Episode 006 – Creating Innovative Products that Reduce Waste with drenchbar

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Leah Smolensky of drenchbar!

Leah launched drenchbar with a dream to reinvent body care by creating the first-ever solid lotion bar that is activated with water. While conventional body lotions can contain 75% water, Leah found a way to make a lotion bar that’s waterless. This allows drenchbar to make a product that is more concentrated with effective ingredients AND reduce waste.

Episode Highlights:

On how Leah navigated challenges during product development and making sure her products were effective, but also stable during shipping:

“I remember sitting on the phone on one of my first calls and having my computer out so that I could Google the acronyms and the buzzwords and the terms that they were using. And you learn quickly. But in the beginning, you feel an extreme belief like ‘I know that I can do, I know that this is gonna work, but also it's so overwhelming.’

I think the biggest challenge through this whole process with this particular innovation was the stability. And I knew that the challenge surfaced early. If you're making a lotion bar, it has to be able to melt at a certain point to deposit and be friendly on the skin. […] It had to melt at a certain temperature, but if you are shipping direct, it has to withstand 140 degree truck in the summer. So that challenge governed pretty much every decision that we had to make. […] But when we finally attacked the problem from product development and packaging working together to overcome that challenge, that’s when things started to work. Like it couldn’t be the formulation alone. It couldn’t be the packaging alone. It had to be a little bit of both.

So we did end up in plastic packaging. We tried forever to avoid that. But going back to the melt point issue that I talked about, there's no way to avoid the product melting in shipping and working. So we needed a packaging option where it could melt a little, it could soften, it could sweat, and then it could reform with perfect compatibility.”

On the best investment she made in the early stages of growing the business:

“While I was launching the business, I also spent a lot of time just ramping up my therapy. And it doesn't sound like those two things would go together or you'd have time or space for either. But being able to ask yourself, ‘Does this serve me? Does this serve the business? Is this worth my energy? Is this worth the time I'm gonna put in?’ Because you only have a certain amount of resources at your disposal. Money, time… those are finite in the beginning. And you have to make choices and there's so much noise. Being able to practice mindfulness and tune out what everyone else is saying and really just focus on what your heart is telling you. That is, I think, the most important advice to give any founder.

And it was sort of similar to when I did become a mother. Everyone wants to tell you what you should do as a mother, how you should raise the child. And you know your baby, you know your brand, you know yourself.

Just being able to tune that out and be confident in where you're gonna go. That that has been my focus.

I think the, the narrative is that the answer lies in external sources. So buy this book, read this podcast, sign up for this group. And you should do all of those things! Those are great, to a point. But you have to be able to know, well, this worked for this woman's business, is that also gonna work for mine? So having the toughness to answer that question and even ask yourself the question and then find the answer, I think is important.”

On why she chose body care as drenchbar’s niche:

“That was a deliberate decision. We focus on the body and all innovations in our pipeline will be focused on the body. We wanted to create a product that could solve a real problem, an unserved need, and it's very hard to find in the face [industry]. There's so many options out there. […] How do you know which one's for you? You wanna buy new things all the time. You wound up with a 10 step routine. That's not sustainable. That's not something that we wanna be a part of.

You know, there's a lot of products out there that I love that work really well for the face. There aren't a lot of products that specialize in the body and we aim to recenter the body and skincare because I think the emphasis on the face just reinforces the paradigm that skincare is about aesthetics and appearance. And it has never been that for me, it is about health. It is about mindfulness. It is about taking a moment with your body. There are a lot of women and humans out there who have had troubled relationships with their body. And just that small ritual of taking care of it, putting lotion on it, checking in, seeing what your skin is telling you can be such a powerful routine to reclaim and ritual. We just wanna break that focus that skincare is only skin deep. It is so much more.

I think it's also important to note that I didn't set out to start a a brand. I had a problem in my family that I was trying to solve. And through that process, we decided to share it with the world because we learned that other people had the same problem that they weren't able to solve. […] I mean, lotion is flat, it's stagnant. It is one of the only categories in skincare that isn't already growing. So being able to drive a stagnant category? That feels like a really meaty challenge.”

You can follow drenchbar on Instagram and Tiktok or go shop their products at drenchbar.com! 💦