#1

Administrator
Philadelphia, PA
(This post was last modified: 03-11-2017, 09:10 AM by andrewjs18.)
Hi all,


First I'd like to thank Stirling Soap for taking the time to do an AMA (ask me anything) with the Damn Fine Shave community. Rod & Mandy will be popping in and out of the forum for most of the day to answer questions that we have for them.

Please keep in mind that the questions that are asked NEED to follow our site rules. Failure to follow our rules will result in the removal of your post(s).

Check out Rod & Mandy and their Stirling Soap items at: https://www.stirlingsoap.com




Thanks,

Andrew
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.
#2

Administrator
Philadelphia, PA
Rod,

What made you want to get into making soaps and then shaving items?
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.
#3

Super Moderator
Rod/Mandy,

First of all, I just want to thank you both for offering such fantastic performing products at a great value. And anyone who has visited your site surely knows the tremendous variety of scents which Stirling offers. With all of that variety, what is your "go-to" or favorite scent?

Asafiev likes this post
#4

Merchant
Arkansas
(03-18-2017, 09:14 AM)andrewjs18 Wrote: Rod,

What made you want to get into making soaps and then shaving items?

We started with bath soaps, just as a way to remove some of the unnecessary chemical fillers in our lives. I don't have particularly sensitive skin, but I'd never cared for the way my skin felt as it dried after taking a shower. I didn't think that having to coat myself in lotion to prevent feeling itchy should be the norm. A bit of further exploration led to me realizing that there was a high probability that what I was experiencing was not only common for a majority of the population, but easily preventable. It's not profitable to sell good soap on a mass scale, so what they do is harvest the glycerin that is a naturally occurring byproduct of the saponification process and sell it to be used in cosmetics and other industries. They add in fillers like sulfates and other detergents and hardeners and sell it to the consumer for a buck a bar or less. Glycerin is a humectant, and removing that from your soap will exacerbate the drying nature of washing yourself with a soap. The sulfates are common skin irritants, and removing them from your shower routine prevents your skin from being completely stripped of oils.

I've gotten away from the original question here and started ranting. Sorry. Long story short, I wanted something better for my skin. I now have that I would never go back to commercial soap or body wash. A couple of years ago Mandy and I took a trip back to central Texas, and forgot to bring a bar of our soap for the trip. We realized it at the hotel, but figured we'd be okay for a couple of days. Wrong. After using a real soap for years now, going back to the normal detergent bar that's passed off as soap made me itch like I'd been rolling around in an ant hill.

As for the shave soap, we got into that in 2012. I was a wetshaver already, but I thought I could probably make a better soap than the two brands I was currently using. I was right, but that didn't mean I was making a good soap. It took until October of 2013 before we finally hit on a formula that worked. We've been on that same formula since, except for the added tweak of removing clay from the formula in May of 2015. At the same time we cut down on our suppliers of raw materials. Rather than chasing sales on tallow, castor, and essential oils, we standardized our suppliers. We only bought what we considered the best ingredients, regardless of prices or sales. It made the biggest difference in our soaps. Like the Papa John's commercials say "better ingredients, better pizza." Well, better ingredients, better soap. Using the same ingredient suppliers also reduced batch to batch variations that can plague handmade soapmakers.

Was that too long?

andrewjs18, BadDad, Blade4vor and 2 others like this post
#5

Merchant
Arkansas
(03-18-2017, 12:14 PM)HoosierShave Wrote: Rod/Mandy,

First of all, I just want to thank you both for offering such fantastic performing products at a great value. And anyone who has visited your site surely knows the tremendous variety of scents which Stirling offers. With all of that variety, what is your "go-to" or favorite scent?

Thank you! I love the variety. I rarely use the same scent two days in a row. I also tend to be a seasonal-type person. Among my own creations, I think I like the Gatlinburg best. It's not a scent for everyone, but it smells like a cabin or a gift shop in the Smokies to me. Among the stuff that is a dupe or inspired by another product, I think I would say the Mountain Man. It's not a perfect clone of Creed's Silver Mountain Water by any stretch, but it blends very well with it and stands on its own as a scent I love.

User 1137 likes this post
#6
Hey guys! What is the ETA for the spring/summer stuff being released? Also, do you guys use other artisan soap products or do you mostly stick with your own? (If yes, which are some of your favorites?) Thanks!
#7
Thanks for the excellent badger brushes. I have the 26 and 24 fan. Compares to those 3X the price. Hopefully a silvertip is on the horizon.
#8

Merchant
Arkansas
(03-18-2017, 02:30 PM)gobeavs Wrote: Hey guys! What is the ETA for the spring/summer stuff being released? Also, do you guys use other artisan soap products or do you mostly stick with your own? (If yes, which are some of your favorites?) Thanks!

We released a handful yesterday. The remainder will be up in mid-April. I wanted to do them all in one big release, but the construction on the workshop expansion has slowed operations down so much that it just wasn't possible to have everything ready. Right now we have Island Man, Coconut Lime, Iced Pineapple, Weekend in Malibu, South Padre, Glacial Spearmint, Glacial Wintergreen, and Glacial Obsidian returning. Oh, and Eskimo Tuxedo.

User 1137 likes this post
#9
Hi,

I was curious why you decided to sell 5.8 ounces of shaving soap in those green jars. Also, one of the first things I do when a get a new green jar of your soap is to take a plastic spoon and smooth out the top. I don't like the lumpy presentation, but it's an easy fix. Maybe you'd consider a way to have a more level surface as the soap sets up. Regardless, you make an enjoyable product.

whollykaw likes this post
#10

Merchant
Arkansas
(03-18-2017, 02:36 PM)StephenG Wrote: Thanks for the excellent badger brushes. I have the 26 and 24 fan. Compares to those 3X the price. Hopefully a silvertip is on the horizon.

Thank you very much. I couldn't be more pleased with how those turned out. We did quite a bit of sampling and testing to get what we those right.

I've been resisting doing a silvertip so far for a couple of reasons. First, all of cash is tied up in the expansion and the new razor handles and I don't think it would be prudent to have any more debt at the moment. Second, 3-band silver tips are difficult to do right. Due to the super fine hairs, meaning the diameter of the hair shaft is small compared to a 2-band finest silvertip, you have to pack in far more hairs per unit area to achieve a good density. This leads to some shedding initially. Even from a good 3-band, you're going to have some shedding, maybe quite a bit. We comb all of our 2-bands and synthetics before boxing them up to remove as many loose hairs as possible, but with a super packed 3-band silvertip, it would be a bit more difficult to get them all. I do hope to grow enough to be able to make it happen at some point though.

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