Meet Robyn French

We were lucky to catch up with Robyn French recently and have shared our conversation below.

Robyn, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

I think all resilience emerges from struggle, including my own. I know that’s a simplification and it doesn’t really answer the question of why some people break, while others adapt. The truth is, I do break, and I have been broken over and over before. I have experienced life-shattering events that stripped me to my core. Somewhere in there though, it gave resilience a chance to take root in the deepest parts of me.

When my oldest son was 2 years old he was taken from me by my ex-husband. And I don’t just mean that he got custody of my son, I mean that my child was physically taken from my arms as I fought like a wild animal. That alone broke me so deeply–the scene is just as vivid in my mind today as the day it happened. But it wasn’t an isolated event. For the next ten years of my life, cruelty and trauma was the name of the game.

Every time I thought I was prepared, the rug would be pulled from under my feet. Showing up five minutes late for visitation would mean he would keep my child from me. Showing up too early would mean he would call the cops *and* keep my child from me. Late on child support? No visitation. Date someone he didn’t know? No visitation. Start my car in a way he didn’t like? No visitation. I wish I was joking.

I learned to steel myself when arriving for holidays like Christmas or Mother’s Day, because if he didn’t outright deny me visitation, then he would just not be home for me to pick up my child. If I tried to have the police enforce the custody decree, they would simply say it was a civil matter–they were no help. Sure, we could go to court Monday morning and have him explain himself to a judge, but that didn’t give me Christmas with my child back. It didn’t undo the feeling of sobbing outside his monolith of a house, helpless and cold as Christmas lights twinkled around me. It was death by a thousand cuts.

It would take years of heartbreak for someone in authority to finally see what was happening. It would take years for there to be any kind of cessation to this torture. And all that time, somehow, life had to continue. Even though it felt like I was bleeding out and dying from the pain, I had to keep going. And I did keep going. I kept trying. I refused to give up or be driven away.

That was such a painful time in my life. It took me so much therapy and hard work to recover from the damage that was done to me. But ironically, the person who tried to break me ended up giving me the gift of resilience. I know now that you can lose everything, and that the universe eventually rights itself.

I learned that every time you break and heal, you get a little stronger. I learned that love couldn’t be possessed or fettered. I learned that some things were unstoppable, including myself.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Scandalous Soap Co started in 2019 with a single product in mind. It was a soap called Sexy Man, which included a banana in every batch. How scandalous.

In those early days, one of the easiest ways for me to connect with my customer base was to do weekly livestreams on Facebook. During these sessions I would discuss both the creative and technical process required to make specific products.

Since I was pretty good at explaining things and could talk forever if you let me, I was contacted by the owner of the Lovin Soap blog, Amanda Aaron. She wanted to know if I would be willing to write some articles for publication. Because the internet already has a ton of free, solid information about the process of soapmaking, I asked if I could focus on handmade cosmetics like bath bombs. The internet is full of terrible information about bath bombs, and if you do find good information, it’s generally behind a paywall. She agreed, and we started up a professional relationship.

When the COVID pandemic hit, Amanda asked if I would be interested in teaching some online classes together showing people how to make bath bombs and bubble bars. That’s how the other business I co-own, Bath Fizz and Foam, started. Our classes blew up overnight, and people couldn’t get enough of our formulations and ebooks. While it started with bath bombs, we now have over 25 ebooks on everything from creating jelly soap to crafting shampoo and conditioner bars.

Leaning back on the success of the livestreams from Scandalous Soap, I began doing weekly livestreams for the Bath Fizz and Foam facebook group. I would show people exactly how to use a recipe or formulation to create amazing bath products. We really wanted to be a reliable resource for the handcrafted cosmetic industry. It didn’t matter if someone was a client, if they had a question we still wanted to help them.

Because of that, we have built a community of kind, knowledgeable makers where you can gatekeep at home, but not here. We help support hundreds of other small business owners internationally, and seeing their success has been such an amazing journey.

