Ruskin Glass Centre shop opens

The Natural Soapworks new shop at the Ruskin Glass Centre opened yesterday. We'd like to thank all of our loyal customers who called in to see us, and sent us good luck cards and flowers. We were really touched to receive so many good wishes, and it really made our day! We're still busy stocking the shelves and working on the unit, but here's a picture of how the shop area looked on the first day.

During the coming half term week we intend to open the Ruskin shop between 10am and 4pm on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This will coincide with the opening of the Ruskin Glass Centre's cafe, which will be offering a selection of complimentary cakes and coffee to visitors.

We're likely to be closed later in the week since we are re-fitting the Studio 7 shop, but local customers can ring our new telephone number (01384 399451) so we can advise on opening hours. We will also post an update on the blog, later in the week. We intend to re-open Studio 7 at the Red House Glass Cone on Saturday 30th October for the 'No Tricks, Just Treats' Halloween Funday. There will be no impact on website orders - these will be processed as normal.

The final thing to mention, is that the 2010 Christmas Catalogue is now available to local customers, to pre-order natural skincare Christmas gifts for collection from our Stourbridge premises during November and December. Many of these Christmas gift ideas will be uploaded to the website later this week.

Opening day preparations

We're now working around the clock to ensure the Ruskin Glass Centre shop is ready for opening on Saturday 23rd October 2010. The new treatment room is nearly complete, and we're now moving onto shop fitting and stocking the new shop. We're going to be very busy! For this reason, our Red House Glass Cone Studio 7 is now temporarily closed. We hope that as many customers as possible can join us on Saturday, to celebrate this expansion of our business:

• Opening day special offers
• Join the Natural Club to make savings on your purchases
• Enter our opening day prize draw
• Receive a discount on your first holistic treatment booking
• Enjoy a glass of wine/soft drink while you look around the new shop
• Launch of our Christmas Gift catalogue

Our new address is: The Natural Soapworks, Workshop 7 Ruskin Glass Centre
Wollaston Road, Amblecote, Stourbridge, West Midlands, DY8 4HF. The Ruskin Glass Centre has free on-site parking. We'll be open between 10am - 5pm on the 23rd, so we hope to see you there!

Ruskin opening date confirmed as 23rd October 2010

Building work on our new unit at the Ruskin Glass Centre is progressing well, and at last we can confirm our opening date as Saturday 23rd October 2010. So hold the date in your diaries!

We'd really love it if as many customers and friends as possible, can join us to celebrate and enjoy a glass of wine (or two!) We will have been in business for just over 4 years, so we're really excited to be expanding into this lovely new unit!

We'll post more information in the coming weeks....

On the move...

Building work is now underway at the Ruskin Glass Centre, to build our new holistic treatment room. Work on the unit is expected to continue for another couple of weeks, so the opening of our new shop will be in early October.

In the meantime, we have to begin removals and this means there will be some disruption to our normal opening hours at the Red House Glass Cone. This weekend we'll be open for most of Saturday, but there will be reduced opening hours on Sunday due to packing and furniture removals.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause to local customers, but website orders will be unaffected by these changes. We hope you can bear with us, while we prepare the new premises!

The Natural Soapworks at the Ruskin Glass Centre

By now, visitors to the International Festival of Glass will have noticed that a certain Stourbridge soap company is named on one of the new business units at the Ruskin Glass Centre. Today we've been asked about this quite a few times so we wanted to confirm that yes, it's true - The Natural Soapworks is expanding again!

Anyone who has visited us over the years at the Red House Glass Cone will have noticed that we keep outgrowing our premises. So we've taken the decision to expand into a much larger unit at the vibrant new business centre at the newly refurbished Ruskin Glass Centre. This will enable us to open a larger shop and we're also having a fully equiped holistic treatment room built so we can offer Natroma aromatherapy and holistic therapies too.

