You can spend thirteen years building something, and weather can take half of it in one afternoon.

Count what the storm took.

In September 2022, Hurricane Ian came through Southwest Florida — my home, and the only home the company has ever had. When we could finally assess the damage, the math was brutal: four of our ten stores were damaged, representing roughly 40% of our brick-and-mortar sales at the time (those are our own figures, stated publicly then and since).

The worst of it was Sanibel Island. Our flagship there wasn’t damaged — it was destroyed. The causeway itself was broken. There was no version of “open next month.”

Triage like a nurse.

Fifteen years of nursing turned out to be hurricane training. In an emergency you don’t treat everything at once — you triage. People first. Then the stores that could reopen quickly. Then the long-term patient: Sanibel.

We stabilized what we could and made an unfashionable decision about the rest: we would rebuild, even though rebuilding would take years, and even though we were a small public company that would have to report every painful number along the way.

Tell the story while it hurts.

Within months, I was telling the story out loud. Retail expert Bob Phibbs gave a full episode of The Retail Doctor podcast to it — episode 801. The title he chose says everything about how it felt:

Retail has no time for disaster.

I told it again on From the Corner Office, in an episode called “Soap, Suds and Surviving Hurricane Ian”, and the Business Observer covered the recovery that November. I’m glad I didn’t wait for a tidy ending. The raw version helped other Florida retailers in the same flood line — and honestly, telling it helped us too.

Reopen the doors.

The rebuild took more than three years. On January 31, 2026, our Sanibel store reopened. I won’t pretend the date is just a line item — for everyone who packed sandbags, filed claims, and held the team together, it’s the line item.

The comeback shows up in the filings, too. Our fiscal 2025 results release (March 31, 2026) reported $12.3 million in revenue, e-commerce up 15%, wholesale up 30%, and net loss cut by 25% — the company’s audited, publicly filed numbers, reported while we were still paying for the storm. That chapter is part of the public-company story.

Rebuild more than buildings.

The hardest part of a three-year rebuild isn’t construction — it’s keeping a team’s faith through it. The six undamaged stores carried the company while the four hurt ones healed, and the people in them carried each other.

Southwest Florida is not an abstraction to us. It’s where I was born, where I nursed, and where our first customers lived. When the Business Observer wrote about our recovery that November, the story wasn’t really about a soap company — it was about a region refusing to stay knocked down.

Today the company stands at 13 Florida stores (the company’s count) — more than we had the day before the storm. That isn’t luck. That’s a decision, made daily, for more than three years.

Keep what the storm taught.

Three lessons I’d hand any founder before their own disaster, whatever form it takes. Take care of your people first — they are the company; the drywall is not. Tell the truth in public, early — your customers, your landlords, and in our case our shareholders can handle bad news better than silence. And decide what you’re rebuilding for — we rebuilt Sanibel because the mission that started in 300 square feet doesn’t abandon a community that’s hurting. That’s the whole point of it.

When citybiz later asked what carried the company, my first word was “resilience.” Ian is the reason it came first.

If your business is staring at its own version of the storm, reach out — I’ll tell you the unpolished version too.

— Deanna

A soap shop with a ticker symbol sounds like a punchline — until you understand what the ticker buys.

Decide why you actually want it.

I didn’t take Naples Soap Company public in 2021 for the headline. I did it for the discipline. A public company doesn’t get to round up, gloss over, or quietly forget a bad quarter.

When you start in 300 square feet during a recession, you learn to live on real numbers. Going public made that discipline permanent — and visible to anyone who cares to look.

Accept the scrutiny — all of it.

Being public means audited disclosures, filed on schedule, forever. Your wins are public. So are your losses, your costs, and your mistakes.

Most founders never have to say their hardest numbers out loud. I have to publish mine. It is uncomfortable, and it is also the single best management tool I have ever had — because nothing forces clarity like knowing the whole market reads your homework.

Uplist when the story is ready.

In May 2025 we uplisted to the OTCQB Venture Market. The reasoning was stated plainly in the announcement at the time:

Increase NASO’s visibility among investors, enhance liquidity.

There’s a side effect of being public that nobody tells you about: the financial internet repeats your name every trading day. Bloomberg, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, and Nasdaq quote pages republish my name, role, and company automatically through investor-relations syndication. It’s third-party corroboration no PR budget can buy — which is exactly why it anchors my Authority Snapshot.

Report the hard numbers, even the flat ones.

Our fiscal 2025 results release (March 31, 2026) reported $12.3 million in revenue, e-commerce up 15%, wholesale up 30%, and net loss cut by 25%. Those are the company’s filed, audited figures — not my recollection of them.

