DROYT NATURAL GLYCERINE SOAP

It’s Tuesday morning after the Bank Holiday and of course the weather is now beautiful. I hope you all had a lovely relaxing time and are facing the week with a spring in your step and a song in your heart. A lot like me in fact. My song is ‘Whole wide world’ by Wreckless Eric, for reasons too complicated to go into in a blog. That’s more of an essay.

Anyway, business has been a bit slow since the New Year but this month we’re very busy, so that’s encouraging. We had a great visit to the Natural and Organics Show 2008 and while we didn’t take lots of orders on the stand, we did have some very interesting discussions which we hope will turn into business. I always say that it takes us about 3 months to discover if a show has been a success or not. By that I mean whether it has paid for itself through increased sales through contacts made at the show. Sometimes you can have a quiet show but meet one good new customer which makes it all worthwhile. Mind you, the reverse is also true and we did have a busy show!
Kensington Olympia is a really great place to exhibit. It’s very light and airy and we were well served by food outlets, including a really good cafe in the middle of the hall. Hopefully we’ll be back next year. It’s only two days as well which means you don’t have a chance to get really bored and fed up with standing all day. I enjoyed wandering around the other stands - there’s such a lot of enthusiasm and interest in this sector. Loads of food suppliers with great emphasis on quality sustainability and sourcing.

All this talk of food is making me hungry so I’m stopping typing to eat something.

Alistair

My new year resolution was to try to be a lot more disciplined about writing my blog. So first entry for 2008 is March. Excellent result.

I am in the middle of new product development and helping to plan a stand for us at the Natural Products Europe show in April at Olympia and since we haven’t been to a trade show in 4 years, I’m trying to get back into the trade show mindset. I think I remember hours of standing around, with the occasional passer-by wandering in to pick up a piece of free soap before getting back to buying the thing they really want - plates with animal pictures on them, or candles shaped like bananas or whatever, but certainly not soap. Fortunately this one is only two days - not some NEC Spring Fair five day marathon, so even I should be able to keep awake that long. And of course there is almost bound to be nice coffee to drink lots of, never mind the occasional wander round the food stands offering samples of delicious little titbits.

I think our favourite all time show was Cosmoprof in Bologna. One year we stayed just inside the city walls to the east (the show ground is in the north). Every day we would leave the hotel, go to the tiny dark bar next door for our due cappucine and danish pastries, which we drank and ate standing up at a shelf, like the local business types, and then go for a brisk 40 minute walk across town to the show. After 4 days of this I felt quite fit. We found some wonderful bars. One we went to provided huge platters of Friday night food for the happy customers ready to kick of the weekend in style. It was all good fun

So, anyway, the blogs will be flowing from my keyboard with the monotonous regularity of a metronome from now on.

Alistair

I’ve had a couple of enquiries recently asking about Droyt’s company structure and I thought it might be informative to write a short piece about this. We are an independent, privately owned limited company with four main shareholders, three of whom are from the founding family.There are three directors, two of whom are involved in the day to day running of the company. We have about 15 factory employees and three supervisors.The history of the name Droyt is quite interesting in that it means nothing! It was bought ‘off-the-shelf’ in 1937 when the company relocated to England after leaving Berlin and needed a new name, which, according to the rules at the time, needed to be 50% owned by an established UK business. The partner firm was called Peter Lunt and was based in Liverpool. I don’t know exactly when their share was bought out, but it was sometime before 1950.This was the time when soap rationing ended and soap production at the factory increased rapidly, with the launch of our best seller PC49. I’ve been lookin through some old records recently and found some great old pictures of the factory workers when we were in Berlin. I must scan them some time and post them up here.Tomorrow is our Christmas bash so watch out Chorley! Hope I don’t feel to bad on Saturday and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at Droyt’s!

At last.

I have nothing to declare except my relief.