It's all very exciting, but we're currently awaiting building work to be completed before we can open the new unit. So for now, please continue to visit us at the Red House Glass Cone and we'll post more information about the new premises later in September!

2010 International Festival of Glass Soap

Who would have thought that glass making would be the inspiration for a soap?!

The 2010 International Festival of Glass weekend is fast approaching (August Bank Holiday 27th - 30th August), and will be celebrated across the Stourbridge Glass Quarter, so we knew that we had to create a new soap. In 2008, we launched our very popular Festival soap. This has since been re-named as Kaleidoscope and still features it's 4 colour swirled pattern. This year's special edition soap is called Crystal.

Crystal has been inspired by the 'frit' (chunks of glass) that's melted in the pot in the furnace. Once the molten glass reaches the correct temperature its gathered onto the blowpipe, and then the glassblower gets to work creating their beautiful masterpieces.

Crystal is a sweet smelling (Geranium and Lavender) chunky topped soap, that's mainly cream coloured with pink and purple chunks running through each bar. Each bar is quite unique, and as the outer part of the bar is washed off it will reveal different patterns. Crystal is one of our lovely new Natroma coconut milk, palm-free soaps so is suitable for all skin types, and vegan customers.

The International Festival of Glass will take place between 23 August - 11 September at venues across Stourbridge's Glass Quarter including: Ruskin Glass Centre, Broadfield House Glass Museum, Red House Glass Cone, Bonded Warehouse, Holy Trinity Church and the Dial Glassworks. So we hope that you enjoy the Festival and pop in to see us at the Red House Glass Cone over the Bank Holiday weekend!

NEW! Palm Free Coconut Milk Soaps for Natroma

Phew...it's been a busy week! We attended the Attingham Park Summer Fair last weekend, and met lots of new customers who seemed to love our handmade skincare and soap products. It was lovely having a chat about the benefits of aromatherapy and natural skincare, and we're looking forward to seeing everyone again with our Christmas Gift Hampers at the Frost Fair at the end of the year.

We've also been busy with press interest in our Humane Cosmetics Standard accreditation from BUAV . It's been lovely to receive so much positive support for our efforts and we're very proud that our products now bear the Leaping Bunny logo, an internationally recognised symbol of cruelty free cosmetics. We'll continue to bring you news of the the valuable work that BUAV does to eradicate the practice of animal testing - which we feel is cruel and unnecessary.
So to celebrate a fantastic week, we're launching some new products - a new range of Natroma soaps! We've listened to customer requests and we think these are pretty special - formulated without palm oil (so they're environmentally friendly) and containing coconut milk (so they're perfect for vegan customers), with pretty natural colours and essential oil fragrances. We felt it was important to introduce this range, since quite a few vegan customers felt left out when we specialised in goats milk soaps. Well we think the Natroma soaps feel lovely on the skin, and have a really bubbly, creamy lather that's every bit as good as one of our goats milk varieties.

We've also specially formulated each of these soaps, enriching them with specific oils and botanicals to support the skin. There's an antibacterial soap (which we admit is a bit smelly!) that contains tea tree, rosemary, lavender and neem oils. We've included two very gentle soaps in the range - Carrot & Rhassoul (top of the soap pile in the picture) and Hemp & Oatmeal (bottom of the pile) both of which have gentle essential oil blends so they could be used as facial bars and will suit sensitive skin. For lovers of floral soaps, there's Exotic Rose which has a delicate blend of rose, geranium and ylang ylang essential oils (middle of the pile) and we've splurged with this one including evening primrose oil in the formulation.

Customers also asked us for simple recyclable soap wrappers, so these soaps are hand wrapped in recycled kraft paper but we couldn't resist adding a little organza ribbon trim! Better still, some of these soaps will be available with hand decorated tops, so they'll make perfect stand alone gifts too.

We hope you enjoy using these palm-free Natroma soaps.....and watch this space since we have several more of these soaps on the way!