The Freckled Farm Soap Company

Tag: The Freckled Farm Soap Company

  • Our Goat Milk Soap Laundry Detergent

    Our Goat Milk Soap Laundry Detergent is really special. Before we started making it we were always searching for a detergent that wouldn’t cause our daughter (who was a toddler at the time) to break out in hives. Her skin was incredibly sensitive and it seemed like any contact with clothing washed in detergent that wasn’t free and clear would make her skin develop these horrible red splotches. We decided we wanted to make something that would be sensitive enough of her to use and that wouldn’t put nasty chemicals into our water system.

    So we developed this simple, yet incredibly powerful, detergent. It gets out the tough stains left behind from our farm, like red clay, without irritating our daughter’s sensitive skin, and is nearly suds-free, making it better for your machine and our water system. It’s made with our Castile Goat Milk Soap, borax, and washing soda. You only use a tablespoon… that’s right a tablespoon!

    You can start by purchasing one of our adorable refillable glass jars ($20 each). Which comes with a cute wooden scoop (pictured above). Once you have used the detergent in the jar you can refill it with our laundry refills. The refills are only $8 each which means the loads only costs about 14 cents each!

    Do you want to try out our laundry detergent? You can find it here!

  • Where to find us this Winter!

    It’s easy to fall into the winter blues when it seems like not a lot is happening on the weekends. You are stuck inside all week. That’s not how you want to spend your weekends too! During the rest of the year its so nice to start your weekend off with a visit to the farmers markets to stock up on all of your needs and maybe pick up a tasty breakfast, but during the winter what is there to do? Guess what… In Virginia there are still awesome farmers markets to visit. Winter markets have increased greatly over the last few years, so now you don’t have to go without! So where can you pick up our goat milk soaps, laundry detergent, and lotions this winter:

    South of the James Farmers Market – It’s undeniable… South of the James is one of the top farmers markets in Virginia and it’s year round! We feel beyond grateful to have such a wonderful place to offer our products. We are out at SOJ every single Saturday of the year, unless the governor declares a state of emergency because of hazardous weather. During the summer there are an incredible number of vendors and many of those vendors stay on all year. If you are coming during the winter you will not be disappointed. Everything you need is still there! There is always at least one or two veggie vendors, honey, dog treats, our goat milk soap products, the list goes on and on… and there are always lots of great choices for breakfast.

    Visit South of the James Farmers Market – Every Saturday during the winter – 9am-12pm – New Kent Ave & 42nd Street, Richmond, VA 23225 

    The Winter Farmers Market at IX Park – This is a brand new winter market in Charlottesville. It has a great selection and is both indoors and outdoors. You can find us at one of the outdoor spots on select Saturdays… Which is hopefully most Saturdays through March.

    Visit The Winter Farmers Market at IX Park – Saturdays during the winter – 9am-1pm – 522 2nd Street SE in Charlottesville, Virginia

    We are also in the process of applying to several craft shows that will take place this winter so please continue to check in on our Where to Buy page on our website for more up to date information.

     

  • Winter Farmers Market in Charlottesville, VA

    Starting this weekend you can find us at The Winter Farmers Market in Charlottesville, VA at IX Park

    We will be outside of IX Park in Charlottesville, VA on select Saturdays from 9am-1pm. Come out and see us!

  • Gifted RVA

    The Freckled Farm Soap Company’s Deep Space Goat Milk Soap and Lavender Goat Milk Laundry Detergent can now be found in Gifted RVA’s gift boxes.

    Head over to their website to check out all of their fabulous gift boxes. They are full of awesome products from vendors from throughout Virginia. They have something for all occasions!

  • Thanksgiving Weekend Website Sale

    It’s here!! Our biggest website sale of the year! Our big “Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday sale.” All weekend long you can take advantage of this awesome sale.

    00909-FF-Thanksgiving-ad-v5

    On top of all of this you get Free shipping on orders $50+

  • What’s the lather like?

    This is a question I receive frequently from new customers. People are often surprised, and maybe a little disappointed, when they use a handmade soap for the first time and find that the lather is not as robust as they are used to with their commercial bar. I will commonly have customers, who are looking to use our soap for the first time, ask what they can expect from our lather.

