Friday, July 26, 2013

Why the name "Global Soaps"?

Thank you for asking!  :) It took us a long time to come up with just the right name to represent our family and our business.  If you are visiting for the first time and getting to know us, then you may not know that we have been blessed with 9 children: 3 are biological and born right here in the US (2 in Georgia and 1 in Michigan), 1 we adopted from China back in 2010, and the other 5 we added to our family from Colombia in February!  So... we like to think of our family as rather "global".

One other reason for the name Global Soaps is that we have big plans for our biz - we would like to go global!  But for now, we are taking baby steps by building a website, creating a logo, learning how to charge tax and ship our product out (that is really confusing to me!), testing other products to determine if we would like to offer them to all of you (this is the FUN part!) and so on...  In a later post, I'll let you know what products we are testing.  We want to make sure that everything we offer will be used on our own family, on our children, before we offer it you and your family.

Thanks for visiting, and please don't forget to take a look at the inventory sale we have going on until the end of July.  We have had a great response from the sale and from our local farmer's market so we have run out of a few items (temporarily!), but there are still a lot of great quality good-for-your skin bars being offered.  Take a look here!

Karen


Monday, July 22, 2013

Introducing Global Soaps!

It's official!  We have the name, the tax id number and are in the process of creating the website at www.globalsoaps.com!  It's amazing how much we can actually get done around here when we aren't cracking open the books for homeschooling :)  For now, the best way to order our soaps, lotions or lip balms is right here on this blog.  Just click here.  Plus, we added a facebook link to our Global Soaps page on the top right-hand side.  If you are on facebook, please "like" us.  When we reach 100 likes we are having a give-away!

Last Wednesday we participated in our towns weekly farmer's market.  A customer there said her son had eczema and asked which type of our goat's milk soap I would recommend.  I told her that all goat's milk soap was good for dry skin, but the one I would recommend the most was the shea butter.  We know our soap is good, but I was so happy to hear how it had helped her 2 year old son with his severe eczema.  She said it made a difference!  She didn't know it, but that's exactly what we want to do with Global Soaps - we want to make a difference, to enrich lives.  I know that sounds a little silly, enriching lives with a soap company, but with God's help and with us keeping our focus on Him, we can do it. 

One of the major aspects of Global Soaps will be orphan awareness/education and adoption.  Our family has a desire to help those who are adopting by offering fundraisers.  The details are still in the works, but I know it will happen.  So if you are in the process of adopting and may be interested in a fundraiser with goat's milk soap, keep an eye on us for when we work out the details.

Tomorrow we are going to visit a company who produces soap-making equipment. They don't have a physical store, but they are letting us in to see what they have - very grateful to them for that!   I'm sure we will walk away with something to help us handcraft bars more effectively than what we are already doing (which will help in the adoption fundraisers).

They have equipment that will allow a person to make 100's of bars at one time.  (Excuse me while I drool a little over just thinking about that! Hey - it's good to like what you do!).  As much as my mind wanders to 100's of bars curing on soap racks at a time, we are going to take it pretty slow by praying, making a game-plan and learning how we can work up to the BIG equipment.  It's baby steps with a balancing act. Enough about that.  On to goat-talk.

This is Velvet and DD.  DD is Velvet's mom.  They are mini-alpines, and the first goats we owned.  Velvet loves to chew on shirts.  When you think about goats who eat anything, she is the perfect representative of that image!  DD is cool, calm and collected. 

Oh, this shot was taken by our oldest daughter, CJ.  She won two Champion ribbons for her photography at our county fair last week and is going to state with her black and white shots - very excited for her!  We added a page above about the rabbits she raises, sells and shows.  Be sure to check out her site, as she built it herself.

Please continue in your prayers for our family.  The children are all doing really well, and I know it is because of the prayers!

Karen

Sunday, July 7, 2013

It's About Time for Some Pics!

Tyler just hanging around!


Diego, Jaime and Briyic playing with BIG balloons!
That a boy, Jaime!
Hang on, David!
Beautiful.
This is when we first met the children!
Um... swings are fun... aren't they???  This is Diego and Brayan.


I thought I should get these posted before I do anything else tonight.  They have been a LONG time coming!  They are all pics of some of our time in Colombia (didn't get a chance yet to get pics of Laurel or Carissa uploaded).  These are at a park - it was AMAZING in that it wasn't like any of our parks we have been to here in the States.