FAQs

The simple answer is yes, as we offer our products at wholesale prices they are perfect for you to purchase to sell at soap parties, or along side other goods you may sell in this way.

Our products are not suitable for babies, and are only suitable for children over the age of 3 years old.

We do offer a Baby range; including Boo Boo Balm, Deep Sleep Baby Bath and Massage Oil and Organic Baby Soap which are safe for use on babies and we hold special, specific certifications to manufacture these products using Essential Oils, especially for babies.

Yes, we make all our products by hand, in our Bedfordshire workshop.

All our products are genuinely made by hand.

However, we have recently employed Brian the bottling machine and Gertrude the handwhisk to enable faster production of bottled products. Although our mixing, measuring and pouring is still completed by hand.

We are strictly against animal testing and we do not use any animal derived ingredients. All of our products are approved by Cruelty Free International and The Vegetarian Society.

“The Soap Shop Ltd is proud to be a cruelty free company. All of our products are certified as not tested on animals under the Cruelty Free International Leaping Bunny programme, the international gold standard for products that are free from animal testing. We adhere to a fixed cut-off date policy and proactively monitor our suppliers to ensure that our products continue to adhere to the Leaping Bunny criteria. Our supplier monitoring system is also open to independent audit. For more information about the Leaping Bunny and Cruelty Free International, please visit http://crueltyfreeinternational.org/”

Unfortunately not, our premises are restricted for health, safety and insurance purposes, only insured members of staff are allowed in to the workshop, you may however purchase a sample box from our online shop.

At this time we are not taking on any further customer manufacturing contracts.

Of course! We allow customers that have placed orders with us to use our images. Please email us on info@thesoapshop.net for consent and once granted you may right click and save images directly from our website or social media.

PLEASE NOTE: We do not grant permission to ANYONE to use our images without our prior agreed consent. This is a very serious matter as all of our images are protected by copyright law. Our images and text belong to us. Without placing an order, you are NOT entitled to use any part of our website for any purpose, including your own financial gain. We have no hesitation in taking legal action against people that are using our images without our consent. (Apart from that bit, we really are a lovely bunch!)

Apart from what is actually listed on our website we do not offer any alternative or mixed packs of products. We make all products in set batch sizes. We cannot alter these batch sizes as our mixtures and recipes would simply not work, which means there are very rarely any products ‘left over’ or ‘spare’ and those that are we use in our sample boxes.

This is a common problem with glycerin based soap that is left in any type of slightly damp environment. If the soap has a high glycerin content, as ours does, it will attract moisture from any environment it is stored in. Even sitting a bar near an open window for 10 minutes when it has been raining will cause the bars to get a ‘wet’ layer on them. Sadly, this cannot be avoided in certain situations. We can advise that by keeping the environment warm, or by putting the soap away, when not on display to sell, in an airtight box will help to stop the problem. Alternatively, you could cut and wrap each bar in cellophane.

Absolutely not! Our soap is made from extremely high quality ingredients. Our soap does not crack, shrink, or change shape at all! The scent will naturally fade the longer the bars are left unused, however the scent will not completely deteriorate.

Never. We use fully approved, safe cosmetic colourants at safe levels in all of our bath products. They will never stain anyone’s bath!

We are happy for you to sell any product you order from us on your own website, via Ebay or other online platforms. We can provide you with any images that you may need to advertise the products, simply contact us and we will send the pictures over to you.

We do manufacture some products that are free from artificial colours, perfumes and essential oils, these products would normally be considered safe for sensitive skin. Our standard products, in our experience, are very well tolerated by people with sensitive skin, however everyone is different and it is impossible to say whether products are suitable for everyone due to allergies.

Yes, we sell to schools, collages, community groups, university study projects and many more organisations. We are always happy to provide products for you to sell on to make a profit for a charity. If you need any advice on pricing or displays please don’t hesitate to contact us, we will be glad to help.

We are more than happy to assist you if you feel you need any help or advice regarding selling handmade soap, bath and body products. From pricing, gift wrapping, location and displays we have lots of experience and can offer a wealth of advice. Please do give us a call on 01582 967426 or contact us here, one of our friendly team will be pleased to help you!

Some of our customers prefer to display our products the way they want to, on their existing shelving to fit in with the design of their shop. If you need any help with displaying products in your shop please do not hesitate to give us a call on 01582 967426 or contact us here, one of our friendly team will be pleased to help you. We do supply posters that you can display in your shop windows or next to your stall to give your customers a little more information about our products and the wonderful ingredients they contain.

We do get asked regularly for point of sale display stands for our products, and we are currently looking into a range of display stands for this purpose. Please sign up to our newsletter here to be kept up to date.

We recommend that you use a large kitchen knife to cut a soap loaf, it is just like cutting cheese!

