New soap maker here, have a few questions.
I volunteer at an animal rescue and we are making soap and candles for a fundraiser, and if it goes well it will become a permanent part of our fundraising. Currently we are just doing melt and pour because we don't know how well it will sell but based off what people are saying on the rescue's facebook it will probably do decent.
I want to know what scents of soaps people seem to like, we currently are doing blueberry, chamomile, vanilla, sweet tobacco (it smells better than it sounds,) lavender, and a few more. I have a weird sense of smell so my taste in soap is quite different from normal, so I can't think of any other scents since I keep leaning towards lemony type scents.
I would also like some recipe advice on what oils I should use, if we do start making it using the cold-processing method a few recipes I have seen show like 50% coconut, 25%olive, and 25% canola oil, but I have also seen a few people say that the balance of those oils is wrong?
I would also like to know people's experience with different mold shapes and extra stuff in soap like loofas or oatmeal. We currently have a few different molds: oval, rectangle, square, and a bulk mold for maybe 5lbs of soap in a rectangle. I prefer using the bulk mold, but when we tried putting in vanilla-oatmeal soap it looked like the oatmeal settled at the bottom or floated to the top, leaving the center of the bar with very few bits. Could this just be an issue with using melt and pour where the oatmeal wasn't incorporated into the baste very well?
If we do expand the soap selling beyond our local farmer's market we were thinking about selling it online somehow, either through the rescue's facebook or Etsy, but I think I remember hearing something about Etsy killing off a lot of smaller businesses in favor of larger retailers, can anyone confirm is this is true or am I just making stuff up?