BERLIN – A few years ago, Jon Conley’s wife asked him to try making her some laundry soap.
A few weeks later, she asked him to try bath soap. Within months, he was selling it at farmer’s markets throughout the region. Now he’s taken it a step farther. On May 1, Conley opened Uncle Jon’s Soaps in downtown Berlin.
“I decided it was time to try it,” he said. “It was an opportunity I didn’t think I could pass up.”
Conley opened his shop on William Street, in the former location of Bungalow Love, which has now moved to Main Street. Conley believes the unique shop, which features soaps as well as other handmade products like beard balm, is the perfect fit for Berlin.
“Nobody does what I do down there,” said Conley, who lives in Salisbury. “A few stores carry soaps but we make it right there. And people like it when they know the person a product is coming from.”
Conley said what started with a simple request from his wife, who at the time was interested in using more natural products, turned into a business rather quickly. Though he’d never made soap before, when she asked him to try it he did some research. As his soaps feature only a handful of ingredients, it wasn’t hard to get the hang of it.
“Then I learned how to make it my own,” he said. “People started wanting to try it and buy it.”
According to Conley the soap making process is relatively simple. He takes vegetable oils — usually olive oil, coconut oil or soy wax — and warms them. He then adds lye that’s been dissolved in water. It’s eventually poured into molds and cut up.
“It’s a true old-fashioned soap,” he said, adding that there were no more than four to six ingredients in any bar of soap he made.
His soaps, which are made in small, well-controlled batches, are quite different from the soaps consumers buy at the supermarket.
“Most store-bought soaps aren’t soap they’re a detergent bar,” he said. “There are a lot of unnecessary chemicals that go into it.”
Though Conley has spent the past few years making his soaps at home, now that he has the shop he’s making them there. Popular products this year are his cotton blossom soap and his honey oat soap.
As he’s become more and more adept at soap making, Conley has also started to experiment with other products. He can make body scrubs as well as beard balm and beard oil, both rather unusual products. He said he started making the beard products after a couple friends asked him to try it.
“I developed it for them and then I grew a beard. I had to be able to try it,” he joked.
He’s happy enough with the products that a year later he’s still got a beard.
“Now it’s kind of part of Uncle Jon,” he said.
Conley says the beard oil is a conditioner to keep the beard from drying out while the balm does the same but is made with beeswax.
“The beard products have really taken off,” he said. “It’s something you don’t see a lot of.”
Conley says he plans to cut back on the number of farmer’s markets he attends now that he’s got a store to run. He will, however, continue to sell his products at Salisbury’s Third Friday events.
Uncle Jon’s Soaps is open in Berlin Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information call 443-783-1829.