To get an equal amount of uniform bars from our soap loaves we recommend that you use a ruler to mark out 2.5cm spaces along the top of the loaf. Simply line up your knife and cut downwards, as straight as you can. Using this formula, you will get 10 good sized bars out of one loaf, with each bar weighing around 115g.

Some of our soap loaves will be harder to cut than others, our dead sea soap loaf is a good example of this, as the layer of sea salt on the top of the loaf is quite tough some extra force is needed!

Our soap loaves don’t split apart when they are cut. If you do encounter any of our loaves splitting, please contact us straight away and we will provide you with a full refund for that loaf. Good quality, well made soap will never split when cut.

Please click this link to view our labelling guidelines for more information.

Yes, all of our products have always been suitable for Vegans. In 2018 we took steps to become approved by The Vegetarian Society to join their Vegan brands and we are pleased to announce that as from March 2018 we are a Vegan approved company. 

As we update our packaging we will be adding Vegan logos to every product to highlight its suitability for Vegans.

We have had a lot of questions about this recently, which is great! The public really are becoming more aware of plastics and the environment.

All of our shrink wrap is both recyclable and biodegradable
All of our plastic tubs and bottles are made from PET and both are easily recycled through normal household recycling bins
The balms and face oils are in amber glass which is also recycled through normal household recycling glass bins
Our bath salts are in kraft paper pouches (recyclable and biodegradable ) and the lining of the pouches is also PET which is recyclable
The bags we wrap our soap in when we send them to you are also recyclable, and our packing chips are biodegradable too.

We are really trying to look into ways that we can cut our plastic use further, but it is quite difficult when dealing with cosmetic products sometimes! We’d love to package our shower gel into cardboard tubs (like milk cartons!) but we know this would lead to problems in transit because they would be likely to get squashed 🙁 But our brains are whirring and working all the time.

At present our white-label division is full to capacity with existing clients and therefore we are unable to take on any new work.

Our soap loaves do currently contain Palm Oil derivatives, these are sourced using an RSPO programme.

We do a range of solid shampoo bars which are Palm Oil free.

We are also working on a Palm Oil free soap range for this year.

It is with regret that we have taken the decision, due to conditions required post Brexit to focus on the UK cosmetics market only.

This ensures we have extra capacity to serve our UK customers more quickly.

*UK excludes Northern Ireland, due to their requirement for cosmetic products to be listed on the EU CPNP which we are no longer a member of.

Please note, we are unable to accept any liability for orders placed with the intention of resale in the EU whether purchased and sent directly to the EU or via a carrier to their final destination. Our decision to not trade in Europe is not based on shipping or tax reasons but due legality of our registration with the EU CPNP post Brexit.

We don’t provide samples unfortunately, however if you wish to try any of our product range we invite you to place a small retail order with us at www.handmadesoap.co.uk where we can accommodate this.

No, unfortunately we do not offer catalogues of any kind because we update our range regularly and they would become out of date quickly.

We do offer a pricelist via email for your reference.

We aim to dispatch all orders as quickly as we can and we advise our lead times on our homepage and on your order confirmation email. We state these timescales as we work to a queuing system, on a first come first serve basis. We always work to get your order out as quickly as we possibly can.

We will always update the front page of our website at busier times of year, like Christmas, to inform you of longer lead times!

We hand make each individual product that is ordered. You will never receive a product from us that has been sitting on a shelf for months. Our products are as fresh as can be when you receive them, and we believe this is better for you and your customers!

Where possible we will always try to dispatch your order as quickly as we can.

Sometimes we can fit in small orders around what we are already making. For instance, if you wanted to order 3 Soap Loaves and needed them quickly, we would ask that you contact us with your requirements and we will see if we can fit them in around our current schedule. There is no guarantee that we will be able to fit a small order in, so please always check with us first before placing an order online.

To reduce single use plastic waste we no longer offer this service.

You can wrap our soap in many ways. The best option, in our opinion, is to leave our lovely soaps visible to your customers and only cut and wrap them when sold. Waxed paper is a great option and can provide a nice ‘rustic’ look. Tissue paper is not suitable to wrap our soap in, as the soap will stick to the tissue paper, ending up moist and sticky! You can also use a variety of cellophane, etc which is widely available and suitable for our soap.

A large kitchen knife will cut the soap very easily! Cutting soap is like cutting cheese, all you need is a steady hand, a ruler and a straight eye!

No, we do not have a minimum order quantity, we only specify that you order in the set batch numbers as detailed on our website. We want as many people as possible to try our lovely stuff, and if that means you only want to order one soap loaf to try, then so be it!

All our products are supplied unlabelled, they will come without any labels at all, ready for you to add your own.

We will of course, provide you with all the information you need to create your own labels.

