Merry Christmas from everyone at The Natural Soapworks!

Merry Christmas everyone!  We hope you enjoy a peaceful and restful holiday this year.

For us, it's been a really busy year right to the last...even though our shop was supposed to be closed on Christmas Eve, we still had to pop in to finalise one last order!   But finally the last products have been made and the last hampers wrapped and sent out, so it's time for the elves to take a well earned rest.  We hope you enjoy all of the lovely fragrant handmade goodies that are hiding under a great many Christmas trees this morning!!

We're now going to take an extended break over Christmas and the New Year.  Our Stourbridge shop will be closed until Tuesday 15th January 2013 - we've tried to tell as many customers as possible that we're closing for a little longer than usual this year, and apologise for any inconvenience.  While we're away we'll still be responding to urgent queries by e-mail.

Our web shops will continue to accept orders over the Christmas break, and we'll make sure they're processed as soon as possible when we return to work.  Website orders will be processed in the date order they arrived, and we hope to begin shipping orders again during week commencing 7th January 2013.  We will be contacting customers by e-mail, to advise on likely shipping timescales for any items that require manufacture.

But for now, we hope everyone relaxes and has a lovely Christmas.  Enjoy!

Last orders for Christmas!

Wow, what a busy few days it's been! 


A Candlelit Soapworks

The Ruskin Glass Centre's Candlelit Shopping Evening was really lovely, but anyone visiting our shop found that we were rather busy with a constant queue at the checkout all evening!  The Centre looked fabulous with low lighting, and we're so pleased that everyone enjoyed the evening...complete with mulled wine and mince pies of course.  It was a cold night after all - just look at the icicles that formed in the Courtyard's Fountain!


Icy Flowform Fountain

Last week was our busiest for Christmas orders, and we're pleased that everything has been dispatched, so loads of fragrant goodies are on their way!  This year we've heard that postal timescales have been pretty good, with many items arriving within a couple of days of dispatch so hopefully most parcels will have arrived by now.  But it's now getting so close to Christmas, that we can no longer guarantee that internet orders will arrive before the big day.  However as orders arrive, we'll continue to send them out as usual in the hope that some arrive on time.

At our Stourbridge shop, there's still a good selection of festive gift hampers available although a few items are very limited now.  The Fizzing Butter Melts have sold out (as usual!) so we'll only be making these to order now - and they take a day or so to dry so this will cause a short delay.

This year our shop will be closing at 4pm on Sunday 23rd December.  We'll be taking a well earned extended Christmas break this year and will be closed for 3 weeks so we can re-charge the batteries.  We'll re-open again on Tuesday 15th January 2013.  During this time our webshops will continue to accept orders, but they will not be processed until after we return.  So if you need anything urgently, we'd suggest that you place an order asap or call in to see us in the coming week so you don't run out.

Candlelit Shopping Evening - Ruskin Glass Centre

Still looking for some unusual Christmas gifts? 

Black Country locals can enjoy a visit to the Ruskin Glass Centre for a special candlelit shopping evening tomorrow (13th December) between 6pm and 8pm.

The Ruskin Glass Centre tenants will have a wide selection of festive items available, and the Centre will be darker than usual to show off the lovely candles and candle holders that are available on the site.

We'll have a selection of beautiful fragrant Christmas natural skin care hampers, oil burners, tea light holders, Himalayan Salt lamps and some special offers on our Christmas candles!

We look forward to seeing you there!

Frostastic Christmas events!

What an amazing few weeks it's been! 

First we exhibited to the Festive Gift Fair at the NEC and what a wonderful event that is.  It's so well organised and the atmosphere was just lovely with live bands and local choirs filling the hall with beautiful music.  The Nutcracker soldier on stilts, Father Christmas and pantomime dames were a big hit with the children....and made us laugh when they paid our stand a visit too!!  There was a wide variety of things to buy, and the food and drink section was very mmm!!!  (Well, it would have been rude if we hadn't tried a few samples and made a few purchases for ourselves).



