My name is Melissa and I am the founder and owner of The Concord Soap Company. My husband and I became interested in living as environmentally friendly as we could once we started our family. We are avid recyclers and are always trying to lessen our impact on the environment in as many ways as possible. We used cloth diapers on our daughter, carry our cloth bags when shopping, drive a hybrid car and just built our eco-friendly house! I have always been immersed in many different crafts. (usually all at once!) The blending of our natural living and my passion for crafts resulted in my interest in making handmade, natural soap for my new family. I began by making cold-process soap and then other bath and body items to give out as holiday gifts. As you can guess, it snowballed from there! After many experiments and trials, I selected my favorite recipes and began my business adventure!
The Concord Soap Company's soap are vegetarian or vegan friendly! We do not use animal fats (tallow, for example) in any of our soap. Some of our soap are completely natural - they include essential oils as the fragrance. The remainder of our soap contains fragrance oils for scent. Essential oils are derived completely from plants, seeds, etc. Fragrance oils are man-made to create a certain fragrance. All of the fragrance oils used by the Concord Soap Company are VERY high quality. We realize that some people are highly sensitive to fragrances, so we also offer fragrance-free products. Our products are made in small batches to allow quality to be the number one issue. We take great care to ensure you will receive a high quality product!
We choose to NOT include artificial colorants in our soap and body products. Although they look pretty, we feel that there is no room for artificial ingredients in our natural products. We do experiment with natural colorants from time to time. The natural colorants that we use occasionally are simply spices, herbs, etc. The essential oils or fragrance oils used will sometimes add a tint to our products as well.
We also choose to not use preservatives, because we don't want to add chemicals to our handmade products. Some companies claim to use "natural" preservatives, but our research has found no real natural preservatives exist. The lack of preservatives in our products does mean that they will have a slightly shorter lifespan than those with preservatives. But, do you want chemicals in a soap that is used on your face (or other areas)? We didn't think so!
We choose to use glass bottles and jars where we can to lessen our use of plastic. When we do use plastic, we search out packaging with a high recycled content.
No animal testing! We never test any of our products on animals! (unless husbands count!)