While I continue to write ebooks and support our community, I have pulled back from doing livestreams. Facebook has made changes to how they store and support videos, and because of that, we are in the process of transferring over 400 free instructional lifestreams to our YouTube channel–a monumental task!

I’ve also been taking time to develop Scandalous Soap more. By adding my husband to the team we have been able to expand our offerings from just retail items. We are now able to offer targeted supplies and resources for other cosmetic makers. The supplies we really try to focus on are things you can’t find anywhere else in North America, or sometimes it can’t be found in the smaller quantities we have made available. We understand that not every small business owner is able to buy pallets of ingredients, and that they might not be comfortable navigating the international market yet.

We have really been able to build an amazing synergy between the two businesses. Bath Fizz and Foam sells the exact formulations you can get from Scandalous Soap. If you’re just a retail customer who falls in love with the Scandalous Soap body butter, and want to try to make it yourself, you can! There’s a link from its listing on Scandalous to the formula on Bath Fizz and Foam. On the other hand if you’re already a handmade cosmetic maker, you can freely learn to make your own cosmetic color blends through Bath Fizz and Foam, but if you find that too daunting, you can buy pre-made color blend from Scandalous Soap.There aren’t a lot of companies that do that. Actually I don’t think there are any other companies that do that.

I never want access to knowledge to be the thing that stops someone from success. My business partners often have to remind me that we are a business–otherwise I would give everything away for free. As it is, Bath Fizz and Foam offers tons of free resources to help get people started, thoroughly researched paid-for formulations when they are ready to dig deeper, and consistently provides amazing customer support. Scandalous Soap does the exact same thing– only with retail items so good that people all over the world use the formulas, and unique supplies, bases and blends to make handcrafting even easier.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Being gracious and kind to others.
Being willing to admit to mistakes.
Being willing to carve my own path.

Because I’ve experienced some really heartbreaking moments, I try to always keep in mind that I don’t know what someone else is going through. Just because I can’t see that they are in pain, doesn’t mean they aren’t, and at the end of the day it costs me nothing to be gracious and kind to others.

One of the strongest statements, especially when you consider the current socio-political atmosphere we live in, is to admit when you’ve made a mistake. There is nothing lost when it is approached with true humility, and everything to gain. And I don’t pretend to say it is easy to do, but it is still worth doing if for nothing else than for the peace it brings.

You can spend all of your time trying to fit in and trying to ride the wave of what’s currently popular, but you’ll never stand out until you’re willing to take a leap. Sometimes it won’t pay out–maybe people don’t understand or you’re ahead of your time–but it’s the evolution of what will make you great. If you’re willing to passionately pursue something to the point of excellence, the universe will make space for you.

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?

My parents let me be my weird little self.

They let me wear whatever strange combination of clothes I wanted to, which led to me often being referred to as Punky Brewster. When it was time to pick instruments for 5th grade band, they let me choose the brash saxophone instead of the dainty clarinet or flute. When we visited New Orleans as a family, I was thrilled to find that my zebra print pants fit right in. When I decided I wanted to block out a window in my bedroom and paint Van Gogh’s Cafe Terrace on it, no one stopped me.

They never told me to stand out. They didn’t encouraged me to be different from the people around me. We didn’t talk about who I wanted to be when I grew up, Instead they let me daydream and live in the colorful, imaginative world that existed inside my head. I was never pushed to be someone; I was just allowed to be.

I can see now that, in some ways, I was ill-prepared to face real life. Society baffled me as an early adult. There was a long time where I felt like my wings had been broken by an unforgiving stringent world I didn’t understand. But the deep independence and trust in myself was always there. By allowing me to just be myself for most of my childhood, I never doubted my own intuition. I always knew that the star guiding me existed within myself and could be trusted.

Contact Info:

• Website: ScandalousSoap.com Bathfizzandfoam.com
• Instagram: @scandaloussoap @bathfizzandfoam
• Facebook: Facebook.com/ScandalousSoap Facebook.com/bathfizzandfoam
• Youtube: @bathfizzandfoam