When Bridget Overson went into a Lush store to get a bar of soap for a friend, she had no idea that a year later, she’d be making and selling her own.
A graphic designer by trade, Overson said that the soap she bought at Lush sparked her creative side, and soon enough she was curing her first batches of homemade cold-processed soap. She is now the owner of Cap City Soap Co., a natural soap- and bath-product shop that she runs in Concord.
“It didn’t start at first with me thinking I’m not happy with my soap products, I’m going to make soap – it was very much just the creative aspect of it,” Overson said. “It was something I wanted to just to create and I really did find the idea of making something healthy very appealing,” she explained as she demonstrated her process.
She mixed a combination of essential oils with lye and mica to create a swirling magenta and blue soap that she calls Spring Breeze. She said she uses as many natural, local ingredients as she can.
“One of my favorite things to do is go to the farmers market in the summer. I make a soap with pureed tomatoes, and one with fresh cucumber and aloe,” she said.
Overson also makes a soap using beer from Concord Craft Brewing Co. She caters her business to a Concord customer base, and spends a lot of time at farmers markets and craft fairs telling stories.
“One of the things I’ve noticed is that the type of people who decide to live in Concord, they’re a special type of person,” she said. “I always say if you own a dog and you live in Concord, it’s the law that you have to go to the farmers market on Saturday. I knew that those were the type of people I wanted to talk to.”
Overson likes to tell her customers the stories behind the whimsical names of some of her soaps. One is called Clean Hippie, which she designed for a friend who wanted a vegan soap.
“A lot of the soap that we make has lard in it. Lard is great for your skin, but being a vegan, she wasn’t interested in that,” Overson said. “So I was going to name it Dirty Hippie, but I was like, it’s soap. So Clean Hippie is what happened.”
Overson also sells a soap called Bah Humbug, the product of a batch of holiday soap gone wrong, and one called Seaside, which she designed to look like the ocean.
For Overson, what started as a creative outlet has turned into a full-fledged business, and one day she hopes to split her time between the soap company and her career as a graphic designer.
“We are still working on becoming profitable. It is tricky to just start making soap and then be immediately rolling in the dough. And I’m still building a name for myself as well,” she said.
Overson will be spreading the word of her business around this summer as a guest vendor at the Concord Farmers Market and a seller at the Concord Arts Market. She hopes her customers will grow to love the soap as much as she has.
“I’m totally a girl – I love makeup and I love having my nails done and stuff like that – but I never really thought that much about soap. It’s funny because the thing about handmade soap is that if you’ve never tried it, you don’t really appreciate it. But once you try it, you realize that it’s such a different experience. Your skin just feels better when you get done washing with handmade soap.”
Overson also sells a variety of luxury body oils, men’s beard oils, lip balms and bath bombs. To shop her products online, go to capcitysoapco.com or find her shop on Facebook.
May 22, 2018
This is the BEST homemade soap! Others I’ve purchased smelled great and felt good when lathering up but out of the shower, my skin was sooooo dry. This soap makes your skin soft and supple! I won’t use anything else!