Soap Symposium

Those leaves definitely aren't what you think they are.

For this project, we had to create a soap product considering potential ingredients (in terms of costs and qualities), and we would also present it to a large audience. My group tried to go for a cheap and environmentally friendly focus, as a way to set our soap apart. To pull this off, we chose relatively cheap materials that had good properties associated with them. The final soap had good properties (smell, feel, cleansing), and was cheap enough to be potentially mass produced.

Steps

Soap Formulation

To make our soap, we first had to agree on the ingredients. We settled on a mix of coconut, olive, and grapeseed oil as these were the most cost effective oils available. We also decided to add a pinch of citronella oil to add a stronger scent, and add an originally unintended effect to the soap as an insect repellent. Food coloring drops were also used to enhance the soap visually. In terms of price, our product had a calculated 130% profit margin per unit sold, making it easily profitable.

Advertising

Once we saw our soap bars, the next step was to prepare the advertising material.

A close-up of the soap.

Advertising posters with all the necessary facts, including a cost breakdown on the first page as well as why we chose our ingredients.

Conclusions

Did it work? At the symposium, we got a decent amount of people over to our stand, and answered a lot of questions to clear anything up.

What could've made this better? Our soap forumation was done in a single meeting, so we definitely didn't analyze ALL possible solutions and potentially miss out on better ideas. The posters also could've been done to be more visually appealing in overall design, I would start with removing the unnecessary gradients and making sure the text is more readable.