Beta Test: These shampoo bars are meant to clean your hair without the plastic bottle

Beta Test is a feature where we sample local products made by entrepreneurs around the Bay Area and profile the folks behind them. Have a product that you'd like us to consider? Email me at: sbloomberg@bizjournals.com.

Sustainabar

About Sustainabar:

Reports have shown that a lot of the plastic we dump in recycling bins doesn’t actually get recycled, and countries that used to take Americans’ scraps are saying no more. A lot has to happen to fix the problem, especially on the manufacturing side. But there are ways to cut down on the amount of plastic we use at home.

A first step could be zero-waste shampoo bars.

Shampoo bars have a reputation for being, well, a bit “crunchy” — a DIY solution for hippies, or perhaps a necessity for a weekend camping trip. But their appeal is starting to broaden with an increasing awareness around sustainability, and modern soap making techniques are producing bars that are pleasant to use.

Albany-based Sustainabar jumped into the fray at the end of 2019 when founder Julia Scheeres began having conversations with her daughters about how to reduce the family’s plastic waste. The girls were 10- and 13-years-old at the time, and Scheeres and her husband were both working full-time as a writer and a history teacher, respectively.

They started looking for products to buy but didn’t like what they found. The bars were too astringent and expensive. Scheeres researched recipes and started experimenting. And thus, a family business was born.

"I want my daughters some day to be like, 'My mom, she did something, she tried to make a difference.' And hopefully other people will follow suit," Scheeres told me.

At the end of 2019, Scheeres took some bars to her daughter's holiday craft fair at school to gauge how much interest there'd be for locally made products like this. The bars sold out in two hours.

They launched an online shop right before covid hit, and although being stuck at home together 24-7 came with challenges, it also afforded the family more time for making, packaging and shipping out orders from home. They even launched local pickups.

Almost two years later, they now offer about a dozen types of bars including shampoo, conditioner, hand soap, dish soap and even one for dirty dogs. Each one uses simple ingredients. Some are lightly scented with essential oils or colored with natural clays.

"Soap making is dangerous. You have to use lye which is caustic," Scheeres said, so she handles most of the production. "My daughters basically wrap up the bars and do a personalized note to the customers. And each order includes a joke."

In the name of sustainability, they keep plastic out of the packaging, too, even going so far as shredding their junk mail to create recyclable cushioning.

The girls also get a cut of Sustainabar’s monthly sales.

"For the wrapping of the bars, they each get 10% of whatever the total sales are for the month. And then they have some bars that are easier to make, and they get all of the money for those bars minus the money for the materials," Scheeres said. 

Part of their mission is keeping the bars affordable, too. Prices range from $5-10 and they say most bars last longer than their liquid counterparts. They've sold around 2,000 units so far.

Testing notes: I tried four of Sustainabar's products: the Cyndi bar, the jojoba conditioner bar, the hand soap and dish soap. The bars arrived in a cardboard box free of plastic and filled with shredded junk mail as cushioning — a recyclable, more sustainable alternative to bubble wrap. One bar was wrapped in wax paper and the others were placed directly in the box. It came with a postcard to help identify which bar is which.

After just one use, the shampoo bar left my hair soft and shiny. I lathered up the bar in my hands and washed my hair using the double cleansing method (i.e., lather, rinse, repeat). The second cleanse lathered up substantially more, as is typical with liquid shampoos. The conditioning bar didn't lather up that much but I was able to work the product into my hair and it left my ends looking healthy without being greasy. Each bar had very mild minty or citrusy scents from essential oils.

I initially left both bars on a ceramic dish with no drainage, and the shampoo did melt into some residual water. Solution: just use a dish with drainage. 

The unscented "Salt of the Earth" hand soap produced a gentle lather, though it was noticeably less than conventional hand soaps that are made with foaming agents such as sodium lauryl sulfate. However, it left my hands feeling clean and not overly stripped, and it easily rinsed away.

Another bar was the "California Sunshine Dish Soap Brick," which is lightly scented with citrus essential oils. First I tried picking up the bar to rub it directly on a sponge. Then I tried leaving the bar in a dish by the sink and just rubbing a sponge on the top. Both methods worked, and the soap produced a gentle lather that cut through everything from blender blades covered in thick smoothies to a pan used to make eggs and sausage.