DROYT NATURAL GLYCERINE SOAP

A Happy New Year to all our customers and I hope that 2007 will see a huge improvement in our service to you, starting with a easy-to-use and secure on-line shop. Don’t forget to email us on website@droyt.com

if you want to be kept up to date on developments.

We were welcomed back into the factory by a problem with our steam boiler. Not a great start and especially unfortunate as the factory has been unheated for 10 days and is therefore very chilly indeed. My colleague Chris fixed it by changing a fuse in a plug! You might think that a massive great oil fired steam boiler would need a team of engneers to solve breakdown problems, but no, as if it were an electric kettle or toaster, merely changing a fuse means steam heating and soap making. Today it is Avocado, which is green and which in the spirit of all great art, is made by mixing yellow and blue. I have just made the yellow, but it so cold in the lab, I’ve come into the office to write this before I go back and make the blue.

Good luck to you all in 2007 and I’ll write soon.

Last working days before Christmas and this year we are still busy. Sometimes we’re happy to close the factory for a week over Christmas and New Year and sometimes we’re busy and it is inconvenient. Everybody likes a holiday though and I don’t think it would go down very well if we cancelled Christmas!

The Droyt Christmas lunch is on Friday, so look out, Chorley, here we come. I say lunch, but it usually extends into the evening and the directors get a bit worse for wear. All good fun. One year we went bowling and it all went pear shaped after a pretty uninspiring meal and a member of staff who started buying drinks for all and sundry with the Droyt bar tab card. I can’t remember exactly but I think someone actually did not come back to work for us after New Year. One year Chris and I were still hanging in there after the last train to Manchester had departed and were given a lift by the boyfriend of one of the our employees (who had not been out with us and was therefore fit to drive!).

Anyway if anything exciting happens this year I’ll be sure to give you edited highlights.

Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year from all at Droyt’s and I’ll be back in 2007 with more occasional snippets from the world of soap. Maybe one of my resolutions will be to try to be more interesting.

Alistair

Sometimes when I’m on the train and we pass a nice shiny new industrial estate with nice shiny new metal sheds, I mean, commercial premises, I think ‘wouldn’t it be nice?………’. Droyt’s lives in a converted yarn mill, built in eighteen ninety something and the climate is more continental than maritime, hot in summer and cold in winter. The walls are solid brick and take a long time to heat up, so first thing Monday morning in winter is pretty chilly in the office. The floors are half stone flags and half concrete in the downstairs bit and wooden floorboards upstairs in the packing department. None of the windows is double glazed and the roof is not insulated. So all very inefficient in terms of energy use and in terms of production there isn’t a smooth product flow from one process to the next (in between production and packing, the soap has to be lifted up one floor!)

And I’m particularly thinking this at the moment because over the w/e we had LOADS of rain and now we’ve got a leak in the boiler house. I happen to be quite handy and after having a quick look at the problem I can see that the lead flashing does not exist for a 2 metre section. How did that happen? It looks like it’s been mortared in, so I’m guessing that this was a quick repair done more than 15 years ago, which has lasted until now. Anyway, it only leaks when it’s really heavy rain, so I’ll put it down on the list and maybe I’ll get around to it one day soon. Which reminds me, I’ll also have to get up on a ladder to look at the gutter over the street. Oh, it’s all fun and games.

So back to my dreams of working in a dry, warm, efficient, soulless, uninteresting shed. I suppose it might happen one day, if we could ever afford it, but there’s no doubt that the company would lose something along the way.

We’ve had a visit from the Soil Association in our bid to become approved for organic soap. This can take a few weeks, so in the meantime we’re starting to plan what sort of soaps we can make. First, of course, you have to source the raw materials and since these include such exotic items as castor oil and coconut oil, as you can imagine there are no local growers! In a supply and demand system, something with high demand but restricted supply is more expensive, and this is the case with all organic ingredients at the moment, although I’m sure this will change as more growers come on board. So we hope to be launching our first organic product ‘Droyt Organic Liquid Soap with Glycerine’ in the New Year, probably retailing at £5.95. Watch this space. The Soil Association are specific about what we can call the soap. Because we cannot source Organic glycerine, but 95% of the ingredients are organic, we can say ‘Organic Liquid Soap’ but because the glycerine is non-organic, although it its vegetable derived, we cannot call it ‘Organic Liquid Glycerine Soap’. With the number of so-called organic products out there, I think it is a good thing that there is an organisation who are trying to improve the situation so that customers can make informed choices.

Off to make up the colour for white mint, so will post again soon. 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi to all our customers from me, Alistair McCracken. I’m the Sales Director at Droyt Products Ltd and this is the first of what I fully intend to be a regular post on life in a small soap factory in England. Of course, best intentions and all that, but we shall see what happens. Also is life in a small soap factory interesting enough to publish a weekly blog? This is a good question and I think I can answer it myself, by saying that  ’interesting’ and ‘blog’ are two words which are rarely used together accurately, so I shouldn’t really worry about it.

So let’s get started. Today for breakfast I had muesli………………….. Just kidding, of course. It was Fruit and Fibre.

What soap are we making today?  It’s always good to know that so I can make up the correct colours. In fact it’s Red Rose as the main batch with a small batch of Vitamin E. Red Rose uses a dye called Red 33 and Vitamin E, which is a pale amber colour uses some orange and a tiny amount of blue. Is this is a bit like painting class? Anyway we have a really accurate balance in the lab which weighs to 0.01 g and since we’re only putting in a matter of a few grams, it’s important it is accurate.  The other job today is designing some labels for a new project for a customer in Germany. Usually this sort of job is just the back label which has all the ingredients and barcode and so on, so designing is probably not the right word. It’s more like shuffling all the required information around till it fits.  

Anyway that’s enough for now. Next week I’m going to talk about Organic soap and hopefully will have some news on that subject.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quite a momentus occasion - this is the first post on the Droyt website blog.