Rocky Mountain Soap opens first in Saskatchewan outlet at Midtown

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Businesses and non-profit organizations regularly open and move in Saskatoon. Today, the StarPhoenix talks to Karina Birch, who opened the 13th Rocky Mountain Soap outlet in Canada and the first in Saskatchewan at Midtown Plaza in December, with her husband Cam Baty.

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The local opening came just ahead of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the first Rocky location in Canmore, Alta. in January 2000. Their workshop, head office and manufacturing continue to be located in Canmore.

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Rocky Mountain Soap specializes in natural personal care products including soaps, face creams, hair and body care products, and much more, using simple ingredients.

The company’s other store locations include Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Toronto. There are plans to open two more stores in Ontario in the near future.

Q: Why did you open in Saskatoon now?

A: We’ve been getting a lot of customers from Saskatchewan and Saskatoon in particular that come and spend some of their holidays out in the Bow Valley in Canmore and Banff. Over these last 25 years we’ve been accumulating some loyal customers. We’ve had lots of customer requests for a store in Saskatoon for a long time. And then finally it was the right opportunity for us.

We’re starting into growth mode again. A couple years past COVID, we embarked on a rebrand. We took the last two years to determine where we want the brand to go in the future with brand identity and visuals as well as packaging and store design.

Saskatoon was the opportunity to showcase the start of many more changes to come as the brand evolves. Midtown is our first new store in a new centre with the rebrand.

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I grew up in Alberta and Cam grew up in Manitoba. We used to spend our summers in Saskatchewan south of Saskatoon. All of my dad’s family is from Saskatchewan. A lot of them are in Saskatoon now. So I’m very familiar with the city and some of the surrounding areas. We still have lots of family there. It feels like a personal connection to Saskatoon specifically.

Q: What is Rocky Mountain Soap?

A: We are a natural personal care brand. We manufacture all of our products in Canmore, Alta. We do all of our own research and development, manufacturing and fulfillment, all out of our workshop and offices in Canmore. Everything is made here and sourced here, and then we ship to all of our stores.

We have 13, soon to be 15 retail locations, and then we sell online. And then the third part of our business is selling to hotels and restaurants and WestJet. We’re on all the WestJet planes in their bathrooms as well as some signature hotels and restaurants within Canada.

We strongly feel with our connection to the outdoors, living in Canmore, that the more people are finding a connection to nature, the best chance we have of preserving the Earth, and so we use natural personal care as a vehicle for pursuing that mission.

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It’s important to us that we’re showcasing the pristine environment that we live in, that we’re highlighting the natural ingredients that we use and all the farmer stories of where some of our ingredients are sourced.

We love sourcing from Canadian farmers. We love telling those stories and finding cool ingredients locally. It all comes down to this idea that the more we can build human connections with the natural world, the better chance we have of preserving it.

Q: What are your top-selling products?

A: What we’re famous for is our soap and our skin care. Those are the two categories that are the largest for us. We find that the soap is an easy entry point, especially the bar soaps. They are just an unparalleled experience in the shower. They have creamy and rich lather, hydrating, and they smell great. Our bar soaps are definitely what people keep coming back to us for. It’s just a classic product for us.

But one of our best sellers, actually our No. 1 seller, is our face cream. What we’re also known for is we have a very simple collection of skin care products that customers love. It’s premium and affordable and high-quality ingredients, simple ingredients and highly effective.

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So we have customers that are switching from much more expensive skin care who try our natural face cream and they are absolutely hooked. It wasn’t intended. We always thought that we’d be a soap company, but we just stumbled across this award-winning formula with our face cream and now that’s become our No. 1 seller. I think that was probably 12 years ago that we launched our face cream.

Q: Do you have some new product releases?

A: We launched our winter soap collection, which is two ultra-hydrating body scrub bars. Those are something new we’ve never done before that we’re very excited about because we’ve been using them now for a number of months and everyone is addicted to them.

Then in May we (will be offering) our solid shampoo and solid conditioner. They are waterless concentrates in bar form. It’s taken us almost three years to master the formula but we finally got to a place that we absolutely love.

We will be competing with our current liquid shampoo and conditioner with the launch of our solid shampoo and conditioner. Everybody we give it to is just completely addicted to it. We know that there’s a winning formula there we’re excited to offer our customers.

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Q: You are committed to using simple ingredients?

A: Simple ingredients are important to me personally because what I’ve learned formulating natural for 25 years now is that it’s very easy to overcomplicate a formula.

In cosmetics and personal care as soon as you get overly complicated, the formula just takes away on you. Now you’re having to do more preservatives or find different emulsifiers or adjust the pH and now all of a sudden it’s even more complicated. But if we keep it simple, what I’ve learned is that we have more of the ingredients that we want and less of the ingredients we don’t want and therefore that’s been the secret sauce to our formulation.

Because a higher concentration of quality healthy ingredients has an impact on how the products feel on the skin and our customers love it.

Q: What sets you apart?

A: The thing that sets us apart is our commitment to naturals. We’ve been pioneering natural ingredients and formulations for 25 years. It’s what we’re known for.

What also sets us apart is just the experience that we deliver. We’re known for great customer service. When you come in our stores you’re just going to get a great experience and part of that is the investment that we make in our training for our teams in the store. Customer service has been a massive focus for us over the 25 years, and we built that into all of our customer experience touch points, but specifically in-store; and our customer online support is fantastic.

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We have large sinks in each of our stores where we build experiences for customers to just find unique combinations of our products at the sink.

We find interesting combinations. We pair some of our Everything Wash combined with a little bit of our bath salts and a little bit of a body oil to just come up with a hand scrub experience at the sink. It’s a place for us to have fun and try different combinations of products at the sink. I would say that that really sets us apart as well.

Q: You offer membership perks?

A: There are big benefits to joining our community. We have toxin-free events throughout the year where you can come in with no purchase necessary and receive a full-sized product for free. We like to give away product a couple times a year, no strings attached, because we want to get certain products into people’s hands because we think they’re going to love them.

When you sign up to be a part of our community then you are getting access to those kinds of perks. You also get early access to some of our launches. You are basically the first to know what’s new and what’s coming out.

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This interview has been edited and condensed.

Rocky Mountain Soap

Owners: Karina Birch and Cam Baty
Address: Midtown Plaza (201 – First Avenue South)
Hours: Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Phone: 306-952-1977
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.rockymountainsoap.com
Check: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube

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