This has taken months but at last the soaps are made, on sale and will soon be in some shops. More news as it comes in, but please let me know if there’s anywhere you shop that might be interested and I’ll be sure to contact them.

We’re very happy with the way they’ve turned out. We still have the eternal problem of the liquid soap drying a little on the end of the nozzle, but if anything, it’s a little better with the Organic for some reason.

Anyway, please try a bar or bottle next time you order. The floral perfume is very pleasant.

Alistair 

 

We’ve been talking about packaging with a business customer. Because our soap is cast into large blocks and is then handcut to suit, we have a great deal of flexibility in the sizes we can offer. So for example, if someone wants a 500g bar then we can work out some possible dimensions and then think about how to package it - wrapped in paper, clear film, wrapped by machine or by hand, labelled, printed paper….. And all that is without even looking at the design. What colour paper, what colour soap, what fragrance…..? As you can imagine there is a lot to think about. And don’t start talking about ingredients lists. I might write about that another time.

Thinking about big blocks reminds me of our family camping trip to Wiltshire last week. We were very lucky with the weather. I even had to use sunblock. It was a very nice campsite with small animals to entertain the various children, and campfires to entertain the adults after bedtime. We were in quite a rural location but Tesco’s was still only 10 minutes away. Never too far from a supermarket. I was inspired by the fields of wheat and ancient standing stones and am looking forward to the launch of our organic soap (getting very close now). Also, I must get on to English Heritage about our Stonehenge soap……..

Alistair

We’ve had some interesting meetings recently under the broad heading of ‘Whither Droyt’s?’. We are selling soap in a market where fewer and fewer people are buying less soap than they used to. I do not want to give the impression that people are somehow grubbier now than 10 years ago. At least not in the hygenic sense. The market is shifting to liquid soap, and in due course will probably shift a little to a higher proportion of nicer quality genuine liquid soap like ours and away from liquid hand wash, so we are starting to build a range in this area. Of course there will always be a need for a really nice bar of soap. There’s nothing better for showering or bathing than to have a bar of clear glycerine soap with your choice of beautiful colours and fragrances from our wide selection….. But we need to improve our market share!

So please support your local (in the global sense) soap company! Somehow we need to increase our sales of Droyt’s brand soap and at the moment we are not doing it. Is it packaging (very probably)? Lack of marketing investment (undoubtedly)? Something wrong with the product (well, I hope not. It is a fantastic soap, but maybe we need to look at different perfumes and colours)? The problem is, we know what the problem is, but we haven’t been able to solve it yet. We’ll keep trying though!

On a completely different subject we went to the beach on Sunday and it was lovely! I want to go all the time now. Trouble is, as Ian Brown said, Manchester has got everything except a beach.

Alistair 

  

 

Just saw a picture of Jamie Murray and Jelena Jankovicz at the Wimbledon Champions’ Ball and I would like to congratulate him, on behalf of lanky Scottish blokes everywhere, on his stunning success in asking out a gorgeous (and wealthy) Serb girl. How cool is that? Fortune favours the brave etc., etc.. OK so maybe not ask her out but asking her to play mixed doubles must be the pro tennis circuit’s equivalent. Their combination of obvious fun and excellent tennis was a joy to watch and I think it was Sue Barker who said that, at the end of it all, Wimbledon 20007 will be remembered for this, and not the thing that I’m not talking about anymore. It was refreshing to see competitive sport played in such a spirit and contrasts to the somewhat dour business -like approach of a lot of professional sportspeople.

I’ve been desperately thinking of a link from this to the next item but for the life of me I can’t see one so I’ll just have to give up as I don’t have all day to think about it. This morning we received test results of our newly formulated anti-MRSA soap with Tea Tree and Rosemary Oils, which showed great results, so I hope we will have this available in due course. I quote, “The test sample was lethal to S aureus within one minute of exposure” If anyone is interested in this, please let me know and I can email you when we have a product ready.

