How Soap Came to Jackson
The city inspector marched through the downtown alley, down the stairs and into the basement where two women were making soap and told them they had a problem.
“You’re zoned retail,” Julie Konkle recalls him saying. “You’ve got to have a store.”
“A store?” she told him. “We’re just making soap in a basement.”
But rules are rules, so Julie and her niece Erin Valkuchak went to garage sales, bought some shelves, stuck a little sandwich sign out front that read “FarmSudz Underground,” and waited for customers they knew would never come.
“Nobody’s gonna schlep down this alley, down these stairs,” Erin told Julie.
Then people started showing up. In fact, more than they could handle.
FarmSudz started as a lot of things do—with a husband who thought he knew better. Julie’s spouse had been ordering goat milk soap online at $11 a bar. She looked at the price and said, “I bet I could make that,” she told him.
“Yeah, right,” he said. “This is *artisanal*.”
She went to the library, got a book, and started making soap in her basement. Goat milk soap, specifically—”one of the hardest to make,” she’ll tell you, because of how carefully you have to watch the temperature. “All of my nursing salary was going into this hobby of making soap,” she says. “I had to get it right!” After fifty batches, her home was being overrun with bars of soap so she started giving it away to coworkers. They wanted even more. Julie knew she needed help.
One afternoon she called Erin.
“Do you want to bring your boys over for a swim?” she asked.
While the kids were swimming, Julie said: do you want to make some soap while you’re here?
“And the bait-and-switch worked!” Erin says.
At the time, Erin was working as an oncology pharmacy tech—mixing chemotherapy, following precise formulations to precise ends. She recognized something familiar in the process.
“Following a recipe, getting an end product,” she says. “But soap was less scary and smelled a lot better.”
She was hooked.
Both Erin and Julie’s medical background shows up in how they talk about their FarmSudz products. When customers come in with eczema or psoriasis or cracked, raw skin that nothing seems to help, they don’t reach for a sales pamphlet or a syringe, but for a formulation.
“If you come in and we don’t have something that can help you,” Erin says, nodding toward her aunt, “there’s a good chance she’s gonna create something new.”
The booboo balm is the clearest expression of this. They call it their “hippie Neosporin”—a combination of herbs roasted in olive oil, beeswax, and essential oils that started as an accident and became one of their best sellers. The herbs in it are largely considered weeds, the kind people spend weekends trying to kill out of their yards. “But those are good plants, with good things in them,” Erin says. Julie started growing them herself before demand outpaced the garden.
She still talks about the woman who came into the FarmSudz Underground, her neck covered in open sores. Eczema. She’d been to dermatologists. Nothing worked. Julie hooked her up with some booboo balm and black soap.
“Two weeks later she came back,” Julie says. “She said, it’s totally gone.”
She pauses. “That feeds my soul.”
That individualized, person-by-person level of care is both what drives the business and keeps FarmSudz out of mass market distribution. But Julie says that not being millionaires is okay with her. “I like being able to tell people about our products and figure out how they can help,” she says. “I like being able to meet people, look at their skin, and help them out.”
After Erin joined the soap making operation and the pair ran out of room to make soap in Julie’s house, they rented a basement in downtown Chelsea. That’s when the inspector showed up and told them they needed a storefront. They weren’t expecting any customers but more showed up than they could handle and they began looking for a second location. Erin had two kids and was already driving to Chelsea every day; she wanted to go east, toward home.
“Give me two weeks,” Erin told Julie. “If I can find a space in Jackson, can we go to Jackson?”
She found one—a beautiful space downtown, shared with a friend named Kim Gomez who was running an online quinceañera business. They made the investment and signed the lease.
A month later, Covid shut everything down.
Two storefronts. Two rents. No customers allowed inside either.
So they improvised. Free shipping. Delivery runs. They became ding-dong dash delivery drivers, Erin’s kids sliding open the van door and sprinting to porches while customers watched from windows. They made lotion for healthcare workers. Their loyal customers, as Erin puts it, kept them going.
Julie admits that when they first opened in Jackson, they weren’t sure if the community would be interested in what they were selling. They figured they’d just manufacture there and keep selling in Chelsea. But the space was so nice that they set it up as a storefront anyway.
And people came in droves.
“They use it, and then they go, oh, I gotta give this to my friend,” she says. “And then that person comes in and they say, oh my mom would love this, and then mom comes in.” She spreads her hands out like ripples. “That’s really how we grew so much in Jackson.”
One of the things that makes FarmSudz different is their willingness to pull you into the back and show you what’s cooking. Kids get to cut soap. Adults get handed samples and an explanation. “We geek out over what we’re cooking,” Erin says. “We still love it like the first day we made it, we want to show you how we make it, too.” Sometimes, if they’re just finishing up a batch, they’ll hand you the tool and let you finish the swirl yourself.
The downtown businesses have been supportive, too. Jennifer across the street at Jackson Candle Company doesn’t let a customer leave without pointing them toward FarmSudz. They return the favor, directing customers looking for something specific to other downtown businesses and with local soap makers who come in to pick their brains.
The raw goat milk comes from Ruth the Barefoot Farmer, between Ann Arbor and Whitmore Lake. Julie and Erin pick it up several times over the summer, freeze it, and use it all year. Lactic acid, natural moisturizing, a creamier lather—Julie can explain the chemistry. Goat milk has “a natural moisturizing capability,” she says, and produces “a real creamy bar.”
But mostly she just says: try it, then go back to what you used before, and see what happens.
Despite the initial pool-as-bait deception, Erin went all in on making soap and quit her job at Henry Ford without much warning. One day in the Chelsea underground, she walked downstairs and told Julie.
Just like that.
“I just wanted to make soap,” she says. “That’s all I was passionate about. I chose the fun job.”
She pauses once more, then laughs.
“It smells better, but it pays much less!”
FarmSudz is located at 229 S Mechanic St. in Downtown Jackson, Michigan.
Current hours:
Sunday and Monday: Closed
Tuesday and Wednesday: 10 AM-4PM
Thursday: 10AM-6PM
Friday and Saturday: 10AM-4PM
