About The Natural Soap Company

Like all good small soap companies, The Natural Soap Company started on the kitchen table. Founder Sara Phillips tried soapmaking as a hobby and was quickly hooked by the alchemy of the process. Handmade soap is common in countries such as America, where there is a history of handmade soapmaking as it was a basic necessity for the pioneers, but in the UK and Europe the hobby was rarer, largely because both England and European countries, particularly France and Spain, have had a commercial soap-making industry that goes back centuries.

Sara very much liked her early experiments, enjoying both the process and the fact that she rapidly discovered that it was something she was good at... her soaps were of a good quality almost from day one. Part of this came from Sara's own desire to create as natural a product as possible, to use high-quality ingredients from the start and to experiment with recipes and methods over and over again to make better and better soap.

But attractive as it is for many, soapmaking has a real drawback as a hobby... you rapidly end up with a house full of soap. It was not long before, having handed out soap to all and sundry, Sara had to look at selling it. The first bars were sold from a table at a local fair, with the sign "Tested on husband and children, not animals". Sara's soap was soon available from local retailers under the name Handmade Natural Soaps.

Having outgrown the house quite rapidly, Handmade Natural Soaps moved into the basement of the local Friends Meeting House. This workshop may have had the right look and feel but within months proved too small... and while its old-world semi-subterranean rooms had a certain charm, they weren't hugely dry or well ventilated.

The Natural Soap Company now lives in what is obviously a relatively modern industrial unit in Wells, colloquially known as 'the soap factory' even though the manufacturing still gets done by hand. The factory is busy and crowded but it does provide a better environment for drying and packing the soaps.

The soaps themselves don't often appear at local fairs and stalls... The Natural Soap Company supplies soap to major hotels, health spas and guesthouses around the UK and the world and manufactures its own recipes or custom soaps for various resellers and shops. You can buy the soap under its own name direct from this website or from The Soap Shop, our own tiny little shop on Wells quay.