2020 was a big year for our website. We ended up having 4x more website sales than we did in 2019… completely making up for the lack of in person markets. As Kevin and I boxed up orders to be shipped all over the country, and sometimes to other countries, we wondered how many states our soap has visited. How close were we to hitting all 50 states? When the holidays were over, and we were able to breathe, we made a plan to create a visual of all the places we have sent orders over the years. A visual reminder of our growth.
We purchased a map, mounted it to a cork board, and hung it up in the soap facility’s office. We then created a spreadsheet of all the counties and cities we have shipped to over the years. When we switched over to the new website this summer the orders from our first two years in business didn’t transfer, so we were only able to get the shipping locations from the last 5 years. I then placed a pin for the first time we shipped to a county/city. This ended up taking a lot longer than I expected! Over the course of a few days I added pins and watched the map fill in. (Check out the progress video below to watch as I add the pins to the map.)
Of course our home state of Virginia is very nicely filled in and it was really fun to see the little blue pins build up in other states… there are not many blank spaces left in Maryland, and while the states don’t look very full, we ship a lot of orders to California and Ohio (y’all love us in Ohio)! We were very excited find out that we have shipped to 43 different states and the District of Columbia. We would love to continue this growth over the next year and hopefully hit all 50 states!
The States Remaining: Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming
I will share an updated map picture at the end of 2021