Katie Carson started her homemade, hand poured, soap business as a young teenager but never imagined it turning into something that would end up being extremely successful. Katie was homeschooled and took a soap making class in her teens that inspired her to start creating soaps on her own that she would eventually begin to sell. Katie never started her business with the goal to gain a huge amount of popularity on YouTube and at first, she started making videos to connect with her community of soap makers and reviewed other soaps, sharing her thoughts with her following. After time, Katie started to share some of her own DIY soap creations and that is when she started to gain a lot of popularity on YouTube.
Katie’s products use essential oil to add fragrance, and she packages her soap bars with a very clean and minimalist look, which fits with the theme of her business’s mantra, simplicity. Additionally, Katie creates seasonal soaps for the holidays that have fun Christmas scents and designs. Katie makes her business fun and interesting by offering mystery boxes with a random assortment of soaps and also creates a sampler packet of mini soaps for customers to test out. Throughout her business journey Katie has thoughtfully used marketing on YouTube as an effective way to bring in more money.
Katie has done exceptionally well with her business and has now sold over 100,00 bars of soap and has over 880,00 subscribers on her YouTube platform and a handful of her videos have gone viral. Creating unique and quality soap bars and making entertaining YouTube videos have gone hand in hand for Katie and while building the success of her business she learned how to use both of those elements to her advantage. Furthermore, part of Katie’s journey has been to share her success on YouTube with others and give tips to other creators about how to use social media platforms to benefit their business.
Katie’s entrepreneur story shows the importance in exploring the adjacent possible and using what is trending and certain marketing techniques to increase the number of sales and profit she was earning. Her story shows that there is value in pursuing a career of creating something you love and enjoy and then using what customers want to maximize on profit and popularity.
