Community Highlights: Meet Baz Morris of Dirty Unicorn

Today we’d like to introduce you to Baz Morris.

Hi Baz, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
The Dirty Unicorn is pandemic pivot for me. Pre-COViD, I was a full-time travel agent and over the course of a single weekend, I lost a hundred thousand in revenue. Coupled with the major uncertainty of when the travel industry would begin to recover and what it might look like this forced me to reevaluate my career path. I stumbled into an online tutorial for soap making and decided to give it shot out of complete boredom. I immediately fell in love with everything about the process from the chemistry to the artistry and knew immediately that it would be, at minimum, a new hobby to help bide time until travel returned. Roughly a week later, I had thirty pounds of soap curing across every flat surface in the house and realized that I either had a really, really bad addiction or a new business!

I stumbled into MADE Mercantile in Downtown Woodstock during a walk and knew immediately that the Unicorn had found a home. For one, it’s an amazing creative space with great energy and a storefront, but also I badly needed to move my production space out of my house. A few months later, I was scouted for and cast in a new crafting competition show (Meet Your Makers Showdown, steaming now only on discovery+) for my skills in making beautiful soap art. The exposure from both venues have been a huge boon to the business to the point that I was able to hire my husband away from an industry that was rapidly burning him out a few months later.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I picked probably one of the worst times to launch a company like this. Raw materials and packaging were incredibly difficult to acquire and shipping times were extensive from most suppliers in the beginning and our popularity was exploding so not only keeping up with base level production but trying to figure out how to scale up a handcrafted business was incredibly difficult for the first several months.

We’ve been impressed with Dirty Unicorn, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Dirty Unicorn is a hand-crafted personal care/lifestyle brand that encourages people to be themselves while indulging in self-care. Our core products include artfully created bar soap, a full beard care line in our signature fragrances, a “nudist” line for those who want smaller ingredient lists and to avoid fragrancing, and of course the best selling Soapy Scrubbie. The Scrubbie is a polishing bath sponge infused with a hydrating goat’s milk glycerin soap in a variety of incredible fragrances. Our people are obsessed with these things!

What sets us apart from others in the industry most is a mixture of a couple of things. My Husbicorn and I both have incredibly diverse backgrounds and skillsets. He is an Army Veteran that became a chef and part-time carpenter and I’ve been a graphic designer, escape room creator, restaurateur, and travel agent. This wide variety of skills is not only where the “Unicorn” part of our name comes from but also gives us a very unique point of view and voice within the industry since we are constantly pulling from this relatively huge toolbox of experiences. The second thing is that we genuinely care about people as individuals and you can find us frequently making customs and one-off versions of our products (and sometimes even formulating new products on the fly) to meet someone’s needs.

We are not only your destination for hand-crafted products with flair and personality, we are educators as well and offer classes in our studio space or yours. Whether you’re looking for a fun night out sipping champagne while learning to make your own personalized Soapy Scrubbie or a two weekend intensive traditional soap making bootcamp, you’re going to have a great time with the Unicorns!

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Two things:

1) We have wholesale and white label programs. Let us help you build your dreams!

2) Never forget: Get Clean… Stay Dirty!

Contact Info:

• Email: baz@dirtyunicorn.fun
• Website: https://www.dirtyunicorn.fun
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dirtyunicorn.fun