A few weeks ago, my daughter Anna came downstairs with her latest copy of National Geographic for Kids magazine. She was excited - breathless, almost. She totally interrupted the conversation we were having; she had to tell us something right now. Honestly, my first thought was to interrupt her and point out that she was using bad manners, because, really, I was not in the mood to hear about how giraffes sleep or whatever was so pressing. But then she spoke too fast...

"Did you know," she said, "that with fifty cents we could give an entire family in Haiti clean drinking water? Did you know they had an earthquake? Their water doesn't even work!  Can I give them my money? I have all of this."

She handed over $7.50.

"That is water for 15 families.  I want them to have water tonight."

A bee-hive of activity started, which ended up with us promising to match 2-for-1 whatever amount the kids could scrape together and donate it to the charity outlined in the National Geographic. We donated over $60, and the kids were really moved. So were the grown-ups.  Which led to more conversations...

"Can we do something with Nordic Soap?  Can we send them soap"

They do need soap, I thought.  They need so much.

We eventually settled on a plan to pick three soap and three causes - a global cause, a national cause, and a local cause. Anna was adamant about continuing to help Haiti, and wanted our most popular soap - Natural Peppermint Bath Soap - to be for that.  There are so many people trying to do so much for Haiti, that we settled on the organization Hope For Haiti Now because we really liked the music on the CD they made, and it seemed the most direct way to send money.

"I hear a lot of people worried about cancer," piped in Mia, our five year-old. "Pop-pop and Grand-pop both were sick with cancer. Can we help with cancer?" 

We choose the Lance Armstrong Foundation as our National Cause, and selected our Natural Lemongrass Bath Soap as its champion.  Mia liked this choice because the yellow tint of the soap matched the yellow ribbon.

Finally, us grown-ups choose the third cause.  Natural birth is something very important to us; we've been blessed to have midwives assist in the birth of all three of our children, with two of them born at home.  One of our midwives has been begging us for a special soap with vanilla and sandalwood, so we decided to create this new soap - Natural Vanillawood Bath Soap -  and use it to support the Midwives Alliance of Pennsylvania.

And so, with a child's inspired interruption, we set off on a new path.  Join us if you can!

That's not the way it's supposed to look!! 

So it was somewhat of a shock - and an embarrasement - to look at our website late last night on a PC using Internet Explorer and see that it looked TOTALLY different from the way it looks on a Mac using Safari.

Now, I am not an IT professional by any means, but I know a couple of things: ONE is that different web browsers can (and will) display websites differently, and a "good" web designer will make sure that the website looks right on all browsers; TWO is that despite my rabid love of all things Apple, the vast majority of the world uses PCs with Internet Explorer, and I should make sure our website looks right there FIRST.

These are basic rules, both of which I learned years ago, but I completely disregarded!  We are a small, family-run company, so we all have to wear a lot of hats, from making the soap, filling orders, and making sure the website is operational, sales, marketing, etc.  When you have to do so many things at once, sometimes we too easily overlook the basics.

Lesson learned (again), and after a late night and early morning of coding, not our website looks (almost) identical on both Internet Explorer and Safari.  There are a lot of small tweaks I still need to make.  I found this really cool website that will take a screen shot of your website all all the major AND minor web browsers out there... ugh.  After looking at these screenshots, looks like I have a bit more work to do!!

We have big plans here at Nordic Soap, and this blog is just one of the next steps.  As we grow, we are investing in new ways to engage and interact with our friends around the world who continue to support us. This blog is intended to serve as a platform where we can share information about a variety of topics, including stories about (trying!) to run a hand made, all-natural soap company; why we started down this path; and new studies and data about the importance of all-natural cleaning products and natural living in general.

As many of you will know, we are already on Facebook and Twtter, as well as LinkedIn and YouTube (coming soon!). We feel this Soap Kitchen blog is important, too; it provides a channel for us to  push information out to friends without requiring log-ins (and without anyone getting in trouble at work for being on FB!). Our plan is to share important content across all these mediums at once, but also to have unique content for each. Visit us however you like - and don't be shy with your comments, we'd love to hear from you!

As always, thanks for joining us as on this adventure as we continue to cultivate this little dream into something really special.

Stay soapy!

PS -  stayed tuned, we have several big announcement planned for the next few days!