    Goat Milk Soap Lather

    I want to start off by saying that there is a good reason why handmade soaps often do not lather as strongly as their commercial counterparts. Commercial soaps frequently contain sulfates. Sulfates are used as a foaming agent that helps the soap to quickly develop a thick lather. There are countless articles out there that debate the use of sulfates, whether they are safe for you or the environment. Whether or not you believe that they are “safe” there is a decent amount of evidence that shows that sulfates can cause skin irritation.

    The important thing to remember is that the lather itself does not get your skin clean. We have been conditioned to believe that a thick lather is necessary for the soap to do it’s job… It’s not. So why include an ingredient that is not necessary and is potentially harmful?

    With that said, what about our lather? We understand that our customers want lather, so when we were developing our recipe we designed a mixture of oils that promotes a more robust lather than is often found in homemade soaps. We do this naturally just with the percentage of a few key oils within our soap.

    So, what’s our lather like? For most of our soap line it is full, silky, and bubbly. It gives you the experiences that you are looking for and leaves your skin feeling soft and clean. The lather of our Castile Goat Milk Soap and our Cedarwood Goat Milk Soap is more lotion-like. It’s slick and full, making it a perfect soap for shaving. Finally there is our Rosewood Salt Goat Milk Soap. The lather for this particular soap is a little thinner than the others, because of the salt, but it still bubbles up nicely.

    We put a lot of effort and research into naturally getting the perfect lather for our soaps. Give it a try! You won’t be disappointed!

  • Our Goat Milk Soaps are Going Organic!

    That’s right! Towards the end of last year, when trying to figure out how we were going to promote further growth and continue to make our goat milk soaps better for our customers and the environment, we decided to take the leap and switch over to nearly all organic oils!

    We now will only have two oils within our soaps that are not organic, both of which are among the lesser oils we use in our soap recipes and neither of these oils are used at all in our Castile Goat Milk Soap. So lets talk numbers. That means 88% of the oil portion of the recipe for the vast majority of our soaps is now organic and the oil portion of our Castile Goat Milk Soap is 100% organic.

    All that’s left is the goat milk. Our farm is not certified organic, because it is a costly certification to obtain and maintain, however we implement every organic practice we can. Our all-natural non-gmo feed comes from a local farm and our hay, also from a local farm, is chemical free. Like us, both of these farms have not gone through the organic certification process, but employ organic practices. We avoid all chemical pesticides on our farm, even in the areas where the goats are not allowed to roam. We implement as many natural remedies for ailments as we can, and when medications are required we exceed the recommended milk withdrawal time. You can feel confident that our milk is of the highest quality!

    What’s the best part of all of this? You are getting access to soap that is now   even better for you and the environment than before and the prices will remain the same! You heard right! We will not raise our prices with this change to our soap line. Enjoy!

  • Best Soap for Men

    We continue with our “Best Soap for…” series, this time we are highlighting the best goat milk soaps for Men.

    Many men have no issue picking out soaps for themselves from the varieties that we bring to the markets, but occasionally we will get a gentleman who comes up to our booth and asks “Do you have any man soaps.” While we don’t have any soaps that are specifically made for men we do have scents that are more masculine or at least would be appealing to both males and females.

    Cedarwood Goat Milk Soap

    Our Cedar Goat Milk Soap is the closest thing we have to a “man soap.” When we discovered what an amazing shave bar our Castile Goat Milk Soap was we decided we needed to make a shave soap that was geared more towards men. The Cedar has a woody scent and the same lotion-like lather of the Castile, making it the perfect bar for shaving your face.

    You can find our Cedarwood Goat Milk Soap HERE

    Rosewood Salt Goat Milk Soap

    Our Rosewood Salt soap is one of our top sellers to men… surprisingly. It’s our little pink bar of soap, but men really seem to love it! It too has a woody scent and has the additional benefit of being an exfoliant. Once wet it develops a texture much like a pumice stone. Many of our male customers seem to like the combination of the rough texture and earthy scent.

