Today we’d like to introduce you to Brenda and Richard Summerlin.
Hi Brenda and Richard, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
Returning to the airport in Denver after a vacation in 2016, I (Brenda) asked Richard to make a half-day diversion so that we could visit my favorite soap shop in Colorado. I bought bunches of soaps, while Richard chatted a bit with the shop owners. I left there saying “I’d be very happy to spend my days making soaps”. Richard asked me the great question “Why don’t you just do it?” We began looking into the ingredients we were already buying for our skincare and were quickly disappointed to learn that my favorite soap shop was using a lot of the same ingredients (artificial colors, fragrances, and preservatives) to make handcrafted soaps that the big commercial products used. We knew there had to be a better way to make a product that contained healthier ingredients!
Richard and I have both battled with cancer (he’s still in the battle), and we’d made a high priority in eating natural, whole foods, and knew we needed to clean up the other stuff our bodies were absorbing (body and home products). We needed to create products that were better for our health and prayed it would benefit others in the same way. We chose to stay plant-based and use the highest quality ingredients- simple plant oils and butters, pure essential oils, natural clays, and botanicals, and to bring our 3600 square foot organic garden to the party whenever possible. We harvest spearmint for our Garden Mint soap, small pumpkins for our Pumpkin Spice Latte soap, and loofah gourds for our loofah soaps. The rest of our garden is a large mix of herbs, vegetables, fruits, and flowers for own food, along with plenty for friends, rabbits, birds, and bees. We nurture our Summerlin Soaps creations with that same love and care that we give to our garden. We’ve carefully selected each ingredient in our product line based on purity and creating the very best result, and we happily share each of those ingredients on our online store and on each label.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Brenda- I’m an introvert, so marketing and promotion aren’t natural for me. I love to engage with our customers, but I’m always somewhat cautious to initiate it. I don’t want to invade their space!
Richard- I find myself wanting to please everyone! This results in me creating way too many products.
Creating our small business has mostly been smooth. It seemed like a thousand things we needed to learn in the beginning (and still learning each week), and that process has been really rewarding. We both love the creating, production and customer interactions of our business, but we do have a few areas in which we struggle.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We create a line of products that are free from animal products or testing, gluten, artificial scents or colors, preservatives, phthalates, and parabens. Our bar soaps are created with the old-fashioned method of cold processing and then curing the soap for 6-8 weeks. Richard creates a line of natural liquid body washes that are truly unique on the market. We also create shower steamers, body butter, children’s bath bombs, linen spray, essential oil mosquito spray, bath teas, essential oil roll-on blends, sugar scrubs a pumice infused pedicure soap, a man bar, man jar, beard oils and special-order gift baskets, shower gifts, etc.
We’ve committed to make our small business foundation honoring to God, our customers, and our community. Everything else branches out from there. We’re both in our retirement season of life, and we seek out ways that we can focus on integrity of our business and products more than on increasing sales.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
We both accept that there’s a risk any time you create, and then offer it to the public for purchase (and comment). We can be really thrilled with a new creation, and it can be sort of soul-crushing when the response isn’t what we’d hoped for or imagined. But then, some of our best-selling products began as a mistake on our part.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.summerlinsoaps.com
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/summerlinsoaps
Image Credits
Thirteen Sixty Photography