Natroma & The Natural Soapworks stand at the 2012 Festive Gift Fair, NEC

We loved meeting so many customers at the NEC - many existing and so many new!  It was wonderful that so many customers paid our stand a visit to wish us well and make a few purchases.  As you can imagine we recognise many names from the repeat orders we receive via our webshops, so it was lovely to get to say hello and advise on product selection and talk about aromatherapy in person.  Thank you so much, and we'll be back again next year.

At the workshop, the Ruskin Christmas Fair sounded like it was another very busy event!  Family members stepped into the breach, and opened the workshop  for us while we were away and did a fantastic job - somehow coping with larger than expected crowds, products that kept selling out and a till malfunction on the Sunday afternoon!  They coped so well, so we're very grateful for their ongoing help and support!

We returned from the NEC...exhausted but happy, and found quite a website order backlog which we somehow managed to turn around so everything was shipped out before we headed off to Attingham Park for the Frost Fair. 

We look forward to this event every year, so we really felt for the Attingham staff who were having to cope with parkland that's usually used for parking that was waterlogged due to the recent flooding.  But their fantastic efforts, and masses of protective matting saved the day!  We've just heard there were record numbers of visitors (nearly 14,000) over the 3 days with the Sunday being the busiest day at Attingham so far. 

So what a fantastic Frost Fair it was!  We had a huge corner stand in the main marquee again, and were amazed by the numbers of people who returned to stock up on their soaps and skincare, and buy Christmas hampers for friends and family who'd specifically requested some more of "that lovely soap" again!  It does wonders for our egos, to hear customers raving about the products, our ingredient quality, and the beautiful packaging and how well last years gifts were received...they aren't on commission, honest!    We're really sorry that we sold out of so many hampers and the Christmas Spice oil on the Sunday - but rest assured, we're back now and will get the elves to make some more!

So once again, thank you everyone for being so kind, supportive and understanding about the website delays and out of stock items.  Today, our shop re-opens at 12pm and we'll hurriedly try to get things back to normal.  Again there is a big website order back-log, but we'll begin to prepare as many orders as we can today so they can be shipped out from tomorrow onwards.  Things should be completely back to normal by the weekend....fingers crossed!

We're off to the Festive Gift Fair!

After a crazy few months of manufacture, we're heading off to the Festive Gift Fair this week.  One of our customers summed it up perfectly, when she described the Soapworks as looking like Santa's Workshop!  We have a huge selection of pretty gift hampers ready, so everything is looking and smelling very festive.

We've warned our Stourbridge shop customers that we'll be operating reduced opening hours in the coming week, while we're at the NEC (the days we'll be closed are shown on the right of this page).  There's also a Christmas Shopping Event at the Ruskin Glass Centre this coming weekend (Saturday 24th -Sunday 25th November 2012) featuring locally produced arts and crafts.  Thanks to much appreciated family support our workshop will be open as usual over the weekend, but we'll be unable to offer our usual hamper wrapping and re-fill service on these days.

During this very busy time, our websites will continue to accept orders, but we'll be unable to process them until after we return.  We'll then deal with orders in the date order they arrived, and will update the website regularly as items sell out.   We're expecting a big order backlog when we return, so in advance we'd like to thank our website customers for their patience.   We'll endeavour to process the backlog of orders as quickly as we can!   

Forthcoming events are keeping us busy!!

The Natural Soapworks is a hive of activity as we prepare for the Festive Gift Fair and the Frost Fair in November.  Anyone walking into the workshop will have noticed the gorgeous aroma of cinnamon and cloves in the air now that the Fragrant Christmas Decorations have arrived again this year (and the Christmas tree will be making an appearance later this week, so remember to pop in and choose this years decorations before they sell out again). 

