Over the past year, the meixu.com team has spoken to over 400 women business owners. From skincare lines designed for women undergoing chemotherapy, to a cat DNA testing kit, we’ve heard so many different stories! This week, we are highlighting female-founded startup, SoaPen.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Shubham Issar, co-founder of SoaPen, a toxic free and fun alternative for kid’s hand washing. In this week's blog, we uncover the story behind SoaPen and the challenges and successes for this women-owned business!
Read our interview below!
CH: What is the story behind SoaPen?
SI: My co-founder and I met while studying at the Parsons School of Design in New York. As industrial designers, we both connected on a few school projects and continued our studies. When we graduated college, we wanted to enter the social intervention sphere.
UNICEF Wearables for Good Challenge called for designers to help people in developing nations and highlighted several problems they were facing, one of them being infant mortality rates. Children under the age of 5 die of infectious diseases that can be avoided by washing hands with soap.
In some underserved areas, soap was rationed and only a small amount was available since it was a donated commodity. We visited these communities and saw that soap dispensers were wasting lots of soap which was already a precious commodity. We wanted to create something fun for kids to wash their hands with, and easier for hand washing. We created SoaPen because it does not waste soap and kids can draw on their hands with the soap- making it fun!
CH: What were some early challenges for your business?
SI: Finding the right Research & Development partners. We struggled finding the connections for the right partner.
CH: How have you gone about marketing your product? Influencers, Digital Ads?
SI: SoaPen was featured in Real Simple Magazine back in late 2019. That was a big success and since then we have done facebook ads and amazon ads but never really hit it on the nail.
CH: Are you selling your product in schools?
SI: We’re starting to sell to schools in the US but realized schools have long buying cycles because they purchase at one point in the year and that is it. Initially our energy was focused on pitching to schools and we have found some success but schools haven't really been most successful.
CH: What are some of the challenges you are facing today?
SI: Marketing and targeting the right person. Getting those recurring customers are a lot of effort.
CH: Are you in any retail stores?
SI: 100 plus boutique stores across the country. Selling wholesale for the past 6 months. We’ve been on a few platforms and have received great feedback. Having our product in these smaller stores has helped us, there is some real honest feedback.
CH: What is your dream retail store where you would love to see your products selling in?
SI: Target and Walmart!
CH: Do you have any competitors? Anyone else with a similar product?
SI: We have a pretty unique placement still there are a lot of innovative fun kids soap that are on the market. Lots of branded soaps with Disney characters so brand recognition is competitive.
CH: Do you listen to any business podcasts or a favorite inspirational book?
SI: How I Built This - NPR. My favorite one is Mei Xu’s episode.
There really are a lack of mentors in terms of immigrant founders. It’s inspiring to see an immigrant founder.
CH: Thank you again for your time!
Interested in learning more about SoaPen? Check our their website here: https://soapen.com/!