About Our Products
The Seeds of Quality
 Making
soap has been an art for most of human history with soap makers in
every community. With
the Industrial Age, factories were established to produce soap
for people. While “kitchen” soapmakers tended to
follow tried and true family recipes for soaps, factories aggressively
pursued cost reduction and other schemes to make the process
more efficient and cost effective. These improvement programs led to
the addition of preservatives, lower cost synthetic additives and other
chemicals all with the objective of reducing the cost of the soap.
In the 1970’s and 80’s there was a gradual
trend to return to nature including the resumption of soap making in
the home among hobbyists. These soap-makers wanted to avoid the chemicals
factories used which are potentially harmful to the skin and the environment.
Their desire was to use traditional and natural ingredients. Unlike
the pre-industrial age soap makers, these new soap makers were better
educated and well armed with scientific knowledge.
Initially developed
as a hobby with the simple objective of making the best soap possible,
the very positive feedback from the
people who sampled the soaps led to the creation of a business to
sell them. So Kopa Haiku was formed in 1999 to make and market
such all-natural soap products and remains
committed to continuing to producing the best soap possible using all-natural
ingredients of the purest quality.
This is best achieved using labor intensive processes
(our soaps are handmade) and paying premium prices for the quality
of the ingredients. One "disadvantage" of this commitment is shorter
product shelf life (no preservatives). However, the saponification
process and the ingredients used allow the soap to continue to be useful
and effective even after 1 year of sitting on a shelf. By staying
close to our customers' needs so we can plan our production more
accurately, the lack of preservatives is not hurting us or our
customers. We are continuing to seach for natural non-harmful preservatives
and will use them when we find them.
Another "disadvantage" is the higher labor costs required
to achieving our goal of making the best soap possible. We use a two-step
process instead of the single-step “cold process” used
by many factories and some boutique soap makers. It
means twice as much work and time in producing the soaps, but we believe
that the two-step process allows us to produce the creamiest soaps
possible and gives us better control over the blending of the ingredients.
The hand work that we do in making the product provides a personal
touch because our workers care about the quality of their work. This
caring is easy to achieve in Maui because of the caring aloha attitude
that is easy to find in Maui. It’s hard to teach a machine how
to have aloha. This caring attitude also carries over to the manufacturing
of our other products.
Finally, bath and body products are only as good as the
quality of the ingredients you put into them. Kopa
Haiku is committed
to using the highest quality ingredients available. Although this selectivity
adds to the costs, we are in business and growing because our
customers care about quality. The skin is the largest organ in the
human body, and deserves the very best quality in skin care products
such as soaps and lotions.
Except for the milk in our soaps, there are
no animal fats or anything else from animals in any of our products
... no lanolin (derived from sheep glands) ...no tallow (made
from melting animal fat). The oils we use are plant or vegetable oils
and because Hawaii is a botanical paradise, it is easy to find
Hawaiian ingredients to go into our products. |
