Expensive Soap, Or Cheap Skincare?

There are two ways to look at what we make.

You can look at a bar of Olive Castile and see expensive soap. Nearly ten dollars for something the supermarket sells for two. Or you can look at it and see cheap skincare: a product that does what the bottles on the beauty counter promise, for a fraction of what they cost, from ingredients you can count on one hand.

I've spent thirteen years trying to get people to see the second thing, and I think the clearest way to do it is to put our bar next to both of the things people compare it with.

Next To Supermarket Soap

Walk down the soap aisle and turn a pack over. On the bottom of most of them there's a letter stamped into the plastic. I wrote a whole post about that letter: T means the bar is made with tallow, P means palm oil. That's what cheap soap is made of, because that's what's cheapest, and it's why the bar costs two dollars. The scent is synthetic for the same reason.

It's also why it does what it does to your skin. A bar built from palm oil and synthetic hardeners is made to be hard, cheap and lather fast, and the way it gets there strips the natural oils off you. That tight, dry feeling after a shower isn't your skin. It's the soap.

Olive Castile is one ingredient: Australian olive oil, turned into soap. Our scented bars are the same plant oils with pure essential oils, and nothing else. We cold process everything slowly, which is the part almost nobody knows about: when soap is made the slow way, the glycerin that forms during the process stays in the bar, and glycerin is the thing that softens skin. Factory soap has it stripped out and sold on separately. So the difference between our bar and the two-dollar one isn't the price. It's what's in it, and what's been left in.

Next To The Beauty Counter

Now think about the other place people buy things for their skin: the beauty hall in a department store, or the shelves of a beauty store, where a cleanser or a body wash comes in a heavy bottle with a pump and a brand name you've seen on a billboard.

Most of what you pay for there isn't skincare. It's water, which is usually the first ingredient on the label. It's the bottle and the pump and the box. It's the billboard. The part that's meant to do something is a small share of what's in your hand, and you pay thirty, forty, sixty dollars for the whole thing.

A bar of ours has no water in it and no pump. It's all active. It lasts for weeks if you let it dry between uses, so a $9.95 bar works out cheaper per wash than almost anything on that counter. And the reason I can say it does what those bottles promise is that people tell us so, every day. We get reviews daily from people who've switched and can't believe the difference, who say their skin stopped itching, who bought one bar to try and now buy ten.

Expensive soap, or cheap skincare. We decided a long time ago which one we were going to be.

What That Decision Costs

Being skincare rather than soap means the ingredients and the process come first, ahead of everything else, including the price.

It means we make everything ourselves in Dandenong rather than having it made somewhere cheaper. It means Australian olive oil rather than whatever's cheapest on the world market this month, and pure essential oils rather than a fragrance from a drum. It means cold process, which is slow, when there are faster ways. It means we make our liquid soap to order rather than sitting on it. And it means that when we tried for years to get into the supermarket aisle and found out what a bar would have to be made of to sit there at that price, we said no, because then it wouldn't have been ours.

It also means we carry every cost that's gone up this year, and most of them have. Electricity. Fuel, which sits underneath every freight bill we pay. Postage, which goes up every July. Olive oil. And wages, which is the one I want to explain, because it's the one that runs through everything we make. Our soap is Australian grown and Australian made. So when wages go up, as they should, they go up for the people in Dandenong who make it, and for the growers who press the oil, and for the people who make our boxes, and for the posties who carry it to your door. Every one of those is an Australian wage, and every one of them is in the bar. A company that makes its soap offshore from oil bought on the spot market doesn't feel that. We do, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

We held our prices through all of that for over a year, because we didn't want to be the business that moves its prices every time something twitches. But a bar made this way, by people paid properly, from an oil we won't swap out, has a real cost, and I'd rather tell you what it is than change what's in the bar to avoid saying so. There are plenty of companies making cheap soap. We're not going to become one of them so a bar can stay at $8.95.

What's Changing On Tuesday, And What Isn't

Back in June I said our prices would need to move this year. It's taken longer than I planned, because we wanted to sort out a few other things first, but here it is. Our first price change in over a year: a dollar on the bars, a better deal on bulk, nothing on the liquids, and the 5L refills come down.

The 5L refills were priced at exactly two and a half times a 2L, which meant you paid the same per litre and got a heavier tin for your trouble. That never made sense, so from Tuesday a 5L is twice a 2L. And the gap between buying one bar and buying ten has got wider on purpose: if you buy in bulk, you've done well out of this.

If You'd Like The Dollar To Disappear

Buy in bulk. From Tuesday, ten bars of Olive Castile works out at $8.50 a bar, $1.45 less than buying them one at a time. If you use the liquids, the refill tins haven't moved and the 5L is cheaper than it's ever been. And if you know someone who still thinks of us as expensive soap, send them this.

A bar of Olive Castile is still under ten dollars. Made in Dandenong, from Australian olive oil, the slow way, with the good part left in. That's the skincare. The soap is just how it arrives.