(Or rather when Andre met Ellie…)
Our story is probably like many others these days. We met online, talked on the phone enough our phone carriers tried to charge us extra even though we were on unlimited plans. And eventually decided we’d like to take a chance on making a life together.
I (Ellie) grew up on a ranch in southern Colorado. My family raise and train horses and run a year round Airbnb at the ranch. And they own the Trading Post in Fort Garland. So my background is rough and ready, country living. Andre on the other hand was raised in Denver to respectable hard working civilized folks. As you can imagine a lot of things get lost in translation.A
I think part of what brought us together was that we were both searching for something different from what we had lived before. Andre has worked over 20 years for the Post Office and while he is very thankful for the great job it has been he was getting restless for a change. I moved to the city to be with Andre and began searching for a new direction for my life as well. I considered getting a job in a cubicle but while I was trying to figure out what to do I believe God opened a path before us.
You remember I mentioned that Andre is a Postman? You know the postman motto
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”.
This is no exaggeration. Until I started dating him I had no idea how hard our post people work to deliver our mail. They are often working late nights and always out in the elements. Their vehicles usually do not have A/C and the heating is nominal. If Andre sees this he will want me to edit this out but it’s true and you should thank your delivery men and women today!
To get back to our story… The first winter we were together I noticed his skin was getting red and inflamed. He said it was the cold and I left him alone for a while. But it got progressively more and more chapped, to the point where it was bleeding in places. He told me this happened every winter! I couldn’t/can’t believe he put up with this for years. I told him his soap wasn’t helping. He laughed at me since he was using a soap brand well known for its gentleness. I asked him if he would quit showering every day, he gave me the look. So I told him I could make a batch of soap to help if he would try it. He politely rolled his eyes and said what men say to make their girlfriends happy. What he didn’t know was that I had been making soap for a long time before we met and had already seen how much difference the right soap can make.
It is kind of a funny story, how I got started making soap. Remember I said that my family owns a Trading Post? Well, back in 2010 a couple ladies who had been selling their handmade soap in our shop either left the area or retired and we ran out of soap to sell in the shop. It had been a steady seller so we wanted to find a new source. Then somehow, I’m still not sure how this decision was reached, they decided that I needed to make soap for the shop. I said no. I had other things to do. They kept on and on about it until I was like “fine! I’ll make a batch so they will stop bothering me. It can’t be that hard I’ll just knock it out real quick” . So I watched a couple YouTube videos, found a soap calculator online plugged in my oils and pulled on my rubber gloves. I think my first soap was like 50% canola oil and 50% sunflower oil. (Fellow soap-makers are laughing at this point) It was a total debacle, after stirring 5 hours we were no closer to trace than when I had started. It was a complete disaster. If it had worked and I had been able to whip out a batch that probably would have been the end of it. But having it fail so remarkably made me curious what had gone wrong and I began to study in earnest the chemistry of soap making and what was actually going on when you added all the little potions together. Before long I was a full on addict making soaps of all sorts of colors and shapes. At this point I thought of soap-making as a novelty, like sewing your own clothes. It was neat to be able to make exactly the color/design you liked for a few pieces, but it’s cheaper and more convenient to head over to JC Penney than to make your whole wardrobe. I wasn’t a handmade soap snob, it was a creative outlet that customers at the store liked. Some of them would tell me how wonderful my soaps made them feel and one lady would drive 3 hours from Colorado Springs to restock! I honestly thought they were nice well meaning folks that just believed strongly in the product. That changed when my dad got eczema.
