While online sales are booming, there are some products which cannot be found on Garden Path Homemade Soap’s online store, including hand sanitizer – the company’s latest addition to its product line.
“Laundry soap, hand sanitizer and foaming hand soap cannot be shipped (due to regulations),” notes Garden Path Homemade Soap owner Tara MacWhirter. “As such they don’t appear in our online store.”
Anyone who wishes to order any of those products can contact Garden Path directly via email through their website at www.gardenpathsoap.com or by phone at 613-678-7298. After placing their orders, customers will then receive via email an invoice which they can choose to pay in advance or via contact-less interact payment if they choose to get their items via the company’s front porch pick up service.
The biggest seller off the porch is Garden Path’s newly introduced hand sanitizer; demand can of course be linked directly to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A couple of people had asked about a year ago if we made hand sanitizer but it is something we had never really considered,” MacWhirter recalls. “But now people have to clean their hands and there’s not always a sink and water available.”
“We realized we had bottles, we had aloe vera gel – we just needed to find the alcohol.”
To ensure safety, MacWhirter consulted with experts to find the proper type of alcohol for the product and the correct mix of alcohol and aloe vera. Once the safety of the product was assured, acquisition of the ingredients to provide for increased production began.
Hand sanitizer is available from Garden Path Soap in 118ml personal bottles and 250ml refills. The company also makes some larger batches to serve local businesses only. Local sales of the hand sanitizer has been brisk and MacWhirter says the company endeavors to ensure the product is always available to area residents and businesses.
“That’s one reason we didn’t put (hand sanitizer) on our website, because we would probably sell out in a day. On the website we couldn’t really control what people buy. We would rather keep local customers supplied.”
