Nova Scotia residents will soon be scrubbing themselves with organic cleansers made in Bermuda.

Natural By Nat soaps made by Bermudians Vladimir Focke and Andrew Haye, go on sale at Be Gorgeous Beauty in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on September 1.

“Getting our products into a Canadian store felt really great,” Mr Focke said. “We put a lot of work into it, and we did it before we sold a single bar of soap there.”

Their Canadian debut came about by accident.

A few months ago, they had just started to manufacture products for Natural Like Nat, when Mr Haye moved to Halifax.

“I sent him up with several bars of soap for his own personal use, but he ran out,” Mr Focke said. “It was going to be a little while before I could get him more, so he went looking for something similar.”

Mr Haye found luxury beauty care store Be Gorgeous Beauty. When he told the store owner, Tim MacPhee about his soap business back in Bermuda, Mr MacPhee wanted to try some of the line.

“He really liked it,” Mr Focke said. “He said he wanted to sell it.”

Mr Focke thinks it was the high level of certified organic ingredients in the soap bars that made them attractive to Mr MacPhee.

Tea tree oil, manuka honey, bentonite clay, and activated coconut charcoal are a few things in the Natural Like Nat items.

“We only have two ingredients that are not organic,” Mr Focke said. “One of them is used in the process of making the product, and is not in the final product, and the other is a preservative, but it is only 0.01 per cent of the product.”

It was not difficult to get the product into Canada because they designed all of their packaging to meet Canadian standards.

“Bermuda’s regulations are not really clear cut for products,” he said. “You find things in pharmacies that do not have specific labelling. In the international community everything has to meet a certain standard for packaging and labelling.”

He thought it was the high level of organic ingredients in the soap that attracted Canadian interest.

Mr Focke’s family made their own organic soap for several years, mostly for themselves and their friends. Then two years ago, Mr Focke and Mr Haye decided to turn the family hobby into a business.

“We have been friends for a long time, and always wanted to run a business together,” Mr Focke said. “We have been preparing to launch the business for the last two years.”

They went public with Natural Like Nat, online, a month ago.

“The response to that was very good,” he said. “But we had a soft launch because we wanted to build up our store of products. Sometimes people launch something, then they lose momentum because they run out of product really quickly.”

Mr Focke has always had an acumen for business. He started working at E R Fisheries in St David’s shortly after they opened in 2021.

“At 20, I was managing the day to day operations,” he said.

That gave him practical business experience. “That was a proving ground for me,” he said. “The only thing I missed was the actual start-up.”

Natural By Nat would eventually like to get their products in pharmacies, grocery stores and other Bermuda venues.

“At the moment we do free, island-wide delivery,” Mr Focke said. “We are also looking to sign up for Harbour Nights in August.”

Mr Focke makes his soap out of space attached to his home on Well Bottom Road in Warwick. His house just happened to be dual zoned.

“Setting up soap manufacture there was easy,” Mr Focke said. “That was just luck.”

At the moment Natural Like Nat can produce 130 to 140 bars a day.

Products range from $10 to $15 a bar.

“When we can produce more in bulk we will look at potentially decreasing the prices a bit, but we will never decrease in quality,” Mr Focke said.

They have no plans yet to outsource manufacturing.