CANMORE, Alta. – When Cam Baty and Karina Birch arrived in Canmore to ski, they never expected to become entrepreneurs and receive accolades for their natural soaps.
The couple bought the Rocky Mountain Soap Co. five years ago because they wanted a business and Karen was interested in skin care products. Working with one part-time employee, the business took off as she expanded the line from soaps to lotions, body washes, lip balms and other products.
A year later Cam quit his regular job and joined the business.
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They produce everything from scratch. The products are all made by hand, labelled manually and sold across Western Canada in three stores they own in Banff, Canmore and Edmonton as well as the Calgary Farmers’ Market and 400 wholesale accounts.
The company now makes and sells about 500,000 bars of soap annually.
“Our growth plan is really detailed. There is so much demand in Canada and we could grow much faster than we do,” said Baty, a 32-year-old entrepreneur in blue jeans.
Their business plan is to grow to 17 stores throughout the West aiming at women in the 30 to 50-year-old age range.
“We could go out and get venture capital and open 10 stores if we wanted to, but that’s not the way we want to do it,” he said.
While Canmore is an expensive place to do business, they chose it for the lifestyle. The business growth has been a bonus.
“We’re about 40 times bigger in sales than when we bought it,” he said.
“We thought it had potential but nowhere near the potential that has happened. We have far surpassed our business plan,” he said.
They capitalize on the Rocky Mountain setting with 95 percent of sales in Banff coming from tourists. Many like the products enough that they buy more over the internet.
Marketing was never as difficult as maintaining the cash flow.
“Cash flow was a problem. You’d want to do marketing things and you couldn’t because you couldn’t afford them. You couldn’t afford to buy the packaging or the ingredients,” he said.
This is an unregulated business but new federal labelling laws are expected to demand they put on a list of ingredients in descending order using international nomenclature.
They already list their ingredients now, unlike many soap companies.
They use natural ingredients from all over the world including essential oils, wheat, oats, berries, dried buttermilk, canola and olive oil for the product lines. In the early days they actually bought some of their ingredients like pumpkin pulp and aloe vera gel from local grocery stores. Now many of their products are purchased through distributors.
Under federal guidelines the couple cannot make health claims about their products, but they have received testimonials from customers, some of whom swear by the creams for alleviating troublesome skin conditions like eczema.
Their techniques are no different than people who make soap in their kitchens as a cottage industry. With a staff of 12, the Rocky Mountain Soap Co. simply works on a larger scale making soap.
“The difference between us and the person in the home is packaging and marketing. The quality is the same,” Baty said.
The local chamber of commerce awarded them the entrepreneur of the year title and Rocky Mountain Soap has been recognized as one of the 50 fastest growing companies in the province. Most recently, they were recognized by Alberta Environment for their waste reduction practices.
They reuse cardboard boxes recycled from local businesses for packaging, reducing their cost by 50 percent.
They reuse polystyrene loose fill and packaging peanuts. Garbage bags are packaging bags. Soap ends and shavings are saved and blended into bars of plain soap to come up with a new bar that looks like licorice candy.
Metal products coming into the plant are sent for scrap metal recycling. In addition, local high school students were allowed into the plant to recommend ways to further reduce waste.
The next step could be installing solar panels to power the plant, replacing electricty use.
