People ask what a normal day in the studio actually looks like. The honest answer: smaller than you'd imagine, and more specific than you'd expect.
Wednesday is usually a production day. That means a full batch of at least two products, plus whatever orders need to go out before the 1pm courier cut-off.
Morning: 8am to 12
The first hour is raw materials. Everything gets weighed individually, labelled, and staged in order of use. We do this before anything is heated because fixing a formula error when the wax is already melted is much harder than catching it on the scale.
By 9:30 the double boiler is on. We melt slowly and at a controlled temperature — shea has a habit of going grainy if you rush it. While the first phase heats, the packaging for the day's batch is being cleaned and laid out. Every jar gets wiped with isopropyl. Every lid gets checked for defects.
Afternoon: 12 to 6
The 1pm cut-off is a real deadline. Orders from the night before get packed, weighed, labelled, and handed to the courier by 12:50 if possible. Then the afternoon is finishing the batch: cooling, filling, setting, labelling.
We photograph every new batch before it goes into storage. Not for marketing — for quality control. The photos go into a folder by date and batch number. If there's ever a complaint six months later, we can pull up exactly what that batch looked like the day it was made.
What it isn't
It isn't glamorous. It's a small, warm room, a lot of careful weighing, and a real satisfaction when fifty identical jars are lined up at the end of the day. That satisfaction doesn't stop being there just because it's the hundredth Wednesday you've done it.
— D