As the world prepared to enter a new millennium, John Howland, president and owner of Bradford Soap Works Inc., was listening to his customers. And since 2000, the company’s reaction to what he heard has transformed the 130-year-old manufacturer.
“We sensed this seismic shift in what was going to be successful for the company,” Howland told the PBN last week. Customers’ needs were changing.
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
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Whereas 20 years ago, customers told Bradford Soap what products they wanted, Howland said, “now, they are looking to us to bring fully developed ideas.”
In response, Bradford Soap has dramatically shifted its manufacturing abilities to better serve customers in the personal care market – making, among other things, brightly colored, candy-shaped soaps, as well as soaps engineered to provide lasting sun protection for the skin.
The transformation began in the late 1990s, when the West Warwick-based soap-maker hired consultants to analyze the personal care market and determine what trends were developing, so the company could offer new types of products in response.
By keeping on top of trends and new technologies, Howland said, Bradford Soap is able to bring value to its customers, allowing them to focus on building their brands, channels of distribution and speed to market.
As a result, he said, the company manufactures millions of soaps for a broad base of specialty stores and well-known brands, such as Dove, Clinique, Bath & Body Works, Mary Kay, Origins and Crabtree & Evelyn.
And since 2002, the company has nearly doubled its work force, through the acquisition of competitors, according Bill Schmiedeknecht, vice president of human resources. Bradford Soap has a total of 800 employees, he said. About 300 are at the West Warwick plant, about 400 at a plant in Mexicali, Mexico, and about 100 at a plant in Columbus, Ind.
Revenue has grown steadily since early 2000, when the company underwent a re-branding overhaul that resulted in a new logo, new promotional materials and trade show booth, Howland said.
Still, the key to the company’s prosperity has been its reworking of its product line. For example, in 2001, Bradford Soap started appealing to the large market for organic/natural products in personal care, by becoming the nation’s first commercial soap manufacturer certified by the USDA National Organic Program to manufacture soaps using organic ingredients and processes.
In 2003, Bradford Soap Works launched a hipper line of products to appeal to a wider audience. The new line included a SunBurst bar, using a combination of ingredients to create a two-toned sun pattern in soap, Howland said.
And the company introduced brightly colored, fruit-fragranced, slab-shaped soaps – plus soap putty, and candy-shaped, rose-shaped and stone-shaped soaps – to show the kind of diverse products the company could manufacture.
This year, it marked another evolution in products, with the launch of the SoapScape line, Howland said. The line explores the nature and science of soaps, including new soap-making technologies that Bradford Soap created.
SoapScape includes a new soap base, called Eco-Ex, that is infused with blends of unusual exotic oils – such as tamanu oil, said to have anti-inflammatory, cell-regenerative and soothing properties.
In addition, the company has developed a proprietary encapsulating technology that allows the injection of encapsulated ingredients, such as anti-cellulite agents to firm up skin.
“We’re really a service company,” Howland said. “We’re giving our customer a product they can market. It has to be distinctive in more than one way.”
The company’s 50 proprietary soap bases form one of the largest collections in the world, he said. Its diversity of soap bases is a large part of what differentiates Bradford Soap from the handful of other soap manufacturers in the United States.
“In manufacturing, we have flexibility and breadth and depth,” Howland said. “We make more bases, which means we can create more and do more.”
He said the company has come a long way since 1876, when two men from Bradford, England, started the company to manufacture soaps for scouring wool in the textile industry.
It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the company began phasing out of manufacturing for the textile industry and turned to manufacturing bases for consumer soaps, Howland said. The shift was fueled by entrepreneurship in the personal care marketplace.
Retailers such as Crabtree & Evelyn in the early 1970s, and Bath & Body Works in the early 1990s – along with other specialty retailers in the makeup industry, such as Clinique – created a marketplace for soaps, Howland said. “You had a huge explosion in the way people bought soaps,” he said. “And a huge explosion in channels of distribution.”
Bradford Soap’s story is one of survival, he said. When the textile industry started moving offshore, the company focused on this new booming marketplace. And it has remained successful by staying at the front end of the consumer market.
“We’ve gone from a manufacturing company to a product development company,” Howland said. “We develop products for our customers’ brands. To understand brands, you have to understand the market. To understand the market, you have to understand trends.”
The company makes anything from a $1 bar of soap to a $25 bar of soap, in batches ranging from less than 100,000 pieces to 10 million. It produces a total of 200 to 300 million bars per year.
“It’s almost inevitable that you could have bars of soap in your [bathroom],” he said. “I can go almost anywhere in the world and find our soaps.”
