Our Year in Review

We have the best customers! We have had an overwhelming amount of support and questions about how we are faring the wild and challenging year that 2020 has been. We appreciate all of the love, and so we thought we should give you a progress report. 

At the beginning of the year, 2020 seemed promising, didn’t it? We all had grand plans, (insert something ridiculous that was planned) and we were off to the start of a busy soap season. Being a business that is 85% wholesale, we took a huge hit as the news of the virus started to bring in canceled orders – about 90% of them when all was said and done. While we were all sent to spend time at our houses and ponder over why we picked that paint color for the walls and going through most of our fabric stashes sewing masks, the Dream Team put our heads together and came up with a plan. We were determined to find the silver lining in this scary and unfortunate event. How would we survive?

To be honest, I had no idea. We have never had a marketing plan, but the first silver lining was that we made one. This “quiet time” in the business enabled us to get creative in a way we hadn’t done before and figure out the magical formulas for social media (well, think about them. I’m not quite sure we’ve got them figured out yet). We also gave our website a refresh with some new photos and learned what all those settings and buttons on the camera actually do. This time also gave us time to connect more with all of you. Not having the opportunity to see some of you in person on your yearly trips up to Alaska required us to reach out and let you know we were still here to help you wash your hands and listen to how you were doing. We paired up with some great Alaskan artists to bring you something a little different and had time to work on giving some of our labels a makeover. Not to mention having the flexibility and time to take a nap while my growing twins were taking up a lot of my energy from the inside.

The Dream Team busted some serious butt trying to make the best of the year. Many had the opportunity to learn different positions and skills around the shop. For some, we even made up new ones. Unfortunately, we had to let our seasonal staff go but were able to keep our core year-round employees busy. 

In the end, we didn’t quite make it to the black. We luckily had a nest egg that was saved away from our future Dream building that was able to help us to get by. The dream right now is to continue to make the fun, good-smelling products that we have been crafting for almost 24 years now. The ultimate silver lining that we have taken from 2020 is we are still in business, we learned a lot of useful skills, met some amazing people (virtually), connected as a team in ways we were never able to before and learned a lot about the sorcery that is social media. And for me personally, my twins were born, healthy and ready to take on this wild world. 

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We want to hear from you – what was the silver lining of your year?

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