Jennifer Mason has always loved burning scented candles at home, but the long commute from her South San Francisco residence to her workplace at Stanford University, where she is associate director of strategy and curricular support at the Graduate School of Business, left her with little time for such pleasures.
Then in the peak of the pandemic, when work became remote, she finally found the time to indulge. The flames and fragrance relaxed her enough to want to make her own candles. So she bought a DIY kit, joined a few online community forums and happened to discover that a lot of candlemakers were also soapmakers.
“A light bulb went off,” said Mason about the origin of Mason and Mason Handmade, now a three-year-old business she runs out of her kitchen. “I just fell in love with the idea that I could completely formulate my own recipe. To be able to control the ingredients and have total, 100% say over what I put in a bar of soap which then I’m putting on my own skin…I was intrigued.”
The process of learning how to make soap from scratch was something Mason instantly “nerded out on.” Completely self-taught, she acquired skills from how-to books, YouTube videos and other soapmakers on the internet who helped her troubleshoot when things went awry. When she finally felt ready, she tried her first cold-processed soap with a combination of oils, butters, distilled water and lye.
“And the first attempt was just OK,” she said, recalling thinking that her soaps were never going to turn out beautiful like the products of “all those experts online.” Now she’s one of them.
After some trial and error, discovering the right “recipe” for her soap, with the desired colors and scents, was the first big milestone. “It clicked,” she said, proud that she hasn’t changed her formula since. A few examples of her soap varieties include sugar plum, apple cider, toasted marshmallow, dragon fruit and good old lavender, which tends to be a customer favorite.
“I had so much soap by the end of 2021 that everyone I knew got soap for Christmas,” she said. It hadn’t occurred to her that it could be a potential business until her friends and family — largely delighted recipients of all that Christmas soap — started asking her if she was planning to sell it. Adequately encouraged, she got an LLC and a domain name.
The very first listing on Etsy, her only online sales platform currently, was in February 2022, with five bars of soap in it. “It sat there on Etsy for two months and then a stranger bought my soap,” she said about the first sale. “At that point I was a little more all-in than I was willing to admit to myself.”
While her star product is soap, she also makes items like lip balm, body lotion, scrubs and candles, the product it all started with. Her offline market includes some local retailers who stock her wares — like a grocery store in the East Bay, for instance — as well as pop-ups and craft fairs on the Peninsula, where small-batch vendors like herself come and set up stalls. “They’re local, small, intimate…I like those for the connection with the community,” she said.
At larger craft fairs, like the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival, she meets several other sellers of handmade soap. This group of local artisans is an interesting microcosm of community and competition, comprising vendors competing for the same customers but united in passion and pride.
“It’s actually a very supportive group of people,” Mason said, insisting that the cooperation between vendors outweighs any sense of professional rivalry. “Different soapmakers have different philosophies.” Her focus is on keeping the list of ingredients as short and simple as possible.
Though taking her products to more popular craft fairs, scaling up the wholesale side of her business and expanding her buyer base are important to her, Mason is intentional about keeping this going as a side hustle and has no aspirations to turn it into a full-time career.
The maximum number of soaps she can make at a time is 36 bars because that’s the biggest mold she owns. On Etsy, sales fluctuate through the year and range from 10 to 30 orders a month. At a single craft fair, she sells between 10 and 50 bars of soap.
“It’s kind of like a self-sustaining hobby,” she said. Logistically, she doesn’t want the business to outgrow her kitchen and wants fun and spontaneity to remain the focus. For example, she’s part of a “soap challenge club” where she learns a new technique every month.
“It’s certainly a different approach than a business that’s focused on growth all the time,” she said.
Mason has worked in the field of higher education for 25 years, spending a majority of that time at Stanford. A skill she has successfully transferred from her day job to her business is project management, particularly aspects like inventory control, managing her production schedule and analyzing sales trends.
It’s a one-woman shop for the most part, but help comes in the form of a woodworker: The second Mason in her business name is her husband, who provides behind-the-scenes support by making all manner of tools, holders, soap molds and soap dishes.
The area she doesn’t have any help in (but wishes she did) is social media. Her Instagram is a series of colorful, ASMR-type videos of her pouring, stirring and cutting soap. They’re easy to watch, but hard to film.
“You have to figure out the right lighting, the right angle,” she said. “I want to make it appealing, but I always want it to be authentic…trying to figure out how to convey that in this world of social media is a challenge.”
Offline though, she loves everything about the process, because it has brought her creative, “artsy” side to the fore. “Making soap is an art form. It’s chemistry, but it’s also art. It doesn’t always go as planned. I’m very Type A — a list-maker — so I think it’s been a good learning and growth opportunity for me…it has made me more of a balanced person in an interesting way,” she said.
Work at Mason’s day job is no longer remote, but she’s not as hard-pressed for time to do things that bring her joy. Looking back at her love for candles that led her to soapmaking in the first place, she said, “Everyone has time to burn a candle; I don’t know why I was so dramatic about it before!”
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