Good, Clean Fun
As kids, we knew this as the sudsy stuff that washed away the mud, dirt and grime, the Trinitarian definition of a really good day.
American consumers, on a quest for the best in everything, are finding that a luxury bar of soap may provide as much in the way of sensual pleasure as it does in personal cleanliness.
“Soap is fun,” says Emilie Davidson, founder and president of Lather, a specialty soap store in Old Pasadena. It’s the variety that draws lines of customers to Lather on Saturday nights to wash their hands for free in the store’s two sinks.
Indeed, the days of choosing between such soapy icons as Dove, Ivory or Irish Spring at the grocery store are over. Now buyers have all kinds of choices--handmade, hand-sliced, all-natural, cold-pressed, super-fatted, triple-milled. One line of soap--made with an olive-oil base and infused with essential oils and aromatherapeutic herbs--seems to hint at a more holy than hygienic experience. At Lather, a bestseller scented with lemongrass has a loyal following and, like other varieties, arrives in the shape of a brick from a place that Lather insiders like to refer to as “the soap farm.”
“Not everyone can drive a Mercedes,” Davidson says, “but they can have a wonderful bar of soap. It’s an affordable luxury.”
Cut and sold by the ounce, an average-size, 4-ounce bath bar costs about $5. Plus, the large blocks offer a trendy and practical presentation given that molded soaps, like the French, triple-milled varieties, are, for the most part, more elaborately packaged and more expensive.
Caswell-Massey, established in Newport, R.I., in 1752 and considered the oldest soap manufacturer in continuous production in the United States, first produced colognes since body soap and the morning shower were not yet part of the American daily ritual. George Washington’s favorite cologne, No. 6, is still on the market, but the company attributes its significant growth in the last five years to the booming interest in its scented soaps.
The company’s soap sales during the last year alone increased by 21%, according to D.J. Tierney, Caswell-Massey’s marketing communications manager.
“The bath has become a more important time for people,” Tierney says. “They feel the need to de-stress and indulge themselves.”
She believes consumers are looking for the scents and smells that recall a soothing, pleasant childhood memory. These are the soaps your mother may have put out in the powder room and told you never to touch, for company only.
Rance, one of the oldest French soap makers, offers its own Lily of the Valley soap collection. Wrapped and packaged in handmade boxes, a set of six bars retails for $35 and accounts for 40% of U.S. sales, according to Shannon Kenber, national sales manager of Es’scents International, Rance’s U.S. distributor.
At the very high end, a single bar of Chanel No. 5, a soap imbued with the company’s 79-year-old fragrance, sells for $16 and is consistently one of the higher-selling products in the firm’s bath line, according to Karen Housman, Chanel’s director of fragrance marketing.
Royal Soap Co., a Texas-based wholesaler that makes glycerin logs of soap embedded with fanciful mosaic-like designs of ladybugs, palm trees and curlicues, offers 70 varieties of soap, many of which are fragranced specifically to remind the consumer of a special memory, a time in high school or a trip to the beach.
“I take a bar of Cocomo in the shower and tell my friends I’m going on vacation,” says Delma Hernandez, the company’s president. The Mercedes, the jaunt to Fiji--all we’ve ever needed is a good bar of soap.