Our Story

It started with one bar of soap…

Thistle Soapery wasn’t born from a grand business plan. There were no spreadsheets (yet), five-year strategies or dreams of building a soap empire.

It started in 2019 with a pretty simple idea: we wanted to use less plastic.

I began making cold process soap at home as part of an attempt to cut down on all the plastic bottles finding their way into our bathroom. It turned out I rather loved making it. Even better, the first batches were actually pretty good.

I also have ridiculously sensitive skin, so it wasn’t long before I started wondering whether I could create a facial soap that worked for me.

Cue a lot of late-night reading, experimenting and probably far more excitement about different oils, butters and clays than is entirely normal.

Eventually, I created a charcoal facial soap that worked beautifully as part of my own skincare routine. That little experiment became one of the first recipes I was really proud of – and, years later, our Charcoal & Tea Tree Facial Soap is still one of our bestsellers. You can read about it HERE if you’re interested.

Soap quickly became my go-to gift for friends and family too.

Birthdays? Soap.
Christmas? Soap.
Coming round for dinner? There was a fairly good chance you were leaving with soap.

Then 2020 happened.

From hobby to slight obsession

When COVID-19 hit, I was furloughed from my day job and suddenly found myself with something I hadn’t had much of before: time.

Eleven weeks of it, to be precise.

My first love has always been baking, so naturally I started there. Bread, cakes and anything else I could find an excuse to put in the oven.

Unfortunately, it turns out that when you’re stuck at home with a constant supply of freshly baked bread and cake, somebody has to eat it all.

After the effect on our waistlines became increasingly difficult to ignore, baking was officially banned.

So I needed a new creative outlet.

Enter soap.

Unlike cake, nobody was going to eat it.

At least, that was the theory.

I made soap. Then I made some more soap. I experimented with different oils, butters, colours and fragrances. One batch inevitably sparked an idea for the next and, before long, there was considerably more soap in our tiny London flat than any two people could reasonably use in a lifetime.

It turns out replacing an excessive quantity of cake with an excessive quantity of soap doesn’t actually solve the storage problem.

It just smells better.

Partly fuelled by my partner Jo’s desire to reclaim some of our living space – and partly by plenty of encouragement (read: nagging) from friends and family – I started wondering whether anyone might actually want to buy it.

So I decided to try my hand at selling online and opened an Etsy shop.

And somehow, people did.

What I very quickly discovered was that there’s rather more to turning a soapmaking hobby into a proper little business than making lovely soap, taking a few photos and popping it online.

There was a whole world of cosmetic regulations, safety assessments and paperwork that I suddenly needed to learn about.

The slightly terrifying bit…

Turning my hobby into Thistle Soapery meant turning the recipes I’d been scribbling down, tweaking and making in our kitchen into proper formulations and sending them off to a cosmetic safety assessor.

I can still remember how strange it felt sending those first recipes away.

Until then, they’d been my recipes. I’d made them, used them myself and subjected willing friends and family to an awful lot of soap testing.

Now someone who actually knew what they were doing was going to look at them.

There was definitely a moment of:

“What if they come back and tell me I’ve been doing this completely wrong?”

Thankfully, they didn’t.

Having those first recipes professionally assessed felt like a huge milestone. These things I’d created at home, initially just for ourselves and our friends, were becoming properly assessed products with my little business name attached to them.

It was probably the moment Thistle Soapery started to feel less like a hobby that had got slightly out of control and more like a real business.

And there was certainly no going back after that.

Then things got a little out of hand…

One order became another. Reviews started appearing. Customers came back for more. The collection grew, we started trading at local markets and slowly our lives began to revolve around what became Thistle Soapery.

The kitchen experiments haven’t stopped either.

Alongside our handmade soaps you’ll now find solid shampoos and conditioners, lip balms, bath treats and plenty of other creations that probably began with me saying:

“I’ve had an idea…”

Words Jo has quite rightly learned to fear.

Thankfully, she’s now fully involved as business partner, Head of Logistics, Creative Lead and Chief Product Tester – an entirely official job title that definitely isn’t four jobs disguised as one.

Small batches. Big personality.

The business may have grown, but the idea behind it hasn’t really changed.

We still make our products in small batches. We’re still trying to make thoughtful choices about the ingredients and packaging we use. Our soaps are vegan, cruelty free and palm oil free, and reducing unnecessary plastic remains an important part of what we do.

And that early obsession with ingredients hasn’t disappeared either.

If anything, it’s got worse.

We’re constantly experimenting with different plant-based oils and butters, clays, botanicals, essential oils and fragrances to create products that we genuinely enjoy using ourselves.

But we don’t think making more thoughtful choices should mean everything has to be beige, boring or smell vaguely of lentils.

We love colour. We love gorgeous fragrances. We love trying something a little bit different.

Because something can be made thoughtfully and still be really good fun.

What started with a few bars taking over our tiny flat has grown into a whole collection of handmade soaps, solid haircare, lip balms and bath treats, sold online and face-to-face at the markets we’ve come to love.

It’s still a small business. It’s still very much hands-on. And there’s still usually something experimental curing, setting or being tested somewhere it probably shouldn’t be.

Some things never change.

And we’re still incredibly grateful

I was only furloughed for eleven weeks, but those eleven weeks gave me the space to turn something I loved doing into something I was proud enough to put out into the world.

Years later, there’s still something slightly ridiculous about seeing an order come through and realising that somebody, somewhere, has chosen something we’ve made.

Every order, every five-star review, every returning customer and every person who stops for a chat at our market stall genuinely matters to us.

So thank you to everyone who bought one of those early bars, told a friend about us, left a review, came back for another order or stood at a market stall sniffing EVERY SINGLE BAR before declaring:

“I can’t decide.”

And, perhaps most importantly, thank you to the friends and family who kept nagging me to sell the stuff in the first place.

Turns out you were right.

Please don’t let it go to your heads. 🧼💜