When Jennifer Ridgway returned to her native Prince Edward Island from British Columbia in September 1995, she planned to stay for the fall and winter while plotting her next move. She had been working in Clayoquot Sound as a sea kayak guide, living in a float house and on a boat. But the 27-year-old was feeling the strain of her lifestyle.
The owner of PEI’s Moonsnail Soapworks comes clean about timing and luck, and the Island’s natural allure.
When Jennifer Ridgway returned to her native Prince Edward Island from British Columbia in September 1995, she planned to stay for the fall and winter while plotting her next move. She had been working in Clayoquot Sound as a sea kayak guide, living in a float house and on a boat. But the 27-year-old was feeling the strain of her lifestyle.
The Victoria, PEI, native had lived in Switzerland and worked in India with Canada World Youth before attending the University of British Columbia for a year, then living on Vancouver Island.
The art of making soap
At Moonsnail Soapworks, in Charlottetown, soapmaking is a labour of love. The process begins with olive, coconut and palm oils being warmed on low heat in a stainless steel pot. Meanwhile, sodium hydroxide is dissolved in distilled water, creating lye (in your grandmother’s day, this was accomplished by filtering rainwater through a barrel of wood ashes).
The two base pots are then carefully mixed, and constantly stirred for an hour as the soap becomes thicker and more opaque. When the consistency is right, the pure essential oils, ground spices, botanicals and other ingredients are added quickly, and the soap is poured into molds.
Well-covered, they’re left for 48 hours before the molds are broken open. The large blocks sit for two days and are then cut into smaller blocks with specially designed wire cutters, made with guitar strings. Each block is then cut into soap “stacks” and, after curing for another week, into eight 90-gram bars. Each block yields 144 bars.
To ensure a long shelf life, the bars are then cured for a minimum of another two months, sitting in a ventilated rack.
The final step? Hand wrapping each bar in a paper label.
Much of this falls to Angela Russell, who joined Moonsnail as production manager-soapmaker 19 months ago. She and Leigh Elliott, who handles mail-order and front-of-house sales, are the company’s full-time employees, alongside owner Jennifer Ridgway.
Now a proud soapwright, Angela particularly loves making the Sea Buckthorn products. Like all Moonsnail’s salves, it requires beeswax, a natural protectant and thickener.
“The scent of raw beeswax is one of the purest things in the world,” says Angela. “Pouring the oils into their pots is an amazing aspect of the process—the colours change from a translucent orange oil into a beautifully hued golden yellow that is so vibrant and calming.”
Now, she was ready to put down roots. “I wanted to settle down and gather things and people around me,” she says, adding that she was tired of cooking on a two-burner propane stove. She had come home to family, and to an Island she discovered had blossomed artistically and culturally.
She’d brought with her some herbal oils that she had prepared while living in the bush. Not long after her arrival, she picked up a book about handcrafted, vegetable-based soaps that used no animal products.
She set to work making use of both.
Her first batch of soaps went to friends and family members as Christmas gifts. “They went over really well,” Jennifer, now 44, recalls.
Leaps and bounds
Within months, Jennifer had created eight soap lines, as well as some massage and bath oils, and was selling them at the Charlottetown farmers’ market under the brand name Moonsnail Soapworks.
Her father—a woodworker originally from Australia—helped her make soap molds and build tables to house her wares at the market.
She designed a logo, selecting the moonsnail, a mollusk common to both her home overlooking the Northumberland Strait and on Vancouver Island, where she often found herself discussing the spiral-shelled creatures with kayakers.
“It seemed like a nice icon, and Moonsnail and Soapworks both have eight letters, so it’s very balanced,” she says. “I didn’t think too deeply about it… I certainly wasn’t planning a lifetime career as a soapmaker.”
As Jennifer recalls, she was one of the first farmers’ market vendors in PEI to sell natural soap, embarking on her venture just as people were becoming more savvy about natural products.
“People were starting to realize that it’s better to have only five ingredients and to know exactly what they are,” she muses. Moonsnail uses a simple paper soap label, glass and recyclable plastic, and bags made from wood-fiber biodegradable cellophane.
Positive reviews about Moonsnail’s products spread early and quickly as Jennifer attended craft fairs. Soon, out-of-province visitors were clamouring to receive products by mail. By the second summer, Jennifer’s brother, Greg, had joined the business.
