A Team of Ten or a Team of Six — The Real Cost of Australian Made

G'day Soap Lovers,

Ben here. Head of Ops at Australian Natural Soap Company, and Emma's brother, for those who don't know. She's been a bit out of action this week so I said I'd take a turn. I don't usually write. I'm more of a face and voice person. Bear with me.

I've had Australian Made Week on my mind all week. Hard not to, given what we do. And when you spend as much time as I do slowly mixing batches of soap, you get a lot of time to think. So here's what I've been thinking about.

What does Australian Made actually mean? Not the logo, not the ads with old mate. What does it mean in practice, for real people?

Here's the most concrete way I can put it.

We have ten people in our team. Five in the warehouse, five in back-of-house. If we did what a lot of businesses do and moved production overseas, we'd probably be a team of six. That's four jobs, including mine, that simply wouldn't exist.

Four people. Four families. Four people paying rent, buying groceries, spending money locally. We're a small business. Multiply that across every Australian manufacturer choosing to keep production here and you start to understand what's actually at stake.

Buying Australian made costs a little more. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But that difference in price is the difference between those four jobs existing or not.

I also want to be honest about something else. Running an Australian manufacturing operation right now is not easy. Costs have gone up across the board, ingredients, energy, packaging, wages. I look at ways to manage that every single week. I completely understand why some businesses make the call to go offshore. The numbers can look compelling.

But the cheaper option is never actually free. Someone always pays. It's just usually not visible at the checkout. It's a worker somewhere else under conditions we can't see. It's a local supplier who loses the contract. The cost doesn't disappear. It just moves somewhere less visible.

We've made the choice to keep it here.

There's something else that matters to me personally. Because we manufacture here, I can track the supply chain of every ingredient in every soap we make. Every single one. I know where things come from, how they're processed, what standards they've been held to. That's only possible because we're doing this ourselves, in Melbourne, where we can actually see it.

Emma wrote last week about what it costs to build something in Australia.

Something a lot of people feel but don't always know how to say.

Australian Made Week ends tomorrow. If you've bought from us this week, or from any local maker. Thank you. You're one of the reasons those ten jobs exist instead of six.

That's what it means from where I'm standing.

Ben ✌️