Vendor Spotlight -April 2012

Meet the Zensations Team!!

Hi :)

I'm Valerie & I'm the soap maker here at ZenSations! I have 2 grown daughters, Angelica, who many of you know from the farmers market, she's my assistant as well as our jewelry designer & Ashlee who's in charge of keeping track of inventory and also helps me with the wrapping and labeling process. I also have 2 very precious grandsons, Laiken who is 7 years old and Caden is 16 months old, they fill my heart with endless happiness :) When I'm not busy making soap and other smell good things, I'm busy working in the pharmacy at Wal Mart.

Back in 2000 after much research on natural soap making I decided it was time to give it a try. I fell in love with the soap making process with my very first batch and I was hooked. I still have one single, solitary bar that I saved from my very first batch of soap, grapefruit peppermint, although the scent has started to fade, it's by far my favorite and what I like to call my soap baby. I made countless soap batches, with my own simple recipes until I found some that were worth sticking with. I strive for the gentlest formulas, I can spend hours developing a single recipe, different oils & butters, Essential, natural clays and botanicals all provide for individual properties in a soap.

Also, cleansing, conditioning, bubbly, creaminess, hardness factors all figure in for a quality bar of soap. As I got more comfortable with soap making, I started adding to my own formulations with different skin nourishing butters like shea, cocoa, aloe & mango ..adding oils such as avocado, grape seed, rice bran & olive. We also make milk soaps, goat milk, coconut milk, buttermilk, e

I used friends and family as my guinea pigs many years before I started selling to the public. For awhile I sold on Ebay but that began to be too expensive, so we started doing craft shows and then the farmers market, which we love!

So many of our customers come through word of mouth, which is fantastic, it's so nice knowing our customers love our soap so much. I love being able to sell a product that is made by me and one that I firmly believe in. It feels good knowing that when someone uses my soap they are using something that is not full of harmful chemicals and doesn't dry out their skin like the synthetic detergent bars they sell in the stores. We also make lotions, scrubs, lip balms, perfume oils and most recently have added solid lotion bars to our line which have been a strong seller. We enjoy meeting new people at the market as well as seeing all of our wonderful customers, some from as far away as Ireland :)

I could talk "soap" all day but I won't bore you to tears! So be sure to come on down to the Hillsdale County Farmers Market on Saturday from 8am-120pm every Saturday and get some of the highest quality soaps. lotions and handcrafted jewelry you can get locally!

We look forward to this market season and seeing all of you.