We love Christmas so we're really pleased to be manufacturing loads of Christmassy items again!  We have a variety of hampers and small gift ideas available in our shop now, and hope that visitors to the Spooky Halloween Funday at the Ruskin Glass Centre (this Saturday 27th October 2012) will get loads of inspirational Christmas gift ideas.  The workshop will probably look grotto-like during November as we complete the hamper manufacture for the NEC and Attingham Park events!  So please keep an eye on this blog, since we'll be warning customers about the dates when our shop will be closed - we'd hate for you to make a wasted journey.

The final thing to mention is that the closing date for Christmas orders for local/Stourbridge customers is this Sunday 28th October.  Our thanks to everyone who's already called in to place their orders - we really appreciate your valued custom and it looks like we're going to be working flat out until we close on 23rd December.  We're definitely going to need more Elves!!

Natroma Organic Soaps!

We're pleased to announce the arrival of a new range of organic soaps!  We've been working on these over the summer months, so they're now available on the Natroma website.

These contain certified organic botanical oils and butters, and as usual the goats milk comes from our local Ruskin Vale organic farm.  They really are lovely natural soaps, and you can easily see that they have a very high organic extra virgin olive oil content.  This is because organic olive oil is deep green in colour, so the organic soaps have a darker base colour than our standard soaps.  But rest assured, although they look a little different, the soap formulation is still the same so customers can continue to enjoy the usual creamy richness you'd associate with our soaps.

There are a few old favourites in this range (Exotic Rose, Orange Blossom, Kaleidoscope and Blue Lagoon return), but there's also some new ones too:  Gentle, Carrot and Calendula, Sorrento (inspired by the orange and lemon groves that surround that beautiful Italian town), Patchouli & Vetiver and Lavender & Geranium.  For anyone who prefers unscented soap there's also Pure Unscented.   More fragrances are planned for 2013. Our Natroma organic goats milk soaps have been given special packaging - each bar is wrapped with a pretty organza ribbon bow since we wanted them to look pretty enough to be stand-alone small gifts.

Coming very soon, there will also be our luxurious Christmas soaps - specially wrapped in colour co-ordinated organza ribbon and decorated with a sprig of festive holly (artifical, so there's no worries about spiky edges!)  These will be available in the ever popular Frankincense & Myrrh and Christmas Spice, and this year's special limited edition is Festive Vanilla.  It has a sweet but spicy aroma, and has a swirl of white clay and real vanilla seeds running through it.  Finally....we're giving in to numerous customer requests, Christmas Rose (the special edition from last year) will return again and should be available later in November. 

Christmas Gifts and Postage Changes

We're pleased to be able to report that some of our Christmas gift hampers have now been uploaded to The Natural Soapworks web site.  This year we have a lovely selection of natural goats milk soap and bathing hampers, all at very affordable prices ranging from just £2.75 upwards!

At the same time as uploading some of the Christmas items, we've also reviewed our website postage.  We've been monitoring the average cost of posting out orders, and have decided to make a few changes to The Natural Soapworks site to help with Christmas orders.  The big news is that our standard postage cost has been reduced to just £3.00 per order!  This is for orders dispatched on a Standard 5-7 day Second Class Royal Mail service.  Customers will then have the option to upgrade to a Priority 2-3 day First Class service for an additional 75p.  We think this is the fairest way to calculate the postage costs, since it gives more customer choice.  In addition to these Royal Mail services, we've also introduced a courier option for an additional £5.50 which is excellent value for money on a next day signed for service.   We hope the courier option will be helpful for urgent or larger orders as Christmas approaches.

All that customers need to do is visit the postage page  on The Natural Soapworks site to add on any postage surcharges they may require for their orders.  Otherwise the Standard postage of £3.00,  will be automatically be added on by the Paypal checkout as usual.  Similar postage options will be added to the Natroma website in the coming weeks.  We hope these changes help to make this years Christmas orders just a little more affordable!

Christmas is coming!

What a fantastic few weeks it's been!  Our congratulations to the wonderful athletes and everyone involved in the Paralympics - it's been an inspirational and moving experience that we'll never forget and we're so proud of your achievements!

