Ey up! I'm Sarah

The Little Northern Soaphouse was born on a June afternoon in 2018.

After stumbling across a tutorial online, it surprised me to learn that, with a little bit of practice and some carefully chosen ingredients, I could make my own soap at home. When I poured my first batch of 10 bars, I had no idea that that soap would be better than any bar I’d ever bought, and that I’d fall in love with soap-making.

Taking inspiration from my weekend rambles in Cumbria and Derbyshire, I soon started channelling my obsession with the Great Outdoors into my soap designs and began naming bars after my favourite Northern locations.

Now, the core collection includes soaps inspired by The Lake District and The Peak District, and throughout the year I introduce limited edition bars inspired by beloved spots in Wales, Scotland, Northumberland and further afield (like Norway!).

The goal now is to create craft soap for thoughtful folk who care about the natural world.

I want the person who buys a bar of Little Northern soap to be cheerfully reminded of their favourite landscapes, happy in the knowledge that they’ve made an ethical, sustainable, eco-friendly buying decision. Have a look at Our Eco Pledge below to see how the Soaphouse prioritises the environment at all times.

Our Eco Pledge

  • Ingredients

    • 98.5% of the ingredients used in our soaps are from natural sources
    • We have made the choice to use no palm oil in our soap recipe due to concerns over its role in driving deforestation. Instead, we've opted to use a range of solid oils and nut butters from traceable sources 
    • In an effort to further minimise our negative ecological impact, we've elected to use a high percentage of British-grown rapeseed oil in our recipe
    • All bars are formulated with vegan and cruelty-free ingredients

  • Production

    • The manufacturing process is low tech and uses very little energy; each bar of soap is poured by hand and requires only 0.004 kWh of electricity to make
    • No single-use items are required in the soap’s production – every mixing bowl, beaker, mould and spatula is used over and over again until it reaches the end of its life
    • No waste is created in the production of our soaps. The ingredients are wholly used up in the saponification process and create no waste by-products
    • Our soaps are formulated to be long-lasting – a single bar used daily in the sink or shower can last for months. By switching from bottled liquid soap - or shower gel - to our soap, customers can dramatically reduce their plastic consumption

  • Packaging

    • All materials used to package and post soaps are either recyclable or, preferably, biodegradable
    • Each soap is wrapped in a minimal brown paper band. Many other soaps are either shrink-wrapped in plastic or popped into a laminated card box. We believe that these types of packaging – while offering some additional protection for the soaps as they make their way from studio to store - are unnecessarily wasteful
    • To protect them from the elements, soaps are sent out in biodegradable paper bags made from recycled materials, or uncoated cardboard boxes, cushioned by tissue and crinkled paper
    • When we post out wholesale orders, we protect shipments with packing peanuts made from starch (which can be broken down in water!) or recycled packing materials