Why category demand is not proof anyone wants your product
You went to a soap-making workshop on a Saturday, mostly to get out of the house. You came home with four bars wrapped in greaseproof paper and a hobby that turned into a mild obsession.
Six months on, you know what you’re doing. You’ve stopped following other people’s recipes and started formulating your own. The bars coming out of your kitchen look like something you would actually pay for, and people keep telling you so. I love that.
So, you do the sensible thing. You open Google and type how to turn a hobby into a business, then how to validate a product idea. What comes back is endless— step-by-step guides, e-commerce blogs, YouTube tutorials, a book or two promising to turn soap into a six-figure business. And most of it is good. Properly researched, practical, and free.
So, you follow it
Market research first. Handmade soap sells. The marketplaces are full of it, the plastic-free end is growing, and you read enough competitor reviews to work out where the gaps are.
Differentiation comes next. No palm oil, plastic-free, formulated for the kind of dry skin that flares up every winter, which is why you started making soap in the first place.
Then the maths. Materials are cheap enough at the batch size your kitchen can manage that £8 a bar leaves real margin in the middle. It works on paper.
Then the compliance, which for anything you put on skin is not quick or easy. Assessments, registrations, labelling rules, insurance. It takes weeks and it costs money before you have sold anything at all. Most people give up somewhere in here. You didn’t.
You even found a contract manufacturer in advance, for the day the orders outgrow the kitchen table, because the advice tells you to plan for scale early.
Then the brand. Name, colour palette, story, voice and social media account. Packaging that matches the message, ordered at the minimum, which is around 500 printed wraps.
Then 300 bars on a rack in the spare room, curing, because handmade soap has to set for weeks before it can be sold. Two months where the whole business is a smell in the hallway and a spreadsheet.
Then the shop. Then the launch.
Eleven orders in the first month. Nine of them from people who already knew your name.
And you’re left with a question you can’t answer, which is what did I do wrong — because you didn’t skip anything. You can point at every step in the process and show the work behind it.
The advice wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t answering your question.
The right answer to the wrong question
One of the first things you’re told to check is whether people are already paying for similar products.
And yes, there are plenty of small businesses making handmade soap. Etsy will show you sales counts on shops charging seven, eight, nine pounds. There’s a woman two towns over who has done the same Sunday market for four years, and nobody does that at a loss.
So the answer comes back yes, with evidence behind it. People pay this price, for this kind of product, in this position on the shelf. That’s actually useful. It’s how you know £8 makes sense.
And then you take that yes and turn it into the assumption that there is room for you.
But that yes is about the category. It tells you the shelf exists and roughly what sits on it. It cannot tell you that a stranger standing at a table with 40 bars on it — all handmade, all plastic-free, three of them rosemary — picks up yours.
That’s the question nobody tells you to ask. Not whether people want handmade soap. But why they would choose yours over the shop with two thousand sales behind it, or over the woman two towns over who also does rosemary, also at £8, and who got there four years earlier.
The right answer is in there
Here’s what got me, when I went back and read that advice properly, one of the most-read guides on validating a product idea lists nine strategies, and the first is to go and make some sales — it says outright that money is the thing that validates an idea. The eighth is to stand at a craft show and watch what people do. Another tells you to pre-sell, take deposits, or run a small pilot batch before you commit to inventory.
It’s all there. It’s just item one of nine, unranked, sitting alongside checking your engagement rate against a benchmark and putting up a coming-soon page. One of those nine can tell you why yours. The other eight describe a category.
And the running order does the real damage. By the time you reach “make some sales”, you have done the research, chosen the differentiation, built the brand, ordered 500 wraps, paid for the compliance and set up the shop.
You didn’t skip the step. You did it last, when it could no longer change anything. At that point it isn’t a test, it’s a launch — and a launch has no way out. It just has a slow month, and then another one.
What I would have told you
If you had come to me with the sample in one hand and the quote for 300 bars in the other, this is what I would have said.
Make 40. Find a market stall, set a price that makes sense for you and the customer, and put them in front of people who owe you nothing.
The point is not to gather feedback. Feedback is what your friends give you, and it costs them nothing to be kind. What you are there for is the ten seconds where somebody who came out for a wander on a Sunday picks up the rosemary and sea salt bar, turns it over, finds the price, and either buys it or puts it back down. That is the smallest complete piece of evidence there is, and it costs a weekend and a stall fee rather than your savings.
I know the running order because I ran it myself, in a different category, with my own money. Range plan, samples, packaging, launch — and the test that mattered came last. I made fifteen sales. Total.
I can’t tell you why someone would buy yours. Neither can a guide, and neither can your friends. The only people who know are the ones with the money in their pocket, and they won’t tell you either — they’ll just show you, by picking it up or leaving it on the table.
Chapter one of Nobody Needs Your Candle — a series on testing demand for a product nobody needs but plenty of people want. If you're staring down a minimum order quantity right now, comment below and tell me what you're about to order.
