Soap Regained
“Lye is like people. If you’re patient and respectful, you’ll get along.”
In Winfield, Missouri (Pop. 1,134) there’s what looks like an ordinary house. If you were to take a peek through the window, it would still look ordinary, if fairly empty. But if you were to come back, say, at 2 o’clock in the morning, you’d find something cooking. Literally.
You’d find Debra Hendron working alone, stirring big stockpots to the accompaniment of medieval sacred music — or Metallica — or no sounds at all. The air would be filled with powerful scents like orange and rum and lavender. It’d be enough to make you want to pull up a chair to the dining room table to see what treat was coming. But while you were waiting, you might be disturbed to see some of the ingredients that are going into the pots. Things like lye. And a black goo with an overwhelming smell that goes by the name of pine tar and is so viscous that it pulls the paddles right off of spatulas.
That’s when you’d begin to suspect that what’s cooking in this apparently ordinary kitchen isn’t really ordinary. What Debra Hendron is cooking is soap.
This house, next door to the house Debra lives in, is the workshop, warehouse and shipping facility of her business, MoSoap. MoSoap, which is to say Debra, makes an astonishing variety of products. One of the things that strikes you when perusing MoSoap’s catalog is that soap can be about a lot more than a plastic pump that does the double duty of washing your hands and breeding new generations of antibiotic resistant germs.
There’s basic lye soap, which is a traditional soap with only three ingredients that you can use for all of yourself, hair included. (In spite of its alarming name, if lye soap is properly made, no lye remains in the final bar.) There’s strong lye soap, which you can use to wash clothes, the floor, or yourself if you’ve got oily skin. It also defeats poison ivy, sends fleas fleeing, does a number on acne and punishes head lice, to boot.
There’s Garage Soap, which smells like orange and works like a charm, with tiny particles of ground apricot pit that scrub without sandpapering your hands. There’s goat milk soap, olive oil soap, shampoo soap, every imaginable manner of scented soap and my favorite, the ominously dark bars of pine tar soap.
So how did Debra become this midnight soap maker? She was born into it. Her family was “always that squirrely group of people who lived on the mountain,” which means that they were the family that other families would come to with this or that ailment. Debra’s family would help out with “common sense,” but that common sense was a deep understanding of the local plants and herbs, which were distilled into soups and soaps.
This tradition was part and parcel of both sides of Debra’s family which may well be why, when she was a young adult, “There was no way I was going to use that handmade soap in my life.” Indeed, she ended up working for Clinique and Estée Lauder, and happily so. But times and circumstances change, and at a certain point, Debra found herself casting about for what to do next. When your mother is a herbalist, and your formidable grandmother MaeErma Jane has been making special soaps for certain families for decades, well, tradition does come calling.
Of course, learning the ropes from MaeErma Jane wasn’t just a matter of collecting her recipes. Debra’s apprenticeship in soap-making was to reverse engineer a bar of soap. As MaeErma Jane put it, “If you want that recipe, you figure it out.” Because a good soap maker will, and this soap maker has.
Debra’s developed her own soaps, but she’s also carried on the family tradition of custom work. For one client, that means soap exclusively made with wood ash and cast in molds lined with beeswax. He’s one of many who have relied on Debra and her family for one-of-a-kind soaps made to order. The continuity and history of this is one of Debra’s greatest satisfactions, how she is part of generations of makers tending to generations of clients. The relationship is surprisingly personal.
Perhaps it’s in the nature of soap. Cleaning is a necessity, sometimes a chore. But its very common-ness hides the way we all first encountered it, while being cared for by our parents and siblings and friends. For the first years of life, the primary tasks of child rearing are feeding and cleaning. The essentially nurturing nature of food we never forget, but the other half of equation has a less firm hold on our memory. Still, it’s there, waiting to be awoken.
A minute or two spent perusing some of the things Debra’s clients have written to her will show you that soap, or at least her soap, isn’t just soap. They speak in a ubiquitous tone of gratitude and, more tellingly, of coming home.
Of course, when you do something important to people, there’s a flip side. People can get angry, and they do, especially when Debra shuts down the shop. It happens sometimes. MaeErma Jane is 92, and Debra’s mother is 70 and sometimes they need her time. Sometimes Debra just needs to stop, to spend some days in the woods. Her grandmother called it the “low soap light,” which means that if you’re tired, or pressured or just worn out, you won’t make good soap. That’s where Debra draws the line.
What sort of business are you? griped one customer on learning that it would be a couple weeks before his order could be tended to. Debra’s sorry to disappoint, but she’s willing to lose the order, which does indeed make one wonder what kind of business is this. The answer is interesting.
Debra loves what she does, couldn’t fathom doing anything else. She takes the business seriously, crunches the numbers, understands the economic realities. The biggest of those realities is that she could make soap night and day and still sell it all. But even with this potential for growth, Debra has no aspirations for MoSoap to get any bigger than the 15,000 customers that have ever placed an order. Why? Because MoSoap is the right size just the way it is, at a scale where Debra can follow her passion while her customers can get the quality they should.
Now ask almost any economist about this scenario and they’ll explain how the invisible and infallible hand of the market will equalize supply and demand though price increases. But prices haven’t done that. Some rose only to reflect increases in material costs and the rest haven’t changed at all since MoSoap opened its electronic doors a decade ago. Debra may not have the ambition to go big or cash in, but she’s still done something to handle that pent-up demand. She’s sharing the knowledge she’s garnered with aspiring soapmakers, and now there are more of them following in the tradition.
What strikes me about this is the extreme contrast with business models that are lionized. The driving consideration here is not ease of manufacture, or the streamlining of supply chain, or the “scalability” of the growth model. It’s sensibility.
When Debra began making pine tar soap, she asked her grandfather’s opinion. He had been in the merchant marine, so he’d lived with pine tar, which has a long tradition of seafaring use. That’s how it went, Debra making adjustments, grandfather making comments until, over time, the soap “became what he remembered.” And it wasn’t just him. Customers sometimes call up crying because Debra’s work has recaptured something they thought was lost. The shape of the product may be an utterly unadorned rectangle but the inner shape — the shape of the experience — is tailored to perfectly fit things that you cannot see but only feel.
This is the fascinating thing. Debra’s soaps are a form of memory. Not only do they preserve a tradition that has passed from generation to generation, but they have, like Proust’s madeline, the ability to carry you back in time. MoSoap appears to be a soap-making enterprise, but it’s not really. It’s one of those unsuspected ways that lived experience survives from generation to generation.
My sense of Debra is that she’d tell me I’m being a bit grand by looking at things this way. But I think it’s true. And I think that her story — of discounting the familiar, of thinking the beautiful industrial things more desirable, of discovering that that beauty was thin and unsatisfying — is a story that belongs to all of us. What’s unusual is that Debra found a way out, or back, to the understanding that the things that we make are more than an expression of our creativity or ambition or need. The things that we make also make us. When it’s done right, a product is a kind of conversation between the maker and the user, a distillation of past and present, spiced with a dash of who we are and what we know, all wrapped up in something tangible. When it’s done right, it’s a small magic, the kind that can turn one of life’s necessities into a luxury.
— Christian Ford
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