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In the beginning.......

It all started at home

In 2006, our daughter was struggling with eczema, and it made us look much more closely at what we were putting on our family's skin.

I started reading ingredient labels, researching natural skincare and eventually began making soap in our kitchen — initially just as a hobby.

Family and friends started trying our soaps, and before long, people were asking for more. There was soon rather a lot of soap in our house!

From Kitchen to Craft Fairs......

To a Small Business

I started making different varieties, experimenting with scents, natural colours and botanicals, and giving bars to friends and family to try. Their feedback and encouragement gave me the confidence to take the next step.

We began taking our soaps to local craft fairs and events, where we could meet customers face-to-face and see their reactions to the products we'd been making at home. Little by little, orders started coming in and the hobby began to take on a life of its own.

What started in our kitchen gradually became a small family business. There wasn't a grand plan behind it — just a love of making soap, people who liked what we made, and a growing feeling that perhaps we were onto something.

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THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE SOAP.....

Still very much a family affair!

I'm Keilly, and this is my husband Dan. Together, we run Mad About Nature — a small family-run business based in Leicester.

After those early years of making soap and taking it to craft fairs, I began looking more seriously at what was involved in turning my hobby into a proper business. I learned about the regulations around selling handmade soap, continued developing new recipes and slowly built up our range of natural soaps and skincare.

In 2020, Dan left his career to join me at Mad About Nature full time. Since then, we've been working together, each bringing our own skills to the business while sharing the same aim: to make good quality products using ingredients we believe in, and to take care with every batch.

Today, I make our soaps, skincare and other natural goodies in our home workshop in Leicester, while Dan works from his own workshop, which we built in 2020, where our products are packed and sent out to customers.

Over the years, we've been lucky enough to supply independent shops, the National Trust and previously the Woodland Trust. We're incredibly proud of how far our little business has come — but we're still very much a family business - and we still love making soap. 🌿

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Traditional soapmaking
Ingredients we believe in
Made by us
Kind to the environment

Traditional soapmaking

Made the traditional way

We make our soaps using the traditional cold-process method, just as handmade soap has been made for generations. Our carefully chosen oils are blended with lye and allowed to naturally transform into soap over time, rather than using a pre-made soap base.

One of the things we love about this method is that it naturally creates glycerine, a wonderful by-product of the soapmaking process which remains in our finished bars. We don't remove it or replace it with anything else — it's simply part of the soap we make.

It's a slower way of making soap, but we think some things are worth taking the time over.

Ingredients we believe in

Simple, carefully chosen ingredients

We believe you don't need a long list of complicated ingredients to make lovely skincare. Our soaps are made using carefully chosen natural oils, pure essential oils, botanicals, clays and other ingredients that have a genuine purpose.

We don't use palm oil, SLS, EDTA or parabens, and we avoid adding unnecessary ingredients simply to change the colour, texture or appearance of our products. Natural botanicals, clays, herbs and flowers often provide the beautiful colours and character you see in our soaps.

We like knowing what goes into our products — and we're happy for you to know too.

Made by us

Small batches, made in Leicester

Every bar of soap starts life in one of our home workshops in Leicester. We make our soaps and skincare ourselves, in small batches, rather than mass producing them, which means we can take care over each batch from mixing and pouring through to cutting, curing and finally packing.

It's also one of the things we love most about being a small family business. We know what we're making, where it's being made and what goes into it — and we're still hands-on with the whole process.

There might be a few more soap bars around our house than most people would consider normal, but we wouldn't have it any other way!

Kind to the environment


Less waste, less packaging

We've always tried to keep the environmental impact of what we do as small as possible. We keep our packaging to a minimum and choose recyclable, reusable or compostable materials wherever we can, rather than wrapping our products in layers of unnecessary packaging.

We also try to make the most of what we already have — reusing boxes and packing materials where possible, recycling what we can't reuse and composting where we can. Being a small business means we can't always get everything perfect, but we believe that making thoughtful choices wherever we can is better than doing nothing.

For us, being kind to the environment is about lots of small choices that add up. 🌿

Timeline

2006
The early years
2020
Today