Yes, once you place an order you will receive an email back containing this information.

You need to state, by trading standards law, the Weight, Price, and full Ingredients list at ‘point of sale’ – this means either on the product itself, or by the side of each product you are selling if it is
not labelled. You will receive information with your order containing the Batch Numbers for each product you order. Batch Numbers are important, as if there is ever a problem with a product, we need to be able to trace it back to a specific batch of ingredients, so we can then notify our supplier, and any investigations needed can be carried out. Batch numbers can be written on Labels, and if you select ‘labelled’ with any of our potted or bottled products they will come with a batch number on them. That said, in the 10 years we have been in business we have never had to trace a problem back using batch numbers, but there is always a first time for everything, so please keep a record of your batch numbers.

Yes, we are. We hold cosmetic product safety reports for every single recipe we make. We use an independent, qualified chemist in skin preparations to test and certify all of our recipes as safe for use on human skin. Because of the in-depth certifications we hold, we have all the relevant insurance needed to sell products in the UK and the EU.

We are proud to say that we follow strict hygiene rules and good manufacturing procedures.

No, we do not give discounts on first orders or to start up businesses. Our prices really are as competitive as they can be, therefore we cannot offer any discounts on any orders.

Just take a look around our website and add your chosen products to the shopping cart. When you are finished click ‘checkout’ to be taken to the payment section, where you have a choice of paying by Credit or Debit card through SagePay or paying via PayPal.

All of our products contain lots of wonderful natural ingredients, however some of our products do contain some non – natural ingredients.

We do make a range of 100% natural products, such as Bath Salts, Bath Melts, Massage Bars, Balms and much more. This is where all the ingredients of the particular product are 100% Natural. No artificial perfumes or colourants are used in these products.

Our perfumes are manufactured specifically for us, in the UK. You will not find scents or fragrances the same as ours anywhere else in the entire world! You can be safe in the knowledge that our perfumes are of an extremely high quality and are gentle on the skin. They have been carefully blended and produced with a low allergen content in mind. We hold full MSDS (material safety data sheets) on all of our fragrances and ingredients and can provide all of this information should it ever be required.

They have some natural components, however they are not 100% natural. Where the product is 100% natural, the scent will come from a blend of natural essential oils.

No, all of our products are Paraben free.

We ask that you carefully check everything when you receive your parcel. If there are any damages, please take a photograph of the packaging, the damaged products in the packaging and the outside
of the box and forward them to us on info@thesoapshop.net with the subject line of ‘Damaged delivery – and then your business or surname’. We insure all of our parcels at no extra cost to you, so if on the rare occasion that there are any damages, we need photographic proof to pursue a claim with our courier. All claims of damages must be reported to us within 48 hours for the claim to be considered. Without photographic proof, we will not be able to refund any damages to you.

We do not offer orders on a credit or account basis. We ask that all orders are paid for in full before we start to manufacture your order.

We can accept payment via Visa, Mastercard and Visa Debit through our website, handled by SagePay as our chosen payment gateway partner.

You may also pay for your order via PayPal.
We can also accept direct Bank Transfers.
We can take payments over the telephone, however it is preferred that you place and pay for your order through the website, as it keeps things a lot more organised this end!
We regret that we do not accept cheques or Postal Orders.

If you wish to pay by bank transfer, or via the telephone please register your details and we will then authorise your account for invoice payments.

We recommend that you store all products in a cool, dry place and out of direct sunlight. We suggest that you keep the products in the original packaging that we send them to you in when not displayed for sale.

Our Soap has a shelf life of approx. 36 months and should be kept wrapped and out of direct sunlight.
Our potted and bottled products have a shelf life of approx. 12 months
Our Bath Cupcakes have a shelf life of approx. 12 months
Our Bath Melts have a shelf life of approx. 12 months
Our Sugar Scrubs have a shelf life of approx. 12 months

Our soap and shower gels do not contain SLS. Our soap does contain SLES which is a totally different foaming agent, even though the names look very similar. SLES is a very mild and gentle foaming agent that is normally very well tolerated by sensitive skin.

Our shower gel does not contain SLES either! Nor does our organic range of soap, if it is your preference for products to not contain either SLS or SLES then our organic range of products may be suitable for you!

We offer free delivery on orders of £250.00 ex. VAT and above to England, Scotland and Wales Mainland addresses.

Some Scottish addresses are deemed by our courier (DPD) to require a higher delivery charge and in these cases we are unable to provide free delivery and we will amend any orders to include a delivery charge if this applies and contact you. If you believe you fall into this category when you register please select Highlands & Islands as your location.

As of November 2nd 2013 The Soap Shop Ltd is registered for VAT. The prices displayed do not include VAT, this will be added during the checkout where VAT is applicable to your order.