Roots: A Sustainable Shamboo Bar Brand
Shampoo bars. Sounds silly at first, but theres a lot of characteristics that make it a cool product to try and launch. They’re eco- friendly, low cost, possible to make at home in your kitchen, not widely marketed towards the male demographic, and is a product that has recurring use, which makes it a candidate for a subscription business model.
There is something special about creating a physical product. It’s the tangible aspect that really gets me. Something you can hold and feel. So, after a couple attempts at digital products a close friend (and occasional business partner) and I decided to see what we could come up with. We decided to brush off our high school chemistry education and whip up some concoctions. Brian (my business partner friend who is crushing it in real estate by the way) focused on learning how to make pomade, which is a hair styling clay that adds shine and hold to your hairstyle. While he did that, I was learning how to make shampoo. We figured we’d launch one product and then introduce the other into our sales funnel as an up-sell within the subscription model.
Here are the first shampoo bars that I made 🙂
Step 1: Lean how to make shampoo bars. I followed these instructions and it worked out well: DIY Shampoo Bar Instructions
Step 2: Buy products. I was able to source all my v1 ingredients and a crock pot for $120. Ordered from Amazon, some speciality beauty product websites, and my local grocery store.
Step 3: Make shampoo bars! It’s basically just a concoction of natural oils and heating it up at various temperatures
Step 4: Test it out in the shower! The shampoo bars were super sudsy and had a fresh scent to them. Each bar lasted me well over a month of use.
For one of the steps you have to mix a chemical into water which releases some fumes. I did this outside with some protective equipment. Looking super enthused!
For v2 of the shampoo bars I tried adding color to them, since we were marketing to a male audience. I also added a Sandalwood scent. I also tested out a different mold to give them a more bar like shape.
While iterating on my shampoo bars, I also started planning out some of the logistics for the pomade launch. Brian was making good progress on the hold of the clay, so we decided to launch that product first. My super talented friend, Mitch, designed our label (highly recommend reaching out to him for design and UX needs). I also found several container manufacturers and received sample product of a 100% recycled cardboard container. It was a top priority for us to incorporate as many sustainable features as possible into the product and while the packaging checked off the eco-friendly box, it showed signs of softening from the small amount of water in the pomade. For various reasons, and due to the pandemic, this is basically where the project ended. We were close to our final recipe for the pomade and shampoo bars, had a label designed, URL purchased, and down selected a few containers. Some projects lose steam and thats ok. Learned a lot through this and gained respect for the challenges a physical product entails. It’s also much harder to scale with technology since it requires constant input from our end to produce.
Shoutout to https://www.designedbymitch.com/ for the great label design!
Ultimately, we didn’t launch either the pomade or the shampoo. I added a domain name to my GoDaddy account – www.ourroots.co – that will join a graveyard of others. But the shampoo bars did make for some great gifts to friends and I learned that you can basically make a 4-year supply of shampoo out of all natural and organic ingredients for $120.
– Josh Gordon
