Today’s installment is about Richelle Spargur, the wonderful co-creator and owner of Virginia Soaps and Scents. I’m a raving fan of theirs (you can read my review by clicking here) and once you try their products you will be too!

As you know, I like to introduce other homeschoolers who enjoy working from home while educating their children. Well, she’s been kind enough to let me share her beginnings with you. And who knows, maybe her story will inspire you to pursue your dreams as well. Now here’s the Spargur’s story told in their own words:

We are the Spargurs…a homeschooling family located in Southeastern Virginia with 9 children, 2 cats and a coop full of chickens. We began our homeschooling adventure 23 years ago and now have 5 graduates with 4 children still being taught at home and a granddaughter just beginning her first year of homeschooling.

Three years ago we faced the most difficult situation we had ever encountered in our 25 years of marriage when our youngest granddaughter died in a tragic accident. After months of grieving and ministering around the clock to our eldest daughter in her loss we were utterly exhausted and had given little thought to where we were in school. But you know, there is often real comfort in just doing familiar things when faced with trials such as what we had faced, and as our homeschool had always provided us with a framework for our daily life, I determined to do a unit study with the kids on Colonial Life in Virginia. And wouldn’t you know it….there was this bit on soapmaking….

We entered into this endeavor strictly as a one-time school project with a one pound batch of lavender soap, dyed with a melted purple crayon and molded in a piece of 3 inch PVC pipe. We made REAL SOAP!! More importantly, we were back to making fun again as a family and didn’t want it to stop.

We continued to experiment, research, learn, design recipes and 6 months later, Virginia Soaps & Scents was born. We were now more than soapmakers…we were in business and on a whole new learning curve as we entered the entrepreneurial sphere. Our one overriding rule was, that as a home based business, everything we do must be done “in house”, from designing and printing our own labels to building our own website. If we didn’t know how to do it, we learned it! Taxes, business licenses, accounting, etc. etc. etc….

We launched our new business at our state homeschool convention in Richmond, Virginia, in June of 2008 as an example of a homeschool project that had become an entrepreneurial adventure and the response to our handcrafted soaps, bath and body products was phenomenal. It was there that we met Paul Suarez, publisher of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, who encouraged us to send a crate of our products to the review team at TOS. In January Heidi Strawser’s review of Virginia Soaps & Scents appeared in the magazine and catapulted us nationwide to the homeschool community.

When so many young new businesses are struggling to “find their market” we have been blessed to have been “born” into ours. We are marketing to predominately homeschooling families all over the country….and most exciting…we are going to begin traveling and speaking at other homeschool conferences in the spring of 2010. Our message, we hope, will be one of encouragement to families that are suffering as ours has as well as sharing what we call “Delight Directed Family Business”. (Yes, that’s a play on Gregg Harris’s “delight – directed unit studies!)

Our business is based on our Handcrafted Olive Oil Soap. This is real soap, not a detergent product. We use all natural ingredients with no added chemicals for hardening or lathering properties. Our soaps are made by both cold process and in-the-mold hot processing. The bars are extremely hard and long lasting due to the recipe we have developed. The big fluffy lather comes from a generous amount of coconut oil used in all of our soaps. We take a great deal of pride in the testimonials from allergy suffering customers all over the country that are using our soaps with no allergic reactions.

Next theirs our Shampoo Bar which contains no added color. The Shampoo Bar is also an olive oil based soap but also contains castor oil which acts as an extra “humectant”, meaning, it holds moisture. Simply wet your hair down and rub the shampoo bar over your hair a couple of times and you’ll have lather clear to your toenails! Our regular sized shampoo is a whopping 5.5 oz bar which should easily give you the same number of shampoos as a 32 oz. bottle if not more. We recommend using the shampoo bar all over if you have very dry skin and feel free to shave with it too!

Finally, our best-selling Laundry Soap Kit. The regular size kit will make 2 gallons. Follow your instructions and you’ll have a gel in a few hours but it can be used immediately even when it’s hot and runny. When you look in your washer you WILL NOT see suds. We put no coconut oil in this product as suds don’t actually wash the clothes, but they can be difficult to rinse out and the residue from the suds left in fabrics can cause many skin issues. The laundry soap works great in front loaders and high efficiency machines as well. We have an ancient Whirlpool and use ½ a cup per load but our front loader and HE machine customers tell us they use ¼ of a cup to as little as 2 tablespoons per load. At 4 to 7 cents per wash the laundry soap kit is a good bang for your buck!

Finally we invite you to visit our website at www.virginiasoapsandscents.com to see our complete product line. Our Gourmet Soap page gives us an outlet for branching into many different artistic techniques and is constantly changing as we experiment and broaden our skills. We have Shaving Soaps for both men and women as well as our Total Body Bars which have become some of the best selling products we’ve ever created. Our Bath & Body page contains our lotions, scrubs and powders. We also make a beeswax based Lip Balm in 5 flavors and a heavenly Lavender Linen Spray.

Our Christmas page will be up soon with holiday fragrances of Pumpkin Spice, Wild Bayberry and Peppermint…soaps make great Christmas gifts! And coming really soon is our new lotion bar. It’s heavenly and has helped me (Richelle) to deal with a skin condition on my hands better than anything else I’ve ever tried. I’ll be sharing the details shortly, so be sure to check back to see when Cheryl gets the news.

If you have any questions about any of our products please e-mail us at richelle@virginiasoapsandscents.com

Blessings,

The Spargur Family

Happy Lathering!