    You can find our Rosewood Salt Goat Milk Soap HERE 

    Deep Sea Goat Milk Soap

    Deep Sea was created to be a deep cleanser/spa bar. It’s one of my favorite bars of soap! We’ve been told by many male customers that it has a scent that they would consider “manly,” although I choose to think of it as more of a unisex scent. This soap includes eucalyptus, rosemary, and juniper berry essential oils. It also has kelp powder, spirulina, and orange peel powder, giving it’s lather a soft silty feel.

    You can find our Deep Sea Goat Milk Soap HERE

    Other Soaps Our Male Customers Might Want to Consider:

  • How we spend our off season…

    The idea of an off season is a bit of a joke at this point. There really isn’t a time of the year where things slow down for us. During the “busy” season Kevin and I work from the moment we wake up, until our heads hit the pillow around midnight. Kevin gets up before the sun rises to do the morning farm chores and when he gets in we all have breakfast together before starting our day. We hurry around making and packaging our goat milk soap, preparing for farmer’s markets and/or craft shows, returning emails and calls, writing blog posts, handling all of the different social media outlets, and of course running the farm. The farm itself is practically a full time job all it’s own. Between that soap business and photography business we easily work 90+ hours a week… each. We are literally working in some form or fashion all day long, seven days a week. We love what we do, so (most of the time) it doesn’t feel like work and we are able to be flexible when it comes to how our day is run. Then December comes to an end we are thrown into this strange “off season” where we only have one (potentially two) markets a week. We only have a handful of online orders come in a week. Weddings and portrait sessions are few and far between. You would think we could maybe sit back and relax now…

    The Freckled Farm Winter

    This time of year we only end up working around 60 hours a week each. Most of our farm chores are year round, so there really isn’t a big decrease in time there. While we don’t have to work in the garden or mow the lawn, most of the animal chores remain the same. We receive a small two month break from milking towards the end of the girls’ pregnancies, but they still eat on the milk stands, so instead of actively working during their feed time I usually spend that time talking to them and watching their baby bellies bounce around.

    This time of year our days are spent working on the projects that we had been putting off during the busy season. This includes doing repairs to the farm structures, preparing for babies, and finally getting to some of the farm projects that we wanted to do.

    When it comes to the soap company we spend the day/evening making batches of our goat milk soap, rebuilding our stock after being depleted during the holiday. This year we plan to (hope to) go into May, when markets open and business really starts to pick back up, with nearly three times more than what we had going into the start of the busy season last year. We also are using this time to work on several new soaps and even some entirely new products! We plan to go into the busy season running!

    Organization is the key this time of year. During the busy season things get tossed around. The shipping station looks like a storm blew through it. Everything in the office is scattered about. Each year we try to prefect our organization strategy a little more, to make things easier on ourselves the rest of the year, but as the business grows we are constantly having to reassess. We have put a lot of thought and effort into the new system that we are implementing this year, hopefully it will make things go smoothly once we hit May.

    We do try to give ourselves a little bit of a break during the winter though. We generally give ourselves the day “off” on Saturdays after the markets are over. This doesn’t mean we get to spend the whole afternoon and evening relaxing, because that is just not possible on a farm, but it does mean that computers stay off. Also, instead of working until midnight every other night we usually call it day between 8-10pm. I would love to be able to stop working earlier, but so much of the morning is dedicated to homeschool activities and using the little bit of the winter daylight to get things done around the farm. The “inside” work often gets pushed back to when it is dark.

    Come the end of March we will have babies all over the place and that’s a busy season all it own. We have seven goats due to kid and we should be getting fourteen to twenty one kids from them, all of whom will be bottle fed for 8 weeks. We have baby chicks coming to us via USPS around the same time. We will hopefully have piglets sometime in April (although we can not confirm if Myrtle is pregnant yet). Let’s not forget the garden! During all of this the 2016 garden will be going in! New life will be everywhere. It’s a really wonderful time of year to be on a farm.

    It’s a busy life, but we love it (so much!), and are incredibly grateful that we get to work side by side and spend our days together.

  • The Freckled Farm’s Support Team

    If you follow us at all you have heard plenty about “The Freckled Farm Family” which includes Kevin, me, and our two children Breckin and Bryce, but the truth is we wouldn’t be where we are today without our support team. This wonderful group of people are who make our lives easier and allow us to grow our business. We are incredibly grateful for them, so we thought it was time to honor them!

