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