How It All Began (Or: The Shower Favor That Started Everything)

Every product I make has a story behind it. But before any of those stories, there's this one.

Thirty-ish years ago, I was at a bridal shower. Somewhere between the games and the food, I unwrapped a little bar of cold process soap - a party favor, made by hand, all the way from Oregon. It was smooth, creamy and had that quality I can only describe the way my mom always did: slimy. And I mean that in the best possible way. That slightly silky, skin-loving lather that good handmade soap has and most commercial bars simply don't.

I turned it over in my hands and thought: Wait. You can make this?

I went home and talked my dad into building me a soap mold out of pine. If you knew my dad, you know that mold was probably more precisely constructed than it needed to be, he didn't do anything halfway. I got online, found a little corner of the early internet called The Sage, and started reading everything I could find.

At the time we had four small children and whatever hours I could carve out between nap times and school pickups was for crafting. I followed recipes, used what I had on hand, ran everything through The Sage's lye calculator, and made soap. It was a hobby. My bars were single color, unswirled, nothing fancy, but they were good, and they were ours.

I made soap off and on for years, picking it up and setting it back down as life allowed. Then one winter, I hadn't made a batch in a while, and my skin was letting me know about it. I've always had dry skin, but that season it was particularly unhappy. It was Adam (the logical, logistics half of this partnership, as many of you know) who said the thing that changed everything.

"You should make soap again. Your skin isn't so dry when you use your own soap."

So I got back in the kitchen. And somewhere in that season, I posted a silly question on Facebook: can you guess how many steps I take as an elementary music teacher? The closest winner got a bag of soap. It was meant to be a fun little giveaway. What I didn't expect was the comment that came back after the winner tried her bag.

"You know you could sell this."

I wasn't ready to sell anything. But those words planted a seed. That Christmas, I made soap for Facebook friends to buy as gifts. Simple bars, made with care, passed along just for the joy of it. Then Valentine's Day. Then the following Christmas and Valentine's Day again. Two full cycles of making soap for people just because I loved doing it and they seemed to love it.

And somewhere in those years, something started to shift. I found myself down YouTube rabbit holes, watching soap makers who weren't just following recipes, they were formulating. Building bars on purpose, tweaking oils for specific qualities, chasing exactly the lather and conditioning they wanted. I discovered SoapCalc, which meant I could dial in a recipe to the gram and actually understand why it worked. And then I found micas.

If water-based colorants were me dipping a toe in, micas were the cannonball. Suddenly I had shimmer and depth and color that held up through the lye process. The bars stopped being functional and started being beautiful. I was hooked in a whole new way.

The hobby that had started with a pine mold my dad built and a bridal shower favor from Oregon had quietly become something else. I just hadn't named it yet.

That part comes next.

Jen Cobb is the maker behind Cobb Cabin Crafts, a small batch handmade soap and skincare business rooted in intentional ingredients, slow processes, and the belief that the best things take time.