The soap maker on the bright yellow bike, by Tom Bamforth
An original contemporary local newspaper article.
If you live in Kestwick and hear a bell ring outside your front door on a Saturday morning, it is probably not the postman. It is Josie Marchant, seventeen years old, pedalling a bright yellow cargo bike loaded with ninety bars of handmade soap, each one wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
Josie began making soap during a school summer holiday two years ago, when, by her own account, she was ‘bored out of my mind and slightly obsessed with videos of people cutting soap’. Her first batch, she admits, ‘could have been used to strip paint’. Her second was not much better. By the twentieth, her neighbours were asking if they could buy some.
Today her business, Suds on Wheels, has 140 regular customers, two part-time employees (both school friends) and a waiting list that she is, in her words, ‘embarrassed about’. She makes soap two evenings a week, in safety goggles and gloves, in the kitchen of St Columba’s church hall, which she rents for twelve pounds a session. Every bar must dry on wooden racks for six weeks before it can be sold, so she plans her stock two months ahead, ‘like a farmer, but with lavender’.
Running a business at seventeen means learning fast. Josie taught herself to keep accounts from a library book, worked out her prices on the back of a maths worksheet and negotiated a discount on oils with a supplier forty miles away by phoning them every week until, she says, ‘they gave in just to get rid of me’. When the bike’s chain snapped on her second ever delivery round, she carried the last eleven orders door to door in a laundry basket.
The bike itself is a symbol of how she does things. She bought it second-hand with £300 saved from a café job, painted it herself and fitted a wooden crate built by her grandfather. ‘A van would be quicker,’ she says, ‘but I can’t drive yet, and anyway, people like the bell.’
Her customers certainly do. Retired teacher Alan Pryor, who has had an order delivered every month for eighteen months, calls her ‘the most organised person I have ever met, and I taught for thirty-five years’. Another customer, Dee Hamid, says simply: ‘Her soap is better than anything in the shops, and she always asks after my dog.’
None of this has come at the expense of school. Josie is studying for A levels in chemistry, business and French, and insists that soap making helps. ‘Soap is basically chemistry you can wash with,’ she grins. On Saturdays her alarm goes off at six so she can pack the bike before her round. ‘My friends think I’m mad. Maybe I am. But I’ve never been happier.’
What next? Josie has been offered a stall at the town’s monthly market and is saving for a second bike. She has also, quietly, started giving her misshapen bars to the hygiene bank at the community centre every month. When I ask her about it, she looks almost annoyed to be asked. ‘It’s just soap,’ she says. Then she rings her bell and is gone.
Josie Marchant is described as a remarkable young entrepreneur. How does the writer try to show this?
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