Meet Karen Joyner of OkraGirl and Mountain Man in Rydal (North Central)

Today we’d like to introduce you to Karen Joyner.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Karen. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My interest in soap making started a long time ago. Out exploring as a child, I found a big old black cast iron pot stored under my grandmother’s house. It had been passed down in the family for generations. When I asked her about it, my grandmother told me how it had been used when she was a child – to wash the clothes, slaughter the pigs, and to render the fat from the pigs and wild game for tallow to make soap and candles. I guess I had more than my share of whimsical imagination. In the retelling of these things, I became fascinated with a way of life that happened before I was even born.

I wasn’t interested in just making soap. I was interested in rendering the tallow, making my own lye water, stepping back in time to experience a way of life the women in my family had known. And, my own failed experiments with creating and using the lye water showed me just that.

Then, one day, I was at Ladd’s Farm Supply buying lye to make a batch of soap for myself. A conversation struck up and ended with “you can set up a basket of soap by the cash register if you’d like to try to sell it.” Then, it hit me!!!! If I sell soap, I can have the pleasure of making more and more and more, which eventually turned into those now glorious days in the soap shed.

How to sell more soap was the question that drew me into a full-fledged company. I started off selling wholesale with Ladd’s, but wouldn’t the profit be higher if I were to sell retail at festivals? I signed up to have a booth at a festival to find out. I immediately found true love when I participated in Booth Museum’s Cowboy Festival with my Mountain Man. dressed in our pioneering costumes, talking to the students on field trips about by-gone days.

I also found out that true love was a lot of work!! Plus, after booth fees and time spent manning the booth instead of making soap, the profit was much the same as selling wholesale. I determined that concentrating efforts to pursue retail locations to carry the products would be a better use of time! I wasn’t ready to give up on festivals though. I signed up to have booths at 5 local festivals, with a twist to the normal notion of selling at a festival. I sold products, but I started treating the festivals as an avenue to promote sales year-round. I passed out a ton of free samples along with the names of retail shops that carried the products to grow brand recognition. With sales increasing in the retail shops that carried the products I was able to do the thing I like best – make soap. It was a win-win!

The story behind its name – Once upon a time, I was a city girl looking for her country girl roots. Every year, I’d plant a garden and harvest barely enough for a bowl of soup. Needless to say, the quest wasn’t going all that well, but I never gave up. I just knew there was a country girl lurking inside somewhere! Then, I planted Okra. Oh my goodness!!!!! It actually GREW!!! Everyone in the world heard about it from the moment it sprouted until the time I had to bend the stalks to pick it. That’s when I became OkraGirl. Sad to say, but I apparently have not completely found my country girl roots, though. My Mountain Man says if I had I would be Ok(rie)Girl instead of Ok(rah)Girl!

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Heavens, no, it hasn’t been a smooth ride! And, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s not the good vacations that have the best memories. It’s the ones where everything went wrong and yet challenges were met and were survived. Being OkraGirl exceeded any strategic board game I ever played as a child, with plenty of thought needed for determining where to go and how to get there.

Right off the bat, I recognized the biggest issue I faced and charged ahead anyway. I set up a shop on ETSY and sat back and waited for the orders to start pouring in. I knew they would. It was simply a matter of time. I had the very best bar of soap on the market; I had a cute little OkraGirl label; and, the fragrances I’d selected were divine!!! Well, when it turned out that the orders didn’t just flow in, I decided I might need to check out the competition (obviously something I should have done first.). I put “Handmade Soap” in the ETSY search engine and came up with 16,000 astounding results, And, even more, shocking, the beautiful bars of soap listed made mine look downright homely!

Now that’s the kind of challenge that can make a girl’s eyes light up! It was very obvious that if I wanted to sell soap, I was going to have to SELL soap. No one on the planet would ever find me on ETSY unless I gave them a reason to look. It wouldn’t matter if I had the very best bar of soap in the world if no one ever had a chance to try it. It was clear to me that the only competition I had was myself.

I also had to see my product for what it was – a homely little bar of soap. As the saying goes, you can’t make a purse from a sow’s ear – well, neither can you sell a homely soap as a thing of beauty. So, instead of thinking of those beautiful bars of soap as competition, I mentally declared that they were not. I started going into retail shops, explaining that my soap hit a different retail market than the beautiful bars. Instead of turning me down, they started giving me a shot. Lo and behold, that homely little bar started outselling its beautiful cousins.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about OkraGirl and Mountain Man – what should we know?
Everywhere you look these days, there’s handmade soap, but I seriously doubt very many others can say they put as much love and effort into as I do. I also have soap made from plant oil, but for the tallow bars, I buy the beef fat from a local farmer and render it myself to make the tallow.  And, like my ancestors before me, I also use the fat from the wild game my Mountain Man brings home.

In 2011, I married my Mountain Man and finally found my country girl roots. Since we met, we’ve been climbing mountains and hiking down dusty dirt roads. In our explorations, we’ve found beauty beyond measure! I don’t go anywhere without a few Ziploc bags or a bucket, because wherever we are something always catches my eye, whether it’s a half-eaten hickory nut or some Wild Mountain Mint.

I use some of the things that follow us home in those ziplock bags in the products I make. Soap bars may contain wild mountain mint, lavender, bee balm, roses, blackberry seeds, wild red sumac, etc. – all collected from hikes or my own backyard, gathered, dried, and ground by my own hands. The bars come by color naturally, for example, green from comfrey-infused olive oil, reddish from Georgia Red Clay, and tan from goat’s milk – hand-squeezed in Social Circle, Georgia! I am so thrilled to have found a way to share some of the beauty we’ve found. I may not know you, but I thought of you and what you might enjoy as I was making the soap.

The company name is OkraGirl and Mountain Man. So obviously I have a Mountain Man. This is a man who started out life as a country boy, but found his city boy roots in his career as an aerospace engineer.   Let me tell you this – every OkraGirl needs one of these!  There isn’t a problem he can’t solve.  One of the earlier issues was cutting the bars of soap evenly.  He took the metal arm off of a hanging file folder, a rectangle of leftover countertop laminate, and a scrap of wood and the next thing I knew, I had myself a soap cutter complete with guide.  He can build absolutely anything out of absolutely nothing!  But, it’s the country boy side of him thathelps gather those little extras I add to the products and he makes the antler buttons for the men’s beard kit and on the pioneer long skirts I also make. Recently, he cut and branded OkraGirl on wooden medallions used on the Soy Candles. He also takes care of building very attractive displays for retail customers. He’s in the process of building work tables and shelving for a new work area. He loves me. 😊

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ETSY.com/Shop/GeorgiaOkraGirl
• Phone: 404-906-8753
• Email: Karen.OkraGirl@Yahoo.com
• Facebook: www.Facebook.com/Karen.OkraGirl

Image Credit:
Ray Edwards

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