What Are You Doing Here?

Today Melbourne stops for a football match between Brisbane and Fremantle.

Neither team is from here. It doesn't matter. The trams will be full by ten, the pubs will have had their tables booked for a fortnight, someone in every street will be cooking for twenty, and a hundred thousand people will walk to the G past strangers in the wrong colours and wish them luck anyway. I've lived in Sydney and I've lived in Canberra, and I spent about ten years away in total, and it was coming back that made me see it. This city turns up. It doesn't need to be its own day to make an occasion of it, and every Grand Final morning I feel a bit ridiculous about how proud of the place I am.

So I've been asking myself what a soap company does with that. We're a Melbourne brand and we wanted to celebrate Melbourne this weekend, and the honest answer is that a city isn't a place, it's the people in it. For us that means the people who stood in a windy laneway in Fitzroy thirteen years ago and decided our soap was worth coming back for. This post is for them.

The Smell Of It

A few weeks ago I walked into the warehouse and smelled it before I saw it.

Grapefruit and mandarin, sharp and a bit sweet, and underneath them the soft rosiness of geranium. It is a very particular combination, and I hadn't smelled it in years, and I was suddenly standing at Rose Street Market in 2014 with one hand on a canopy pole. Scent does that in a way nothing else can. I'd forgotten how much of that period lived in this one bar until a batch of it was curing on the racks again.

That bar is Fitzroy Flavour, and I want to tell you about the years it comes from.

A Pop-Up, And A Piece Of Advice

In the lead-up to Christmas in 2013 I ran a pop-up shop in Prahran. I had just moved back from Canberra, where I'd been making soap in whatever time a public service job left me, and I had decided I wanted a real change of career. The pop-up was the test. Would anyone buy it?

They did, and nearly everyone who did said the same thing on their way out: you should do Rose Street.

So when the pop-up closed, I applied. I got in. I went and walked around the market first to see what I'd signed up for, and I liked it immediately. It was grungy. It was very Melbourne. After a decade away it felt like the city welcoming me back.

The Night Before

Here is what a market day actually involved, for anyone who has ever bought a bar of soap off a trestle table and wondered.

The night before, I'd go to the warehouse and cut the soap. Every bar was cut by hand, which is why the early ones were all slightly different sizes and none of them had straight edges. Then I'd count out the float. Check I had the EFTPOS machine. Check it was charged. Pack the little paper bags a friend had designed for me, because that was the branding. Load the whole lot into the back of the car. I was living back at Mum and Dad's at the time, with a car full of soap. It was not where I'd pictured myself.

Then Saturday morning, set up. Rose Street didn't provide cover in those days, so you brought your own canopy, and the laneway turned it into a wind tunnel. You'd be halfway through explaining cold-process soap to someone and a gust would come through and you'd throw a hand up and grab the frame before the whole thing lifted off, and carry on talking. It was too cold or it was too hot. Something always went wrong. I can't tell you now what went wrong on the first day, only that something did, because something did every week.

And people kept mistaking the soap for cheese. In fairness, rough-cut and stacked on a board, it did look like cheese. The grapefruit usually gave it away.

The Question

I want to be honest about what was going on in my head, because I think it's the part of this story worth telling.

Not long before this I had been writing speeches for Australia's trade minister and foreign minister. Before that I was a journalist at SBS. And now I was standing in a laneway in Fitzroy with my hand on a canopy pole, selling soap in paper bags.

I wasn't embarrassed. I want to be clear about that. I'd chosen it. But it was such a strange next job, and I knew how it looked, and Rose Street is the sort of place people visit, so the looks arrived in person. Old colleagues from SBS would come around the corner, see me behind the table, and their face would do the thing before their mouth caught up.

What are you doing here?

Anthony, my husband, was always somewhere in the background helping, and it happened to him too. A very good friend of his, who he'd lost touch with, lived in Fitzroy and wandered through the market one Saturday. Two doctors looking at each other across a trestle table of soap. What are you doing, selling soap now? They've been close again ever since. Of all the things Rose Street gave us, I think that one's his.

The People Who Came Back

The honest answer to the question is that I was finding out whether this was a business, and the people of Fitzroy answered it for me.

You can't learn that from a spreadsheet. You learn it when the same woman comes back three Saturdays running and tells you her skin has stopped itching. When someone brings a friend to your table specifically. When the people who mistook it for cheese in March are the ones telling their sisters about it by June. There was a core of them, and they turned up in the wind and the heat, and they said the same things about the soap that people write to us now. They were the first community this company ever had. They made it real before it was one, and everyone reading this who has bought a bar since is part of what they started.

Rose Street faded out for us the way good chapters do. We got a permanent spot at South Melbourne Market, did the fit-out, and for the first time had a shop that stayed where we left it. I didn't appreciate how much I'd wanted that until I had it, and after a while loading the car on a Friday night got harder to justify. But every part of what this company is came out of that laneway. The plant oils and nothing else. The box instead of plastic. The habit of talking to customers like people, because for those first years that's all a customer was — a person, standing in front of you, in the wind.

Fitzroy Flavour

So this is how a soap company celebrates Melbourne. Not with the football. With the people who were there at the start, and the bar they bought.

Fitzroy Flavour is back for a limited run, made exactly the way we made it then, though I'm pleased to say we cut it straight now. Grapefruit and mandarin first, then the geranium. If you were at Rose Street in those years you'll know it the moment you open the box, and I would love to hear from you. If you weren't, it's the closest I can get you to the table.

And for the first time in our history, we've made a limited edition as a liquid too. That's new. We have never done it before, and I'd like to do more of them, so if you buy this one that's how I'll know you want us to.

It launched on Thursday. Enjoy the game, whoever you're going for. I'll be somewhere near a barbecue, in a city that turns up.