We've been watching loads of sport during the last few weeks, but behind the scenes at the Soapworks there's also been a festive aroma in the air!  Yes, 'that time of year' is rapidly approaching again and we've been busy making lots of festive soaps, and developing new hamper packaging etc.

So we just wanted to warn Stourbridge customers that our Christmas catalogue is already out (this is for orders that will be collected from the workshop).  For website customers, we hope to have the the Christmas gift and hamper range uploaded to the websites in the coming weeks.  

Fantastic Glass Festival!

We just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who visited us during the International Festival of Glass!  We intended to add a few words to the blog over the weekend, but we were so busy we never found the time in the end.  It was lovely to meet so many new and returning customers, and we're delighted that our special edition Festival soaps, bath bombs, home fragrancing and Glassmakers Balm (a lavender balm infused with sea buckthorn that would be perfect for supporting the skin with minor burns) proved to be so popular.  We still have a few of these left, so catch them while you can!

Wasn't the Glass Festival fantastic?  Over the weekend thousands visited the Ruskin Glass Centre and the new Glasshouse Arts Centre and Webb Corbett Visitor Centre.  Despite the weather, people flocked to see the many exhibitions, took part in workshops, watched live glass blowing/craftspeople at work, saw the completed Portland Vase (really gorgeous!) and sampled the excellent food and drink before popping in for some retail therapy.  The atmosphere was wonderful all weekend, and on the final evening it was amazing to see so many people packed into the Glass Centre for the glass auction!

We think the Festival has been a huge success, and the renovated building looks fantastic and is the perfect venue for the British Glass Biennale exhibition (as usual the craftsmanship is stunning).  So if you get the chance to visit the exhibition (it's open until 15th September 2012) and new visitor facilities, we'd highly recommend a visit!  For now, we're taking a well earned rest today (Tuesday 28th) and will be open again tomorrow, so see you soon!

Back to work!

After a lovely relaxing summer break, the workshop is open again from today.  Our thanks to the many customers who have ordered off our websites while we've been away. We'll be working around the clock to process these (with your free gifts), so your patience is greatly appreciated!

It's been a fantastic couple of weeks, and didn't Team GB do well at the Olympics!!  We were lucky enough to experience it first hand at the tennis, and echo what everyone has said about the wonderful organisation and atmosphere in London.  So to everyone involved, we'd just like to add our own congratulations - you did us proud!!   

Visitors to the workshop will see that we still have our bunting and flags out - we're now looking forward to the Paralympics!  So to round off a fantastic Summer, we'll continue to offer our special edition Celebration bathing products for another few weeks in the workshop.  We're also looking forward to the International Glass Festival which will be celebrated at the Ruskin Glass Centre and other Stoubridge venues over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Phew - we're going to be busy again!

 

Soapworks and Natroma Summer Holiday

Phew!  It's been such a busy year so far that we've decided to take a break during the next few weeks, to re-charge the batteries before things get really busy in the Autumn and to enjoy the Olympics of course!  This means that our Stourbridge shop will be closed for 2 weeks, re-opening again on Wednesday 15th August 2012. 

During this time our websites will continue to accept orders, but we'll be unable to process them until after we return to work.  Orders will then be dealt with in the date order they arrived.  We apologise if this causes any inconvenience, and look forward to seeing customers again soon!

We have a new soap offer on the Natroma and Natural Soapworks websites, for customers ordering over £25 for delivery within the UK!

These are lovely well matured palm-free coconut milk soaps, which have a wonderful creamy lather.  Catch these while you can since we're discontinuing this range, to make way for some new organic goats milk Natroma soaps which should be ready for launch in August.

May Monoi Offer!

We love Mono de Tahiti!  It's such a wonderfully user-friendly botanical oil that's suitable for use on all skin types.  It appears in many of our products, but it's also lovely on its own.

