“We use only the lowest quality ingredients!” — Alma Soap Co.
In marketing today it sounds so cliché to talk about using only the “highest quality ingredients” that I try my best to avoid saying it. It’s meaningless. I mean, really, would anyone tell you if they didn’t? They may not even know themselves. The proof is in the product, whatever it is.
I was asked recently about the quality of the ingredients we use, and was able to respond with pride, ‘We don’t know, and we don’t care!’ — John, Alma Soap
Sometimes I think it would be fun to say that we use the highest quality ingredients so long as it is convenient and cost effective to do so, and use rather low quality ingredients the rest of the time. The fun is for the customer to figure out which is which!
Okay, so my sense of humor has often gotten me in a lot of trouble. The truth is that we have never used higher quality ingredients in our soap than we do right now, and at this point it is not even cost-effective for us to use anything less.
Most of what becomes handmade soap starts out as oil, and the quality of the oil truly does affect the quality of the final soap. It takes good oil to make good soap.
It is a fact that today we purchase all of our oils in bulk from one of the largest suppliers in the country. This guarantees that they are as fresh as possible, and are supplied by someone who truly knows oils. Everything else we use: essential oils, fragrances, clays, colorants, et cetera, are purchased only from premium suppliers. Experience has been a good teacher, and is backed up by the fact that I don’t like being second-best at anything.
So rest assured that in everything we do we are striving to make the absolute best products we can, while at the same time providing you with good value. Although we may occasionally make jokes about it, we actually do take this very very seriously.
— John, lost in trying to not take life too seriously…
The site started crawling again Tuesday night (May 2nd), and I sat here astonished, realizing that after all this [website maintenance] if I had to sit through these page load times as a customer (much less my impatient self) I would flat out go somewhere else to buy soap, or salt, or scent, or anything! And for good reason! Okay, so I’m having some fun here, but I’m also serious.
I have been monitoring the web server in real-time and watching, with some interest, the processes that accumulate at different times and under different loads, including the work that I do on the backend.
I finally rebooted the server last night and took some other actions in an attempt to get the site running spry again. These actions were only semi-effective, and I ended up spending a good part of today learning yet more about caching web pages and running a lean site . It’s highly interesting, if it’s what you really like. Unfortunately, I don’t.
So, in what can only be described as the ultimate irony, it appears that the Contact form, in unison with Google’s own anti-spam technology (reCAPTCHA), is the very thing that forced the website back to a crawl. I have instituted a line of JavaScript instead in order to provide you with an email address, while hopefully hiding it from spam robots.
Many may ask, “Why don’t you just post your email address to the website and make it easy?” Well, from personal experience, that’s a disaster. Evil robots harvest it, and no spam filter can adequately deal with it. I am not doing that again.
So, that’s the story with the form on the Contact Us page that has now been decommissioned… at least for now.
Thanks for your time,
John
I have added a Surprise! bar to the line-up. I did this originally so that I could run some Shopping Cart and Checkout processes on the website without skewing our inventory. Technically, this SKU (product) is not an inventory item, so there is no inventory to mess up by running transactions against it. After setting it up I decided to make it a part of our official offering.
It is not unusual to hear a friend say, “Just send me ten of your best soaps, and let me know what I owe you.” This is that item — the item to purchase if you simply want a quantity of great soaps at the best price. These are all first-rate soaps, not seconds or duds. We want you to come back and buy again!
We do lots of test pours — trying some new scent, process, or ingredient. These are often great soaps, just that for whatever reason we don’t immediately list them for sale here to the online store. We may be waiting to hear what our testers say, or how well a scent holds… something like that. These are regularly added to orders that leave here, in hopes of receiving feedback, and these are soaps that may be included here.
In short, these may be any size bar, in any base formula.
More to come!
John
Alma-Clean
$6.99 – $28.99
