Region #19's Boutique Results

I certainly learned a lot from this event!  It was only the second time that I set up a booth for direct sales and I was quite nervous about the display and the stock I brought along.  However, Thursday night was a huge success and actually represented 50% of my sales for the whole weekend.  I am grateful for both my husband, Tom, and my mother, Midge, for their help in making this whole thing work.

Here is what was popular:

20% of sales: Tenor, Lead, Bari, and Bass soaps
10% of sales: Lavender Butter Bars
10% of sales: Lavender Loofah
10% of sales: Coffee Kitchen Soap
10% of sales: Tea Soaps (Green Tea, Chai Tea, Mint Tea combined)
8% of sales: Goat Milk Soaps (scented and unscented)
7% of sales: Castile Soap (including the baby soap.  If I had more, this might have been higher on the list)
25% of sales:  Everything else combined (Beer Soap, Wine Soap, Shampoo & Shaving Bars, Men's fragrances)

I do have a lot of the voice part soaps left over and am trying to decide what to do with them.  They will last for over a year so I guess I need to decide if I'm going to take them to FLASH or not.  Decisions.

Finally Catching Up!

Working as a team, Tom and I have 200 bars of soap made, labeled, shrink wrapped, and packaged ready for the convention.  Another 100 bars will be ready to wrap soon.  The 250 voice part soaps are also finished but are sitting out to cure and harden before we wrap them next week.  

I have my temporary license to sell in Maryland for the weekend and I've been improving the display set up with a few new purchases.  The new hang tags and stickers have arrived so I just need to make table top signage.  

It's a good thing I'm home for a few more days at the beginning of this week!  With each "batch" of soap yielding 26-30 bars each, getting to this point has been quite labor-intensive.  Yet, it's been fun exploring and being creative.  Being a vendor at the Boutique for the Sweet Adeline Convention will be my second chance as a vendor.  Lots to learn.

Milk & Honey Soap

Today I split a batch of goat milk soap so that 1/2 is just milk and honey (unscented) while the other 1/2 is my traditional honey oatmeal soap with cinnamon leaf essential oil for the fragrance.  Both were set in the mold with bubble wrap around them so that a "honeycomb" will be on the outside of the bars.

Then I made my second (final) batch of Baritone soap.  Both traced nicely and set up just right.  I love it when all goes smoothly.

Productive Weekend

I took full advantage of the weekend and time at the house to really produce a lot of soap.  Saturday I made some beer soap and another batch of Lead (floral) soap.  Sunday I made a men's soap with Leather fragrance oil, the third and final batch of Lead soap (used up all of the flowers), and then a Lavender Loofah set.  I'm running out of space for storage so i did buy another rack of drawers from Michael's.  I have soap everywhere right now.  Great fun.  The house smells wonderful!