Why We Started Perfectly Natural Soap — And What 12 Years of Making It Has Taught Us
Perfectly Natural Soap didn't start as a business plan. It started as a label-reading project in a grocery store aisle, because our oldest child turned out to be allergic to the synthetic chemicals in most commercial baby shampoos and washes. Rich and I just started trying to figure out what was actually in these products, and once you start reading ingredient labels, you can't really stop. That rabbit hole led to a natural soap-making hobby, which led to a kitchen that smelled like lavender and olive oil most weekends, which eventually led to everything we've built here in Williamsburg.
We get asked a lot about why we started a soap company, and the honest answer is that we didn't set out to start a soap company. We set out to take care of our kid. The business came later, almost by accident, and then with a lot of intention.
From kitchen hobby to a real business
At the time I started making soap, I was working in IT and going through my MBA program. Almost every homework assignment that asked "if you were to start a business" ended up being about soap. Looking back, the business plan was being written before I even knew I was going to use it.
In 2013, I made the leap. Left the IT career behind and officially launched Perfectly Natural Soap. In the beginning it was online only, just us and a website and a whole lot of carefully made bars. We grew steadily from there, and in 2016 we opened our first retail location in Smithfield, right on Main Street in the historic district. That was a genuinely transformative experience. Having a physical place where people could come in, smell everything, try a hand scrub at the counter, and really connect with what we were making changed how I understood what this business could be.
We expanded to Richmond Road in Williamsburg in 2018. Today our products are still handcrafted right here in our warehouse studio in Williamsburg, which is where most of the work happens: the making, the formulating, the packing, the ongoing effort to get the products right. We've grown well beyond soap at this point, into lotions, body butters, sugar scrubs, candles, beard care, facial care, and more. But the foundation has never changed. Clean ingredients, short formulas, products that genuinely feel good to use every day.
The hard part nobody talks about enough
I want to be honest about this because I think it matters. Building a small handcrafted business is not a smooth road. Ours certainly wasn't.
The most significant challenge we faced was the pandemic in 2020. The timing could not have been worse. We had just signed a lease on a third retail location, and within weeks everything shut down. That was genuinely frightening. You're sitting there with a new lease commitment, stores closed, and no idea how long it's going to last. That third location did eventually open, and has since closed, but what I'll never forget from that period is how our communities showed up for us. Our customers in Williamsburg and Smithfield were extraordinary. Their loyalty during the scariest stretch of this journey is a significant part of why we're still here, still growing, still making things we're proud of. We don't take that for granted.
Beyond the pandemic, there are the everyday challenges that come with being a small, handcrafted business. You're managing production, retail, online sales, staffing, and marketing all at once, often with a lean team and a lot of personal investment in the outcome. Growing without losing the quality and personal touch that made people fall in love with your products in the first place is a constant balancing act. We've gotten better at it over 12 years. We're still working on it.
What we actually believe about clean ingredients
We're not preachy about ingredients. That's a deliberate choice. We're not trying to scare anyone or convert anyone to a particular lifestyle. We just genuinely believe that plant-based oils, botanical extracts, and naturally derived fragrances make better products for your skin than a lot of what fills conventional store shelves, and we've built everything around that conviction.
No dyes, no parabens, no petrochemicals, no synthetic colorants. Those are our constraints, and they've shaped every formula we make. Working within them has made us better formulators, because you can't lean on cheap fillers when your ingredient list is short and honest. Every ingredient has to earn its place.
What we're most proud of is that our products actually perform. Customers who come to us because they have sensitive skin or ingredient sensitivities stay because things work and feel genuinely good to use. That combination, clean and indulgent at the same time, is harder to find than people realize, and it's what we've spent 12 years trying to get right. If you want to go deeper on what to look for in your own products, our guide on how to read a skincare label is a good place to start.
What the stores mean to us
When you visit one of our retail stores, we love offering a complimentary hand scrub experience so you can actually feel the difference before you buy anything. That philosophy of generosity and genuine connection is something we've tried to carry through everything we do, online and in person.
Our Smithfield store sits on Main Street in the historic district, which is a genuinely special place to be rooted. Williamsburg has been home since the beginning in more ways than one. These communities are not just where we sell things. They're where we make things, where our team lives, where we've been through hard seasons and good ones. Being a local business in a real sense, not a franchise with a local face on it, matters to us more than it might be obvious from the outside.
After 12 years, the thing that stays with me most is not any particular milestone but the accumulation of small moments. A customer who comes in saying they've been buying the same bar for eight years. A parent who tells us their child with sensitive skin finally found something that doesn't cause a reaction. Someone who discovered us on a trip to Williamsburg and has been ordering online ever since. Those are the reasons we're doing this.
What's next
We're still growing, still formulating, still looking for ways to make products that work better and feel more indulgent without compromising what we believe about ingredients. The line has expanded considerably from those early soap bars, and it'll keep expanding, carefully and with the same standards we started with.
We were recently featured in Voyage Virginia Magazine, which gave us a chance to tell some of this story in a longer format. If you're curious about the fuller version, including how Rich and I think about risk and what the pandemic years really looked like from the inside, the full interview is worth a read.
And if you haven't yet found your thing in our shop, our bar soap collection is still where we'd suggest starting. It's where we started. It's still the heart of everything we make.