Try using it as a wonderful melting massage or bathing oil, or to smooth dry patches of skin, as a complete hot oil hair treatment (or applied to just the ends to tame frizzy hair), or perhaps as a light pre-moisturing facial oil, or as a natural alternative to night creams...the list seems endless!  Since it's made from coconut oil it's even suitable for use on oily, acne-prone skin types since it's absorbed into the skin without leaving any oily residue.  But we've also seen good results on drier, more mature skin, sensitive skin and on troubled skin conditions. 

But best of all Monoi de Tahiti smells just heavenly!!  It's made by macerating Tiare flowers in pure coconut oil, so smells like gardenia blossoms.

So as a special treat for customers during May, we'll add a FREE rollerball of Monoi to any UK orders placed on the Natroma or Natural Soapworks websites valued at over £25!  There's no need to quote any offer codes at the checkout, we'll automatically add your free gift to your order.  We hope you enjoy using your Monoi!

April Opening

We'll be operating reduced opening hours during April 2012. This is partly due to the Easter Bank Holiday, and also because some building work is scheduled within the workshop shortly after Easter. Our reduced opening days are shown on the right, and we apologise for any inconvenience that may be caused.

The building work may lead to a short delay in dispatching website orders, so we will contact customers if the dispatch of their order is likely to be delayed by more than 48 hours.

Gift ideas for Mothers Day

We've been busy creating some new hampers for the Natroma website, which would be lovely for Mother's Day!

These pretty Lily Hampers have an unsual fluted design and are wrapped with pretty Spring inspired two-tone organza ribbons topped with luxurious lily flower decorations. They're available in two options: one is filled with just bathing products (including bath bombs, organic fizzing butter melts and a bath salt sachet) and the other contains a mixture of handmade decorated soap slices and bathing products.

On The Natural Soapworks hamper page, we also have a wide selection of soap and bathing products all packaged in luxurious hampers.

So we hope that both of our websites have some nice ideas for Mother's Day gifts.

Ruskin Glass Centre Spring Fair - Saturday 10th March

This weekend there will also be a Spring Craft Fair at the Ruskin Glass Centre, so as usual we'll have a range of gift hampers available. We'll also be pleased to gift wrap items while customers wait thoughout the day. In addition to our handmade natural skincare items, we also have candles, crystals, jewellery, oil burners, decorative tea light holders and other gift ideas that would make lovely Mothers Day gifts. The event will be open between 10am and 4pm on Saturday 10th March, so we hope local customers enjoy the day!

Natroma launches New Mum pregnancy range!

It's been a long time since we last posted....sorry, but we've had a really busy start to the year! Our thanks to everyone who's placed orders on the websites, or popped into our shop to pick up supplies and have a chat. (We'll try to keep things more up to date from now on!)

Behind the scenes we've been working on a brand new Natroma range, especially for new Mums or Mums to be. There’s a great deal of myth and fear surrounding the use of essential oils during pregnancy, with various lists of ‘banned’ essential oils circulating on the internet. We often speak to anxious pregnant ladies who've heard bad things about one essential oil or another, and after they've left us we usually shake our heads in disbelief over the latest horror story!

Sadly many of these stories circulate without any sound reasoning or clinical evidence, so it’s little wonder that new Mum’s often feel confused by the contradictory information and may even decide that it’s safer to avoid using any aromatherapy products during their pregnancy. We think this is so sad, since correctly formulated aromatherapy products and professional holistic therapy, can provide comfort and support during what can at times be an anxious (and sometimes difficult) chapter of a woman’s life.

So we're launching our New Mum range to provide user friendly, luxurious pampering aromatherapy products that can be enjoyed throughout normal pregnancies. The range has been formulated with knowledge and care, and we hope that women will feel confident in using the range. Wherever possible we're using organic ingredients with therapeutic essential oils correctly diluted in lower concentrations than usual (typically at or below 1%).

We're making no medical claims about our pregnancy products, but they have been carefully formulated to take into account the growing body of evidence that essential oils can support a variety of health issues. For more information visit the New Mum Pregnancy page on the Natroma website.