soap for hope: about corona, initiative, and existential fears

When the Corona virus bomb dropped, we were shook

Everything started to be cancelled including a very important berlin cosmetics fair we had planned to exhibit in. Our sales dropped. Being fully self-employed with terrorists of beauty since January 2020 only, we felt pure anxiety. More than 100 retail customers, mostly little eco concept stores or boutiques, stopped ordering and also online sales crumbled while the whole world was watching the news in disbelief. On top, Mar, one of us founders, got stuck in quarantine in Spain where she had been visiting her family. With a torn team and torn hearts, we had to find a way to deal with the situation

what was so scary for us seemed to be the long needed break for the environment

The slowdown was going to provide some well deserved rest for the planet. CO2 levels dropped and stories of dirty seas and polluted skies turned blue again

After some days, the deaths in europe started to add up

we started to fully understand the severity of this situation. This was not just about a drop in sales or a risky break for our young company. When we started seeing dire hospital situations in Spain, Italy, and also Germany, we realized: we need to act now

We saw all these people fighting the covid-19 battle on the front lines: the nurses and doctors that run towards the infected to cure them. These people can’t just turn on Skype to keep doing their jobs. They are in the line of fire. This also includes all the employees at supermarkets exposed to hundreds if not thousands of possibly infected people searching for toilet paper. On top, all restaurants were forced to close. From one day to the next, local gastronomy owners lost 100% of their income

Compared to this, our situation in spanish and german home office seemed rather harmless. We decided to decline public monetary support in order to leave it to the ones more severely in need. Cause we still managed to create some sales in the still operating BUDNI drugstores and our online shop

But we wanted to do more than just sit and wait

We learned about the initiative „Kochen für Helden“ , a collective of restaurant owners cooking fresh food for doctors, nurses, and other crucial frontline workers for free

We rolled up our sleeves and started to support them! We had hope and we had soap. The two we combined to the concept „Soap for Hope“. We cooked up a recipe for a hand soap. as usual, high in quality, and handmade from cold press oils. to boost the cleaning power we added extra sodium bicarbonate to make sure the virus can’t stick to any hand. Every 50g bar of soap would go straight to the cooks of "Kochen für Helden" to keep them cooking and feeding the workers on the front line in the exhausting fight against corona

shortly after launching the soap for hope in our web shop, also budni placed a big order to support us. So from this week on you can find our soap for hope in all 80 budni drugstores listed on our website! We are proud that we managed to donate about 2000 EUR to the cooks of „Kochen für Helden“ within weeks. And collection continues!