who has customers from across India and a few from West Asia.
Charcoal black rose soap
Each soap is made in small batches so as to maintain the quality. “And also because I make the soaps myself. Rahul handles only the marketing side of the business.”
So, what next?
“I have a few ideas for soaps floating at the back of my mind and am itching to try them out,” says Nithya, signing off.