He never had a minute’s trouble with his skin until he got into his 50’s. Something changed and he got extremely bad eczema, to the point where he really could not function. The burning itching was so prevalent and constant he couldn’t concentrate on anything else. My whole family and I had never dealt with anything like this before but from what we read online and what the Dermatologist told us it could be pretty much anything in his environment that could be triggering this. Especially everything touching his skin. At first we tried to figure out if there was anything that had recently changed that was causing it. It seemed logical that it was something new since there was no trouble before. But nothing we tried had any effect. Eventually we changed his detergent from the one we normally used and finally convinced him to change the soap that he had been using for more than 30 years. He didn’t think it could possibly be the soap, he had been using forever and had never had any trouble before! But low and behold, the eczema started improving. Now I am not saying the soap was the trouble 100%. We were changing everything at that point, but it was clear that changing helped him. I eventually started making a moisturizing soap with sulfur and neem oil just for him that seems to help. While the eczema may never totally go away he was finally able to resume life as normal.
Due to this experience and others like it I knew a change of soap would help Andre if I could just get him to try it for a while. So I made him a batch of colloidal oats and lanolin and kept pestering him until he started using it. I had to hide several of the soap bars he normally used before he gave up and started using the homemade soap regularly. After a couple weeks he told me his skin didn’t hurt as bad. I still remember how he said it, it was like he was in disbelief. His skin eventually cleared up to the point where it was just a little dry and treatable with lotion.
Andre became a believer in the power of soap!
Now I hope you are still following all of this because I have several sub-stories going at the same time. We started in the middle, went back in time and are now going to come back to the middle.
So I’ve moved to the city and am looking for a new occupational direction. One that would allow me the freedom to continue working for my family business (I am a remote working office manager) and one that would help pay for the exorbitant cost of living in the beautiful state of Colorado. The closer Andre and I got and the more conversations we had it became clear to me that, while he could accept it, he doesn’t really want to work for the post office the rest of his professional life. I realized that if I took a normal job at a company, our reality would be that he would have to remain in his job. So we began considering opening our own business. After all my father came to Colorado in 1988 with $800 in his pocket and now the family have a little ranch; while they aren’t getting rich they love their lifestyle and pay their bills. How hard can it be! Hahahahaha! You may laugh at us.
We considered everything from car rental to airbnb subletting. We prayed and prayed about it. All during this research process the whole chapped winter skin thing is happening. I don’t know who said it first but one of us was like “well, we could make and sell soap.” My dad had said for years that I should get serious about the soap as a business instead of just as a side hustle for our shop. We talked about it more..and more.. and more. We knew it wasn’t the fastest growing sector of the economy or anything. We are not likely to be the next billionaires. But we felt it was a business that we could both get behind and feel good about providing people with a quality product that for some, could drastically improve their quality of life.
Andre became a believer in the power of soap!
So in the spring of 2023 Andre and Ellie received their first shipment of oils and began making soap for Mountain Bubbles Soap.
It was like saddling up a wild bronco and getting on for the first time. We have been holding on for dear life as our horse bucks first one way then the other, about the time we get in the rhythm, he stops on his front feet and spins and slams us into a fence.
Due to the relatively low cost of entry, the soap market is highly saturated. Many soap makers enter price wars with each other, trying to have the lowest price to get the most customers. Unfortunately that strategy is simply not sustainable. The turnover in the business is incredible. As soon as one person gives up another starts making soaps. A simple search on craigslist, eBay or Facebook Marketplace will yield dozens of listings of folks selling their equipment or ingredients after they couldn’t make it work. And unfortunately the public has been “conditioned” by this to expect certain prices for soap. It’s not their fault, they have no idea what costs go into the ingredients, packaging, labeling, label making software, and especially the TIME it takes. They can buy a bar of soap for 50 cents at the supermarket, they think 8 bucks is pretty generous. Unfortunately, the only way to make a soap that is that cheap and not go out of business is to either buy low quality ingredients or produce on a massive scale and order your oils from suppliers by the truckload. We had no interest in running a manufacturing business.
It was also important to us from the beginning to use sustainably/ethically sourced ingredients even though these come at a higher cost. We purchase our micas from Mad Mica that is committed to sourcing their mica free from child labor and inhumane working environments. We have chosen to use animal fat bases for most of our soaps (excluding custom batches) as a responsible healthy way to use a product of the meat industry that would otherwise be wasted. As much as we know how, we make choices that are kind to other humans and sustainable for our environment.