They rented an empty general store with a small storefront in rural Caledonia as a production space for more than two years. By then, both were married and expecting babies, and Moonsnail was doing a booming wholesale and mail-order business.
In January 1999, with babies in backpacks—Jennifer’s son, Sacha, is now 12—they set up a retail space in Charlottetown, adjacent to the larger space the company now occupies. Both of their spouses joined the business and in 2001 they relocated to their current emporium.
Eventually, they found that sustaining a staff of four was too much of a financial strain, so Greg and his wife left for other pursuits. In 2004, Jennifer and her husband divorced, although he stayed with the company for another four years.
Flying solo once again, Jennifer decided to renovate, moving the production area to the back of the store, and nearly doubling the store’s size. Now, 15 years later, she has a bright, roomy production studio and retail store in Charlottetown’s historic waterfront district. Customers can be found throughout the store chatting with employees, or touring the fragrant production area, with its natural light and hardwood floors.
That’s the ambiance the owner and her team work hard to maintain.
Business savvy
Moonsnail currently makes between 25,000 and 30,000 bars of hand-cut soap annually in about 18 varieties—Red Clay & Kelp, Spearmint Swirl and Lavender & Aloe among them. It has another 40 products, including a sea buckthorn line for inflammatory skin conditions, a men’s grooming line and natural baby- and pet-care products.
Most of the products are sold at the Moonsnail retail location; some are sold through other stores, like P’lovers and Little Mysteries in Halifax, and The Dunes in Brackley Beach, PEI. They can also be ordered online, and orders come from all over the world. In the summer Jennifer employs four full- and two part-time staff; the staff complement shrinks off-season.
She realizes that she’s been lucky: “Looking back, it’s really shocking that those first batches of soap turned out perfectly… when I started to need larger batches, I realized that the recipes didn’t always work, and I learned by doing.”
But Jennifer was also smart.
In the first six months, she used her small savings to cover costs, and put her profit—minus a living allowance—back into the business. When demand increased, she got a $2,000 loan from the province to pay for additional raw materials and packaging.
“The business pretty well pays for itself, although PEI has a winter production loan of up to $10,000 that I have taken advantage of every year,” Jennifer says. The program helps craftspeople produce their wares in the off-season so they can sell during the tourist peak, then repay the loan.
Maintaining balance
“I try to create products that represent Prince Edward Island,” she says. “They are natural products made from natural ingredients, nothing too complicated, which kind of fits our lifestyle here. It is pastoral here, it is natural and uncomplicated—it’s not like some big branding scheme.”
And while delegating production duties to others so she can focus on the business side has been a personal challenge for Jennifer, her staff toil tirelessly to retain her original values: everything is handmade in small batches, with the finest natural ingredients—no preservatives, dyes or artificial fragrances, just pure essential oils sourced locally and from around the world.
Jennifer hasn’t taken part in a consumer show or farmers’ market for the past four or five years, although she highly recommends the practice for entrepreneurs who are starting out.
“It motivated me to bring my product line up a notch—you know how we all really work better under a deadline? It gave me incredible deadlines to maybe pull up three new products, change a label. And it gave me tons of feedback, which you don’t always get when you’re a craftsperson working away. Without that, I don’t know where my business would have gone. It was really good, positive pressure to move it forward and keep it cohesive.”
Today, Jennifer’s drive comes from within, and again, it’s uncomplicated.
“I’m very big on work-life balance. I’m a person before I’m the face of Moonsnail,” she says. “I want to keep coming up with new and better products, use some cool new ingredients that have great potential for skin healing, take advantage of all of these great things Mother Nature has to offer.
“I want to work hard, be proud of what I do, and know that the people who work with me feel like they’re part of a team. We’re here because the quality of life is crucial and important and being happy is crucial and important.”
In the next five years, Jennifer says she’d like to maximize her mail-order business, streamline production systems, and see more traffic at her store.
But she feels no need to open more locations, which would then require “a production space in a warehouse in an industrial park with 10 employees wearing hairnets and a manager and a production head. And then there’s always a fire simmering somewhere that might need to be put out later that night—you can never really put down your extinguisher.
“That’s not the life I want,” she says. “I want to go home at the end of the day and sit on my deck and read a novel.”
Understandable, perhaps, given that her deck might not be far from PEI’s iconic red shores—where passion and relaxation can be fuelled in equal measure.