What is Supply Chain and Why It Matters

Let's talk about packaging.

As a designer, I LOVE testing new packaging and figuring out how to fit stock packaging within our line of products. I also, urm, let's say DEFINITELY love designing custom packaging as well! Those who have followed along for a while know that I execute a major design rebrand last year (solo, I might add) and one of the coolest things I got a chance to do was to design some custom packaging for our body wash an body oil. It was mostly color that I was able to tweak, but it was still fun testing all the colors out. But where does it come from? How do we receive it? And when you have custom packaging, how do production errors get resolved?

Supply chain enters the chat.

But what exactly is supply chain and why does it matter? Supply chain is essentially the network of people and businesses that are responsible for turning raw materials into products and delivering them to customers. As a manufacturer, we would be considered one of the final steps involved within the supply chain that creates your products and delivers it to your doorstep. Our supply chain heavily involves our suppliers, i.e. businesses that deliver the raw materials we need to make your products. 

It's very important that our supply chain is reliable. You may remember just 4 short (long...waaaaaayyy too long) years ago that we were all fighting for toilet paper. That's because the supply chain that delivers that paper hit a sharp and quick uptick in demand, and the supply chain took some time to catch up to this new and temporary supply and demand. But what does this TED talk about supply chain have to do with Soap Distillery? Well, I found that a supplier within our supply chain wasn't as reliable as I tested them to be.

After quite a bit of data, feedback, and testing, it was discovered that some of the body washes had a pump that was difficult to open. Definitely not impossible and easy to do without the use of tools, but not the easy "pop it open and use" that they should have been. Those perfectly milky white, lightweight bottles tested well, but the production samples were definitely not indicative of what we received for production runs. It was also not consistent which made it difficult to discover, but even five people having the same issue is enough. After further testing, I discovered that the issue was that the thread spec of the bottle itself was off on some of the bottles. This put pressure on the pump housing and in turn, caused the pump to seize and lock, making it difficult to spin the pump open. It's not dangerous, but it is annoying when you just wanna take a shower or wash your dang hands!

On top of this, the same supplier that created these bottles made our awesomely gold body oil bottles as well, but of course, the thread spec on those was also inconsistently off which caused leaking in the affected bottles. When I reached out to the supplier to inform them of the issues to begin fixing them, they refused to test and replace because their samples were "fine". 

They were a tear in our supply chain.

So we did our best in house to make sure you didn't have to deal with these issues and went to work. Why does this all matter? I prefer transparency and if I changed the packaging without saying anything, I bet you all would be confused and that's just not how we do things here. You know me! So I've been working to resolve this and fix the tear in our supply chain in order to deliver the high quality product that this company of mine has been known for since 2012.

New packaging enters the chat.

Let's welcome our new body oil bottles and body wash bottles! For the body oils, we will be returning to the crystal clear glass bottles we've used for years with a pretty silver cap. They are still spill-free, have awesome clarity, and are sourced by a very reliable supplier.

For our body wash, we're using a silver bottle that's a little taller and consistently amazing.

This former supplier was also the hang up in our refill program, so here's more good news: REFILLS DROP IN EARLY 2025. Can I get a resounding "hell YES!!"?

*types in real excitement*: HELL YESSSSSSSSS.