Meet Simi Khabra | Owner of Muddy Mint Soap Co

We had the good fortune of connecting with Simi Khabra and we’ve shared our conversation below.

What should our readers know about your business?
Troy and I run a natural soap company called Muddy Mint. It was founded in 2016 and has grown to a pretty busy little soap shop. We’re still small enough to know many of our customers by name, but we’re big enough to have our soap in over 600 retail stores in the United States (and in some other countries too!). We began as, and remain, an online-only business, so we have our roots on Etsy and Instagram.

There are a lot of soap companies out there, so it’s tough to set yourself apart, but I feel like we’ve developed a very strong rapport with our customers. I still run our social media account and try to remain as genuine and real as possible. I am in charge of customer support and photography and our website, so I still have my hands in everything that is public-facing. The brand is really synonymous with me, and I think this makes us much more personal than many larger brands out there. In addition, we have pretty strict values that we never bend on. The main one is keeping our soap all-natural, scented only with essential oils, and we don’t compromise on quality, ever. I mean, that all sounds pretty cliche, but I think it’s pretty easy to steer towards cutting corners as things start to grow. It’s also easy to be swayed to use fragrances or less natural ingredients, as that’s what the customers sometimes want. I’ve seen many soap companies go that way, but still keep their all-natural claims. We have gotten a lot bigger over the years, but we still make our soap exactly the same way we did in the beginning.

In the early days, I spent a lot of time and energy on recipe formulation and this is really paying off in our business. We hear all the time that our soap is so much better than anything else people have used. I mean, that totally sounds like we’re bragging, but we hear it from our customers all the time. I think this goes back to the early days of me working on recipes and making sure I came up with something that I really loved and wanted to use. We use really high-quality ingredients, and I’m glad that folks that buy our soap can easily recognize the difference. It definitely costs more and we spend a lot of time on making our soap and packaging our orders, but hopefully you can feel the love that went into your soap and your order when you get your package in the mail. We make sure every order feels like a fun little present to unwrap.

One of our proudest moments as a business was being able to hire Troy full-time. He left his architecture job to come help run the business full-time and it was a huge leap for him and for us! He’s been working full-time for two years now and we couldn’t have grown so much without him. We moved into our current production space two years ago and are now bursting at the seams in this building. One of the biggest things we did was add wholesale to our business and that has really pushed us forward. None of this was easy and I resisted a lot of it, as I often miss the roots of our small-batch business. We have several employees now and I spend a lot of my time making the same soaps over and over again. We’ve had a lot of hurdles along the way, but I think what makes a business is perseverance. Just keep going. I’ve listened to a lot of episodes of “How I Built This” and read books on business and everything we’re going through is normal! Just knowing that helps tremendously. It seems like a business that is growing organically (without any outside investment or advertising) is going to take time to grow. That’s how we like it. Slow and steady.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
We’ve just had a bunch of people visiting, so this one is easy! 🙂 We love eating locally, hiking, and working out at our gym, so this is how our weeks with friends and family have been going.

We usually sign up our visitors for a one week pass at our local F45 gym in Longmont (if they’re willing). We work out five times a week, and it’s really fun to bring our friends into our local gym for the week. It’s such an incredible community and we’ve made so many friends there.

Breakfast is our favorite meal of the day, so we usually head to Lucile’s, Le Peep, and Tangerine with our people. Yep, that’s three breakfasts in a week. We’re crazy like that.

Hiking is our favorite thing to do with out-of-town visitors. We usually start at Rabbit Mountain to get our visitors acclimated and then head to Mt. Sanitas, Royal Arch, or other hikes in Boulder. We also enjoy walking around McIntosh Lake with our pup.

Of course, if there’s time, we make a stop on Pearl Street in Boulder, and visit some of our favorite Longmont eateries: The Roost, Pumphouse, Jefes, and Ziggi’s. I mean, there’s a lot more of course, but these are typically top of mind. Outdoor concerts are also a must.

There’s so much to do here in Longmont, but we’re pretty laid back folks, so most of our time with visitors is spent talking, cooking, and laughing, with a good dose of breakfasts and workouts.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I definitely need to give a huge shoutout to Troy, my partner in life, love, and soapmaking. He’s been alongside me for nearly my entire soapmaking journey, helping with actual work in the soap studio (he quit his architecture job to join the biz!), along with being a sounding board for all the business decisions. Muddy Mint wouldn’t be the same without him!

Website: https://muddymint.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/muddymint/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/muddymint

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@muddymintsoap