This year marks exactly five years that I've been making fuzzy costume accessories as my full time job. It's exciting to me, because many small businesses fail (as in, never turn a profit) within the first five years. I am so happy I've been able to have success with this work!

It has been, however, incredibly demanding on my time. My business is at a point now where I have more demand than I can keep up with, and yet still not enough for me to really justify hiring anyone to help with production. When I try to keep up on my own, every spare moment of my time is taken up with the business. Throughout Halloween season, my husband comes home from work and is immediately on baby duty, I am working. I work while she naps during the day, too. I put in full time work around caring for a curious toddler, and my house's upkeep really suffers for it, not to mention everyone's diet because I'm not able to make real, good meals. All of my time is spent working.

So Silv and I talked it over and we came to a conclusion. We're working on a new business. We have been making many of our own personal care products for personal use in our own home (things like toothpaste, or dishwasher detergent, or laundry booster, for example) and we decided that we would start making soaps. Real, all natural, honest-to-goodness-from-scratch soaps. As in, put on the gloves and the goggles, we're playing with LYE kinds of soaps.

We've done a few different scents so far, and the reception has been pretty good! I'm confident that with all I've learned about running a business over the past five years, this will be able to succeed.

We've already done kind of a "soft opening" of the Etsy page and Facebook page, and will have a fundraiser up soon with different scents of soaps as perks for helping to fund our venture. My eventual goal is to settle in to a brick and mortar store to be able to sell our products on a full retail scale!

If you're interested, you can check out the Facebook page here:
http://www.facebook.com/scruboaksoaps

I'll still be doing limited amounts of costume accessories, but not full time as it once was. I'd like to eventually transition from one business to the other, because the soaps allows me to spend more time on things I need to, like tending to the household and playing with the kid.

Anyway, that's that... I'm sure I'll share more later. :)