A Non-remunerated pitch, though a little remuneration would have been nice

For the past several years I’ve been buying outrageously awesome Zum soap from the gals and guys at Indigo Wild. This stuff is beautiful, good for you, smells GREAT, leaves YOU smelling great for hours (like, I’ve had people ask me hours after I showered what perfume I’m wearing. Nope – not perfume, just great-smelling soap!), and comes with a dash of positive juju in every bar. Plus goats milk. And enough glycerin to make large commercial soapers cry hot tears of shame at their rampant detergenting of a nation.

Can you tell I dig this stuff?

Recently, it came to pass that we ran OUT of the outrageously awesome soap, and, for a misguided week or so, had to resort to using ‘Coast,’ which I guess is fine but nothing like the outrageously awesome soap, except that it’s like 1/3rd the price. That is small comfort, as getting clean should be a wholly pleasurable experience, part of which is coming out smelling like a rose (or patchouli, or citrus/sandalwood, or whatever the flavor of the week is) and continuing to smell like one. The Coast scent is a little too ‘gym-y’ and not nearly enough ‘hippie,’ other soaps like Dial and Ivory are also fine, but once you get used to the goat’s milky smelly goodness of the Zum there is no substitute and you, like the addict you are, need to get MOAR!

The price though. Oy! Over 5 DOLLARS for a bar, ONE BAR, of soap! Of course you know why it’s that expensive when you buy it, as goat’s milk can’t be cheap, all those essential oils can’t be cheap, the material required to do large-batch cold saponification can’t be cheap, and all those dyes used to color their soaps can’t be cheap (and they use a LOT of them – so pretty!). Also, I'm guessing that running a soap factory that employs 50 people can't be cheap either. So yeah, a LOT goes into these bars, and it's artisinal, so it's not going to be sold on the Dollar General's shelves. But still - $5.50 a bar is an expense that needs to be rationalized, every dang time we buy.

What to do then, when one is trying to do a little bit of belt-tightening and get-out-of-debtting while NEEDING the outrageously awesome soap?

Buy more of it, of course!

HERE COMES THE MATH-Y PART…

Indigo Wild sells their soaps not just in bars, but in 3-pound bricks and 20-something pound slabs. If you want a LOT of soap of one smell, this is by far the cheaper way to go, ounce for ounce. At retail, a pound of Zum bars goes for something like 28 dollars. A 3-pound brick goes for $66.50, which saves about 5 bucks a pound! A bargain it ain’t, necessarily, but it’s cheaper than buying tons of the same bar for a much higher price.

So, we are now the proud owners of a brick of their sea salt soap, a lovely blue bar with amazing skin-moistening properties and a lovely citrus scent. And because I’d already paid for shipping for this puppy, I also got a grab-bag of a pound of random soap flavors for 16 bucks and a few other bars of personal faves for the regular ‘ouch’ price, because someone here loves sandalwood-citrus a lot and someone loves patchouli a lot; lets guess who is who.

Further rationalization for the Big Buy - It’s all a part of our “Armageddon Buying” plan. We do NOT want to be stinky after the bomb drops, markets crash, debt defaults, grid goes down. Nope - we will be the sweet-smelling destitute folks holed up in our home behind the tinfoiled windows. Priorities, people!

Which reminds me – must purchase a brick of TP, a 12-pack of Sure, and a gallon of toothpaste.

BJ’s, here we come!

Tiff Out.

Gnome to scale.