In view of the guidelines we wished to work between, we thought long and hard and asked ourselves “What could we make that could provide our customers enough value that they would pay a fair price for so that we can be fair to our sources and still be in business 20 years from now?”
We turned to what had attracted us to soap in the beginning. For me that is the creative aspect to soap, the ability to make something beautiful that you can use in your everyday life. Something that can not be mass produced. Soap Art. For Andre that is having a bar of soap customized specifically to your needs that makes your skin feel amazing.
But just knowing how you can help your customers and what you can do to improve their lives, isn’t enough to make a business work. No one knew we existed or that we could help them. As any entrepreneur quickly learns, starting a business isn’t just having a great product.
We decided to start off our business by attending events and setting up booths so that we could meet our customers face to face and learn what was important to them. We had no idea what all that would entail!
Both of us have other jobs, me part time and Andre full time +. I really don’t think we could have made it without all the wonderful support we have received. My Father was overjoyed that I was finally starting a soap business like he had been recommending for years.
He and my brothers helped us build our show shelves.
In view of the guidelines we wished to work between, we thought long and hard and asked ourselves “What could we make that could provide our customers enough value that they would pay a fair price for so that we can be fair to our sources and still be in business 20 years from now?”
We turned to what had attracted us to soap in the beginning. For me that is the creative aspect to soap, the ability to make something beautiful that you can use in your everyday life. Something that can not be mass produced. Soap Art. For Andre that is having a bar of soap customized specifically to your needs that makes your skin feel amazing.
My mother and Andre’s Dad head up the “seniors gang” they have attended so many “labeling parties” I’ve lost count. I really would never have anything ready for sale without these guys. It’s actually gotten to the point that I set up tables and carry the soap over and then they want me to go cook lunch and stay out of their way. When I try to help they scold me that I’m not doing it right!
Both of our families and friends have checked in on us at shows and helped run the booth when we were busy. Andre’s mom has become our champion salesman and scouts new shops for us to be in everywhere we go. After our sugar scrubs helped Andre’s sister with her Keratosis pilaris, she has become our number one customer and buys all her soapy needs from us.
My family have been my ever tolerant guinea pigs as I test out new soaps and products. Ask them about the whipped sugar scrub that turned into rubber! Or all the bath bombs I accidentally set out where the sprinkler could reach them!
Andre and I have braved sub freezing weather and learned to play real life Tetris while packing the car. My Poor mother came to the Fair all 5 days on one of the hottest weeks of the summer and she isn’t a warm weather gal! My step mom came and actually helped at the booth while my dad ran around and socialized with the other vendors instead of helping! 🙂
We have learned not to rush the pack up.
And through it all we’ve met wonderful people.
When it got too much for us to handle on our own, God sent us two special people who help behind the scenes.
Robyn is our go to girl with anything that needs to be researched, labels that need to be created, spelling that needs to be checked (if you see anything misspelled its my fault not hers) and pretty much solving any problem we have as well as a brainstorming extraordinaire.
The most recent individual to come on board Team Bubbles is Nick and his business associates at Rhema Web LLC. It is thanks to them that you are reading this page and that we have a website and online store. Sometimes I think Nick must hate me because I constantly want to add or change something, but he has the patience of Job. I highly recommend him for all your website building needs.
Andre and I thank God every day for his kindness to us. He has helped us through the tough times and smiled on us with some real blessings. We received our first contract for the National Park gift shop summer of 2024 and we know that without God that could never have happened.
We pray each day for God to lead Mountain Bubbles in the right direction. We invite you to be a part of our story and tell us how Mountain Bubbles can serve you best.
Oh and our story would not be complete without the mention of our mascot and my first friend upon moving to Denver! Meet our friendly neighborhood squirrel! Only problem is he is a felon, he keeps robbing the postal trucks, I mean the postal nuts!
