Suds for sale: New West soap business officially launches

It’s a chilly, cool, and gray day along Front Street, but opening the door and entering Arrieta Art Studio in the city’s downtown core, there’s never any shortage of colour.

But if you close your eyes and take a deep breath—through your nose, of course— perhaps you’ll catch notes of lavender, eucalyptus, lemon, and grapefruit wafting through the air.

Some of those scents are a relatively new edition, with the owner of Lola’s Soap, Pat Wood, moving into the space just a few months ago. Wood uses a handful of ingredients to produce her creations: ghee, olive oil, distilled water, soap, and essential oils.

She’s busy—but very excited—to celebrate the fruits of her labour with a launch party at the studio on Saturday, March 4, and she tells The Anchor she can’t believe the journey she’s been on thanks to dozens upon dozens of bars of soap—a journey that also intersects with her fight against cancer.

“I went through chemotherapy and radiation, and in the process I had a lot of dry skin. It was so itchy and, no matter what lotion or medication the doctor gave me, it didn’t work,” she tells The Anchor, adding that she was diagnosed with cancer in January of 2021; four months later she was in for major surgery in a bid to get rid of it. “I had to keep going back and asking for other prescriptions. It was difficult.”

On a whim, one of Wood’s two daughters encouraged her to go on a farmers market trip to Sechelt to see if there was anything that might be worth trying.

“We found a soap, it was natural soap, so I bought some. I immediately found it helped a lot with the hydration of my skin, and the itchiness went away.”

Wood was required to take time away from her full-time job as she was recovering—she’s an outreach worker with a Metro Vancouver transition home—but was beginning to get bored during recovery. Reflecting on her experience at the farmers market, she says her curiosity for soap making began to bubble.

“I started reading about making homemade soap, and I started getting some recipes for it, experimenting—there’s a lot of trial and error! But I kept persevering until I found a recipe that really works for me,” says Wood.

As she’d make soap, she’d find herself with extra bars, so she began sharing them with friends, family, and co-workers. It eventually got to the point where Wood couldn’t keep up: the soap would leave her home so fast, it sometimes hadn’t finished minimum ripening, and she’d have to remind folks to wait until it was ready before using it. After much convincing by her daughters and other relatives, she began to sell it.

“I’m starting to get orders from other cities: Toronto, I’m shipping some to … a relative in New York … people come back and say, ‘I’m not going to use anything else.’”

Wood chose to call it Lola’s Soap after her daughter suggested the name: “lola” means “grandmother” in Filipino/Tagalog. Wood, who is also a grandmother to two boys, thought it would be a great nod to her heritage, as well as the “old school” way of making soap.

With Wood spending years helping people through her work at the transition house, she realized that making and sharing her soap was another form of helping. Tapping into this desire, she noticed that creating dozens of bars of soap out of her Surrey condo could get tricky.

While she still makes the bars at home, she brings them to Arrieta to ripen, then package. As Wood takes me into the space she shares with one of her daughters, I see dozens of brightly coloured bars packed up and ready to go. Some sit in simple—yet beautiful—wooden boxes, while others are arranged carefully in heart-shaped ceramic bowls.

I ask her what her favourite part about the soap-making process is, and her eyes immediately light up with pure joy.

“The cutting!” she says with a laugh. “I love the cutting! You never know what pattern will come out! You open it, and no soap is ever the same.”

It takes approximately a month for Wood’s soap-making process, start to finish. “I prefer it to be six weeks before I start selling it, but some buyers really can’t wait,” explains Wood, adding that, in some cases, she needs to put a “please don’t use” until date on some of the bars she sells. “Instead of a ‘best before date,’” she jokes.

While she’s smiling now, she looks back bittersweetly on her cancer journey, reminiscing on all the battles that happened before she got to where she is today. “I’m in remission … but I want people to know that once you [think something is wrong with you], you can’t wait around. You don’t know sometimes if it’s going to be aggressive or not,” she says, adding that at one point after her doctor made the referral for a scan, no one actually called her back to book her an appointment.

“It’s a good thing I advocated for myself, a good thing I did that … and look. Now I’m doing this! Soap!”

The Lola’s Soap event is happening on Saturday, March 4 from 1 to 4pm. It includes complimentary soap samples, and refreshments will also be served. Wood hopes people will come down to the studio—at 707 Front St.—for some mingling and a good time. There will also be an opportunity to win prizes via raffle for those who make a purchase.

In the meantime, be sure to follow Lola’s Soap on Instagram—and be sure to bookmark the company’s website, which as of deadline is still in the throes of being built for its launch day—also slated for Saturday, March 4.