Drumroll, please….it’s time to announce the 2014 Annual Conference Soapers’ Showcase Winners.
If you were with us in Tucson at this year’s conference, you had a chance to ogle all the entries in person, along with boxes and boxes of soaps and personal care products donated by many, many generous conference attendees for donation to local non-profit Sister Jose Women’s Shelter.
Categories for competition this year included Best Scent in both melt and pour and cold/hot process soaps, Best Appearance in both melt and pour and cold/hot process soaps, Best Packaging, the always intriguing free-for-all category of “Something Different”, and Best In Show.
Beyond the usual fierce competition for each of the seven categories, soapers continue to defy categorization, creating their own transparent bases, mixing cold process with melt and pour, and mixing cold, hot and rebatch techniques to spectacular ends. Needless to say, our judges (aka attendees) had a tough job ahead of them.
The winners, as determined by attendee vote and announced at the 2014 Annual Awards Dinner were:
JoAnne Somers from Dirty Face Soap Company for Best Scent in Melt and Pour
Dawn Cabral-Quimby from Horsin’ Around Soap for Best Scent in Cold/Hot Process
Shonna Mangeris from The Soap Shop for Best Appearance in Melt and Pour
Emily Shieh from Shieh Design Studio for Best Appearance in Cold/Hot Process
Janey Davies from Scrubology Soap for Best Packaging
Chris Port from Lotion Bar Cafe for Something Different
Jennifer Chaloux from Three Crows Soap and Bodyworks for Best In Show
Congratulations to JoAnne, Dawn, Shonna, Emily, Janey, Chris, and Jennifer for sharing your spectacular winning specimens with us! Thank you to everybody who entered for making this, as usual, an impossible decision and thank you to entrants and attendees for donating loads and loads and loads of soap for Sr. Jose’s. We can’t wait to see what you cook up for #soapconf15 in Indianapolis!
Did you have a favorite soap this year? New categories you wish we’d create? Feel free to sound off here!
7 Comments on “Soapers’ Showcase Winners”
Make HP a separate category, it deserves it since it can look so different.
Special category for all natural colorant (herbs, spices, charcoal, etc.)
New category for “handmade mold” shaped soap. People are making their own casts for silicone molds…
Oooh, good ones, Christine!
These are great photos! Can you tell US what the best fragrances were for m and p and for the cp soaps?
Thank you!
Hi, Pam,
Didn’t Adam do a great job on those photos? That’s an entirely reasonable question. Let me check in with the Soapers’ Showcase head honcho and see if she kept a record of the winning scents. My smell-memory is not quite up to snuff. And if anyone else out there remembers, please chime in. 😀
Cheers,
Jen
Pam,
My Three Crows soap is a blend of lavender lemongrass rosemary and litsea cubeba. I remember the best cp fragrance was a yummy coconut. They all smelled so good!
My Dirtyface Soap – Best Scent in MP – is Coconut.
If you like the smell of Coconut, you will love this fragrance! Reminiscent of suntan lotion, pina coladas and all things tropical! Very popular!
What has surprised me is that there are actually people who don’t like the smell of coconut — maybe 1-2% of people who visit my soap sales booth!
Yummmmm, what a perfect summer scent, JoAnne. Thank you for confirming! Isn’t that funny how that happens? We should do a share-and-tell, sharing what scents elicit strong love/hate reactions from customers. 😀
Jen