And here is the part a private founder could skip: our top line has held around that same $12.3 million for three straight years while we cut costs and rebuilt from Hurricane Ian. I say that out loud because public-company founders don’t get to hide it — and because the turnaround is more credible when you admit what it’s turning around from.

Use the listing — don’t worship it.

The ticker isn’t a trophy; it’s a tool, and it works in rooms I’m not in. A boutique buyer deciding whether to stock us can read audited financials before our first call. A landlord, a lender, a journalist — they can all check the record without taking my word for anything.

Being public also puts your news on a schedule. In one stretch of 2026 we reported fiscal-year results (March 31), launched Celestii — stem-cell skincare developed with NASA zero-gravity bioreactor technology, tested by AMA Laboratories (April 14) — and introduced GROW BEAUTii, clean care for the whole family, babies to 80s (May 6). Each went out as a company release, on the record, where anyone can verify it.

That cadence is the quiet gift of the public markets: the story can’t go stale, because the filings keep writing the next chapter.

Tell other founders the truth.

Would I recommend going public to every founder? No. The reporting burden is real, the scrutiny is constant, and a small-cap listing is not a magic source of capital.

But if your story depends on trust — and a clean-ingredient skincare brand built by a nurse lives entirely on trust — then there is no stronger proof than numbers someone else audited. A 300-square-foot shop that files public financials is making a statement no advertisement can make.

The full arc — nurse, recession, hurricane, ticker — is on the About page. If you’re a founder weighing this path and want to compare notes, reach out.

— Deanna

Nothing in this essay is investment advice. For filings and disclosures, see Naples Soap Company investor relations.

People hear “soap company” and picture gift baskets. Mine started in a treatment room.

Start with the skin in front of you.

I’m a Southwest Florida native. I earned my LPN at Lorenzo Walker Technical College, took a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Barry University, and then spent 15 years in healthcare — hospital floors, wound care, home health.

Nursing gives you one habit you never shake: you don’t treat the symptom, you find the cause. You read the chart. You look at the whole person. Skin, more than any other organ, tells you when something upstream is wrong.

Treat the patient you can’t discharge.

For years, the most stubborn patient on my rounds was me. I battled eczema and psoriasis through my nursing career — the flare-ups, the trial and error, the products that promised relief and delivered irritation.

Then my daughter started fighting the same skin I had fought all my life. Watching your child go through something you know from the inside changes the math. The nurse in me stopped accepting the situation and started charting it.

Cut the Badditives™.

So I did what nurses do: I went looking for the cause. I detoxed my bathroom shelf by shelf and read every label on every bottle. What I found was a wall of harsh ingredients that had no business on sensitive skin — the stuff I came to call Badditives™.

That word became the company’s whole filter. If an ingredient is a Badditive, it doesn’t go in the product — no matter how cheap it is or how standard it is in the industry. Everything we have made since has started from that one rule.

The mission was simple: help people with chronic skin issues like eczema and psoriasis find higher-quality, clean-ingredient products.

Open anyway.

It was 2009 — the bottom of the recession. Everyone with an opinion told me it was the worst possible time to open a retail store. I opened anyway: 300 square feet in Tin City, Naples, Florida.

A recession start turns out to be a strange gift. It forces discipline from day one — every dollar, every product, every customer has to count. The shop survived because it solved a real problem for real skin, not because the timing was kind.

Earn proof, not promises.

A trust business has to be vouched for by someone other than its founder. The first outside proof came in 2011, when the Greater Naples Chamber gave us its Entrepreneurship Award — and the wall grew from there: eight business awards between 2011 and 2024.

The one that still stuns me is the Florida SBDC at FGCU Distinguished Entrepreneur Award (2024), announced over BusinessWire and carried by Nasdaq.com and Yahoo Finance. A bar of soap I made because my daughter’s skin hurt ended up on national finance pages. Every honor and headline is listed, with sources, on my press wall.

Keep nursing.

One shop became 13 Florida stores, a national e-commerce business, and more than 300 wholesale doors (those counts are the company’s). In 2021 I took the company public — that story has its own essay — and in 2022 a hurricane tested everything we’d built, which is a story too.

When citybiz asked me in 2025 what carried the company this far, I gave the honest answer:

Resilience, empathy, and adaptability.

All three came from the nursing floor. Empathy is where the products come from. Resilience is how the stores survived. Adaptability is how a soap shop learned to file audited financials.

Seventeen years after I hung up my scrubs, I tell people I never really left the profession. I’m still doing the job I had on the hospital floor: taking care of people’s skin — one bar, one store, one conversation on The Soap Dish at a time.

If any of this is useful to you — as a founder, a parent, or a person with skin that won’t cooperate — here is where to find me.

— Deanna