And a final note from a customer who likes our liquid soap and says that her husband uses it the shower ‘like water’ and do we do a larger bottle? The answer is yes, and it is now up on the slowly growing site. Now that I think about it, there’s more of a link between this item and the first one. Maybe I should rethink this layout.

Maybe not.

Alistair

 

This is never ending and is the last time I will talk about weather until the next time. I mean, after a while it just gets boring and that while was weeks ago, so I am officially bored by it. Although there are a lot of song titles featuring rain. Although not drizzle, interestingly enough

If you are reading this and haven’t ordered from us yet, please try our £15 offer of a selection of soaps. It’s fantastic value, includes postage so there’s nothing else to pay and would make a great present for a loved one (actually you would have to pay more for gift wrapping). We’ve tried to put together a package of soap which reflect our range and obviously play to our strengths so expect really nice fragrances and interesting shapes and sizes. As ever it is important to keep the soap dry when you’re not using it so a well drained soap dish is a must, or a magnetic holder, or patting each bar dry with a dry cloth after every use (my personal favourite and surprisingly time consuming). It all keeps the soaps looking great until the last little sliver of joy.

A customer has asked about the fragrance we use in our liquid soap and I’d like to make a little statement about that. When we were first developing the soap (believe it or not it’s taken 10 years!) We wanted a fragrance which was gender non-specific, unisex or liked by both men and women and children. In the end we chose one which we had made specially for us called Botanico, which as the name suggested, takes its inspiration for the world of Botanics (oh?). It’s sort of greeny, herbally, freshy and so on and well worth trying (there’s one in the trial pack, by the way).

Like most of the commercial fragrances we use it is a blend of fragrance components and essential oils, but for those of you who prefer natural fragrances, our new Organic range will initially have one variety in liquid soap and soap bars which will contain a fantastic blend of three organic oils - geranium palmarosa and lavender, which is a really great addition to the Droyt Soap line. And we’re launching a new stripe soon which is black and white and which will be fragranced with organic peppermint and spearmint oils. Never start a sentence with ‘and’, kids. You never know where it might lead. I do but then I’m a grammatical rebel without a clause.

It’s Friday It’s 11.10 and play has started at Wimbledon (according to my pop up display scoreboard courtesy of the Wimbledon website. Here’s the link. http://www.wimbledon.org/en_GB/index.html and press the Live Scores button. Only three days to go. Never watch tennis for the rest of the year, but Wimbledon fills in the gap between the Test matches and the football/rugby season. I follow summer golf for the same reason, but I do not have Sky Sports because a) I’m not allowed and b) I’m not allowed.

Happy weekends all round.

Alistair

At last we have a new online shop which I hope will prove easier to use and more flexible than our last one. Our partners in the venture are Athernet Solutions based in Chorley and they have been working hard to make sure everything is operating as it should. Needless to say if you experience any problems, or have any comments to make about the new site, please email me and tell me your thoughts. We hope to keep the product range fresh and relevant to special days and seasons. So watch out for our Christmas themed gifts! Available from next month!

Just kidding. Isn’t it terrible when shops are full of Christmas stuff far to early in the year? We’ll hold off until August.

So have great weekend and don’t forget to logon and buy some soap.

Alistair

Just back from a week away in North west Scotland and see that the weather is suddenly looking better. I can’t complain though. We had a few good days when the rest of the country was under cloud. Did a couple of Munros and felt it for the next two days. I think what did it for me was the very steep descent, rather than the fact that I haven’t been hillwalking for years. That’s my story anyway. So topped up with shellfish and fresh air, it’s back to work to see what’s happening in the world of soap. Loads of new ingredients are becoming available, including bamboo oil. This is a very interesting product. It is quite acidic but has skin improving qualities and I don’t know how it would work in soap, but I’d like to get my hands on some to try it.

Looks like the website is nearly ready so hopefully I’ll have good news to report soon. 

Here’s hoping that those of us looking forward to a bank holiday weekend will get some sun.

Alistair