    This is who you are likely used to seeing… The Freckled Farm Family – Crystal, Kevin, Breckin, and Bryce:

    The Freckled Farm Family - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    Now Meet Our Support Team!

    The Freckled Farm Support Team - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    Ashley

    Ashley is our “farm hand” (farm sitter… whatever you want to call her) and quite frankly I don’t know what we would do without her. Farms run like clockwork. Regular farm chores are twice a day exactly twelve hours apart. The animals come to rely on our punctuality to be fed, and when it comes to milking, their comfort. For my breastfeeding mommas out there you know exactly how it feels to go too long between “milkings.” So everyday at 5am and 5pm we do farm chores, which includes; feeding the animals, changing out their water, mucking the enclosures, and of course milking the does. This can occasionally pose a problem. It’s not always possible to be at the farm right at farm chore time. We may have a craft show, market, a wedding for the photography business, or family event that gets us home later than 5pm. Sometimes we even like to get a weekend away… imagine that! This is where Ashley steps in. When we aren’t going to be at the farm at farm chore time she comes and takes care of the farm for us. She knows exactly how to run the farm and can step right in, in case of an emergency. It’s extremely comforting to know that I have back up to take care of my animals in a pinch. She knows the animals by name, and knows them well enough to be able to tell if something is off, so we have another set of eyes on our herd. We trust her (which is saying a lot when it comes to our farm, which is our home, our livelihood, and a part of our heart) and love her! She deals with our tornado of craziness and we are so grateful for her!

    I highly recommend (obviously) Ashley’s farm and pet sitting services. Contact me for her information.

    The Freckled Farm Support Team - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    Lauren

    Lauren and I have been friends since we were fourteen years old. She has been a support system for me long before the farm, so the work she does for us is really only the beginning, but that’s all I am going to highlight here. Lauren was one of the first soap testers. Her and her parents were part of the group who gave us feedback that helped us to develop the recipe that we use today. Lauren also was our very first booth sitter. When we started out we had one booth set up, so we would only commit to one location at a time. We quickly realized that we needed to be able to expand to do two locations at a time. This was easy enough with Kevin and me, but the demand continued to grow and we needed someone who would be able to run a third booth or to run a booth when one of us were unable to attend one of our regular locations or to help when we were in very busy locations. Lauren was of course the first person we thought about. She’s a great salesmen and works so hard for us! We love you Lauren.

    The Freckled Farm Support Team - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    Ashley (the other Ashley) and Mike

    Ashley and I have been friends since college. We have always been a great support system for each other. Years ago Ashley offered to run booths for us if we ever needed anyone. As the business expanded, as did the need for her help. Ashley and her husband Mike are hustlers! They can sell goats milk soap like it’s nobody’s business!! It’s comforting to know they are working for us. After Ashley worked a recent holiday craft market for us I had the vendors who were set up around her send me messages making sure I knew how hard she worked. Vendor friends are always commenting about how awesome our booth sitters are!

    The Freckled Farm Support Team - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    Clairee and CC

    CC is my brother and Clairee is my soon-to-be sister-in-law (that a lot of hyphens). Like all of our other booth sitters they are incredibly hard workers. Sometimes I will set outrageous sales “hopes” and they will work their butts off to reach it and in some cases exceeded it. They played an huge role in our record sales day this past December. It’s often hard to find salesmen who are as passionate about selling your product as you are, and somehow we we lucked into three different families who are willing to sell our soaps as if they made them themselves. It’s a rare gift and one of the reasons we are so incredibly grateful.

    Moms

    Cindy and Patty

    These are our mothers! Beyond the motherly support that they provide they have babysat countless hours for free. While I know they do this because they love us and the kids, and are looking for an excuse to be around their grandchildren, it is still beyond helpful for us. Taking the children to certain craft shows is just out of the question and the moms step right in and take care of things at home. It’s hard leaving your children but knowing they are in good care makes it easier for us to concentrate on selling soap.

    We are so grateful to have these people in our lives. Without them we wouldn’t be where we are today.