sop

Barck Floop: What’s the story behind your sop factory?

Kay Wa: I got sick of trying to navigate the job market, got fed up with the way people were treating each other and that negative spin drove me further into my thoughts about the environmental crisis and how people produce waste and manufacture things that are simply damaging the planet. I’ve always wanted to do something creative (hence the fine art degree), but I like this endeavor because it fuses the natural inner workings (growth, colour, properties) of plants and life, with fundamental chemistry; and then all this results in a pleasing, often pretty, outcome that we as people experience and use as a functional object. Prior to putting lots of my eggs in this basket I had been making sop for a few years already, but when I started I called it soap – now it is a revolutionary term as sop. Also standing as a transmittable message as Save Our Planet.

BF: How do you give Sop its colour?

K: I confine myself to the natural colours deriving mainly from plants. Nothing I use is artificial. I prefer to know that when sop gets used its remnants can go down the drain and join up with the ecosystem without adding anything harmful or too foreign to it. By using dried flowers in oil infusions, spices and known plant dyes my range of colours are already limited to what is available to me. Luckily there is a vast range of natural colourants I’ve not yet explored. Also it cuts out many of the fluoro, super bright and over the top colours that I have never really been a fan of, but which you can achieve by using micas. Micas are mined minerals which can be found
in a lot of coloured cosmetic products. They are essentially natural yet with the ethical issues bound to their non-renewability and the labour conditions where they are
sourced - I don’t want to support that. It’s a bit like selling products containing palm oil knowing it’s not sustainable yet branding it as ethically manufactured. The colours I use the most are made with dyes such as Alkanet Root that I use in my product Lavandula. That is coloured through a long oil infusion – normally in olive oil. It’s the same with Annatto Seed which colours things yellow or orange, I use that in Basilina, Neem Dream and mellow yellow. There’s also Madder Root that I use to make Madder Cake and tickled pink. I have a few new ideas for madder root, that pink can be quite special.

BF: Madder Root is also used as a painting pigment.

K: Yeah it’s a very very old natural dye. You can crush it down and turn it into a pigment.
By the way I have a pointless super zoom on my pictures on sop website.

BF: It reveals your artistic background.

K: Apparently I lean more on the aesthetic value of the product instead of marketing.

BF: I agree that it is very aestheticised and a bit niche looking like sci-fi landscapes but for the
background you come from it’s very appealing.

K: I wonder if I’m too much an artist, someone who is too concerned with the way things look
overall and whether it’s detrimental to being a business woman.

BF: Nowadays everything has to be aesthetically pleasing. All these trends like Kinfolk,
Scandinavian slow living are marketed by calculated beauty. It’s unavoidable to want to break
through the market with something visually pleasing if there is no other choice.

K: I think aesthetics are very important but when I think of those lifestyle brands I just picture the instagram posts, the clean minimalist white arrangements. I don’t wish sop to slot into that, I like coagulation and a mix of different textures, colours and things. I like a viewer or instagram user to think about what they’re looking at and maybe even the process that led to that shot – if that’s not asking too much. The thing that is putting me off now is how much does sop have to conform to the aesthetic ‘clean’ (not in the sop washing sense) trend, and the whole need to gain thousands of followers that are probably bots, so that sop has some validation and standing on the virtual world.

BF: So you’re doing all your marketing via social media? How else can you market an emerging
one-person company now?

K: You can pay for adverts all over the place. Though the main route into the stardom is Instagram.

BF: Is there big competition in the hand-made soap industry?

K: You wouldn’t believe how many people make soap, and when you get into it it’s not surprising how many do – many of these people describe making soap as addictive. Most of the many people are in America, there is a huge community there. Probably stemming from how widespread and easy it is to get soap making ingredients – there are quite a few whole companies dedicated to selling supplies.
I have managed to find some really good suppliers here – there is one company called Nukraft based not far from me where I get amazing organic cacao butter. You can make chocolate with it too.

BF: Smells so good! Can you melt it and spread on bread? Are you going to produce edible soap?

K: You can’t produce edible soap because of some ingredients that could be harmful if you eat
them.

BF: Can soap be lethal?

K: It can be when you’re making it. It can blind you. Sodium hydroxide is alkaline and it creates a solution that can burn you. You have to wear gloves and goggles.

BF: Does it give you adrenaline?

K: No but the result is really exciting. Recently I made a shampoo bar with coconut oil, olive oil,
castor oil, neem seed oil, sweet almond oil, rhassoul clay and tea tree essential oil. I like the idea
of shampoo bar because it reduces the waste and production of plastic bottles.

BF: What’s your attitude towards companies like Lush and Body Shop?

K: Lush is good, but questionable, and they use some things I would avoid. One soap lady decoded what some ingredients behind a £90 serum bottle are to check if the product contains anything that makes it worth the price. Alas there was nothing to warrant the price tag. Some skincare companies’ ingredient labels are so confusing because they’re writing about the compounds that are resulting from chemical reactions, they don’t reveal the initial components. When I write my ingredient label I include everything I put in the mixture at the beginning, so to be transparent and understood. Those companies make use of latin words purposefully to cover up the crap that they’re using.

BF: Are they not as good as they market themselves as?

K: All the money you pay goes for their billboards and adverts. You’re paying for what exists around the actual product. However they probably still try to make the production ethical/cruelty-free, if that’s how they market themselves, because otherwise someone would sue them.

BF: That makes me think of an article I came across recently. It was about Snake Oil that was used hundreds years ago in China supposedly giving relief to various joint pains. It was brought and patented in England in 1712 when chemistry was not advanced enough to analyse it’s content. It was sold as a remedy for everything until in 1917 the US government sued a local seller for delivering fake information to the customers and revealed that none of the ingredients have actual health benefits or parts of snake.

K: wow. I have a friend who’s a scientist and soon to be a nutritionist, she’s helping me to understand the chemical and health values behind sop. She is also quite logical and savvy with the old spreadsheet and some quite scary things involved in setting up a business.

BF: When I write sop should I put (TM) next to it?

K: Sop is not trademarked. To copyright my logo would cost me some hundred pounds. I am confused, because I drew it myself and if you draw something you have ultimate copyright to it, so why would I have to pay for copyrighting the logo I drew with my own hand? I’ve always drawn hands like that. When I draw a person her hands would always be these flat things. I may guard it once I get more exposure.

BF: Do you ever sell sop in person?

K: I did my first craft fair in February. It went well, I surprised myself. I’ve got two more lined up and will be applying for more.

BF: What markets did you sell at?

K: One of them was a charity fair in Mill Hill. I got a small table for £12 and made my money back in not very long! I made a table cloth and little pads for the sops to sit on. They’ve got another one happening on the 14th of April at the Mill Hill Library. There’s also another fair on the 22nd of April which is run by a collective of artists in a pub in North Finchley. I also found the Crafty Fox, a big and frequent craft market and I will apply for it but it costs more than these small ones.

BF: [looking at the screen] They have a guest curator at a craft market?! I don’t get why would they introduce a curator to a craft fair. It makes it over professional and probably kills the appearance of eccentric products.
How does your sculpture background and knowledge of art theory affect your soap production?

K: It’s quite apparent when I create things around the object. I produce little set designs for my sops at every market. I want to produce something that would be a half art piece. I want the sops to relax on the pillows. I just hope that it’s not going to scare people off like contemporary art does. “Can I touch the sop on the pillow? Is that okay?”.

BF: That's a fragrant relief from contemporary art indeed.

you can read more about Kay Wa's sop on