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| BELLEVUE - Rose Gilb swears Nancy Howes is the best advertisement for her Bubble Shop products. |
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| "Her skin is a perfect reference for her soap," said Gilb, who works at National City Bank near the Bubble Shop's Fairfield Avenue spot. |
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| Joseph Miller of Northside uses Bubble Shop soap for shaving. |
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| "I've never had anything make a razor glide this easily over my face," Miller said. |
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| Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wendy Collins of Murray, Ky. discovered Howes' soaps at the General Store in Rabbit Hash, long before the Bubble Shop opened in Bellevue. |
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| "I called Nancy at home and she started shipping to me," said Collins, who later became the Bubble Shop's first customer. |
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| Collins said her skin feels "wonderful" after using Howes' soap, and "the slight scent stays with you." |
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| A Dayton, Ky., native, Howes opened her store in historic downtown Bellevue in May 2004 after years of making soap as a hobby at her home in Anderson Township. She started out - and continues - selling soap wholesale to a handful of businesses and at craft fairs and events, which is how most handmade soap makers do business, according to Marie Chandler Gale, president of the Handcrafted Soap Makers Guild Inc., of Birmingham, Ala. The guild has more than 700 members. |
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| "Quite a few sell wholesale, but these accounts are small - not to the Wal-Marts but to local gift stores," Gale said. |
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| The majority of Howes' sales now are conducted at the Bubble Shop, where she makes about 300 bars of soap a week - sometimes more, sometimes less. She also makes other toiletries on an as-needed basis, such as lip balm, milk bath and lotion. |
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| She said she makes small batches - 42 bars at a time - so she can control the quality. |
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| "It is extremely gratifying to see a beautiful product come out of the mold that you've put your personal mark on," she said. |
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| Howes makes her soap on site from mostly natural ingredients, including food-grade vegetable oils and a "pinch of silk for that extra layer of smoothness." |
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| The business ebbs and flows, but Howes said she enjoys the work and is happy to be a small business in a quaint shop. |
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| "I can go for a few days sometimes with no customers at all, then bam! all of a sudden - thank God for the bams," Howes said. |
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| At prices ranging from $4.50 (for a bar of soap) to $35 (for a gift collection), Howes started out selling about $2,000 worth of merchandise monthly. Revenues have slowly increased, she said, but business remains erratic. |
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| Howes' soaps come in a variety of fragrances - including French lilac, green tea, rosehip tea, masculine musk and Bellevue Beach Pear (an exfoliating bar made from the fruit of a pear tree in the store's backyard). |
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| Howes' soap making evolved from an interest in the traditional use of herbs and gardening. |
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| For 10 years in the 1990s, she ran Sanctuary Water Garden in Milford, where she grew water lilies and designed water gardens. Then she moved into making soap with herbs and plants. |
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| "It was more of a curiosity/experimental phase thing that I was going through," she said. "I had no plans of selling." |
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| When National City Bank was robbed this summer, Howes extended a comforting hand to the bank's five female employees by giving each of them some Bubble Shop soap at no charge. |
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| "She runs a really neat business," Gilb said. |
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| E-mail aguido@fuse.net |
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