Welcome. I am writing this on November 5th of 2019 (but posting on Dec 2nd 2019), when we are officially in the month and year when Blade Runner (1982) movie script was set and when I am finally close to launching various lines of plastic free brands. What are my qualifications? Please read my About page where I overshare my story of how I went on a very strict plastic free lifestyle in March of 2014. If it comes packaged in plastic, I don't buy it. 

This is my very first post on my new store and I want to announce a product I have been working on for the past 6 months. Its not the only one nor is it going to be the first one available but its an important one I am excited about. It a stainless steel travel soapbox.

Yes, you read that right, a travel soapbox. Yes, so you can take your soap bar places, soap to wash your body and smell clean. When I tell my friends about it I usually get this particular stare which I can read their thoughts: "wtf is wrong with Miguel.. ??, he's never going to make money from that.. WhyTF would anyone wan't a soap box?... huh? is he serious??" Every once in a while you will get the person that says "yes, please, I've been looking for that... wow, awesome." They get it. Well, this product is for them. 

So why did spend so much time, effort and money designing this?

Reason 1.

Because cheap plastic travel soapboxes break and become trash too easily. As an experienced world traveller whose been to about 35 countries and clocked 2+ years of traveling abroad, I need a soapbox that lasts more than just a few trips. I need something super cool that I ideally keep for the rest of my life and stainless steel is the most durable non plastic material I can rely on. There are millions of other people who've travelled way more than me and they likely understand the cheap plastic soap carrier problem too. This is for you.

Reason 2. 

Because liquid soap is not an option and soap bars are the best plastic free option. I get this a lot from those skeptical friends looking for a way undermine the idea. "Why not just use liquid soap..." Well, because liquid soap is sold and dispensed in plastic and the whole point is not to buy more plastic. The airport security liquid allowance is only 150 ml which isn't a lot of soap for a long trip. Once the liquid soap runs out its quite hard to refill it. Ever had liquid soap spill in your bags? It sucks! You never find liquid soap sold in anything but plastic and its almost never sold to refill unless you are lucky enough to be traveling near a zerowaste shop in Ubud or Canggu, Bali. Liquid soap products require plastic because the bottle needs to be squeezed in order to get the soap out. However, bars of soap are available in every corner of the earth and are almost always packaged in paper and they don't require plastic nor will they go spilling out all over your bag nor will they limit it to 150 ml thru the airport. Bam, no more liquid soap, no more plastic!

Reason 3. 

Because stainless steel is more durable than the other non plastic options and cool! There are cheap tin boxes that you can use for soap. You ever use a cheap tin box? It works until it gets super wrecked and starts to oxidize and it doesn't work any more. I personally want things that you pay for once and last many years. I don't like to buy things that are only meant to work for a short time and tin is a temporary cheap non-solution. No thanks! I will take my rust-free stainless steel option designed to last all my world travels. 

Reason 4. 

Because I hate scummy soap on arrival. Every traveller knows this scenario: You take that last shower before you get on the road and then immediately place the wet soap back in the travel case, then inside your toiletry bag and in your luggage or backpack and hit the road. This is the problem with the plastic soapbox, by the time you arrive at your destination the soap is a wet scummy sloppy mess. This is because plastic soap boxes seal to tightly and don't allow the soap to dry. So, I designed mine with tiny evaporation holes just small enough so that excess water doesn't go spilling out too fast and create a big mess in your toiletry bag. These holes reduce the moisture inside such that the soap almost always arrives dry. I recently saw a travel soapbox that someone else designed to address this same problem however it was plastic, I just can't.

Reason 5. 

I LOVE SOAP BARS and you buy them all over the world. I take soaps very seriously. Besides the fact that I love smelling clean I love being clean. I blame my mother for this. While growing up in Peru she was rightly obsessed with making sure I didn't touch public knobs or handles because of germs and made me wash my hands a lot. So I developed a hand washing OCD behavior that I definitely don't mind. Because of this I love the smell of new soaps and is something that never gets old. So when I travel I collect artisan soaps. I will get stuck in the soap section smelling fragrances and feeling textures. I brought back about 30 soap bars from my last trip to Turkey. Soap making is an ancient product traced back to 1550 BC Egypt and staying clean is an essential part of being a proper human. Thus, soap formulas and fragrances are an endless art form humanity keeps culturing. By creating an awesome stainless steel travel soap box I am simply honoring one of my passions and an ancient human tradition, soap bars!

Finally.. I already spent too many hour and dollars designing this already and its happening regardless. I need this alternative and so do other's who practice plastic-free lifestyle principles and travel. 

So here it is.

Presenting The Dream Flyer Travel Soapbox V 1.0 prototype:

I had this prototype for a few months now and its been field tested enough to make significant improvements on the next model. More on that shortly. 

The story:

I started researching the market in mid 2018 and didn't find a single soapbox product that fit my needs so I decided to design my own from scratch. I considered white labeling the product but I could not find any suppliers anywhere that sold anything even close to what I was looking for. I would only find the cheap tin or plastic boxes and I already know those don't work. In 2019 I did find one stainless steel piece for a particular fancy french soap brand which was out of stock for months and one from another soap maker in India which was sold out and the owner disappeared.

I was really inspired by looking up vintage soap boxes on Ebay and it was clear that in the old days people respected their soap in beautiful silver travel soapboxes with intricate details and clasps. They looked like heirlooms, something you'd pass down to family. I spent time in Turkey where they seem to take their soaps seriously probably due to the hammam culture. They had beautiful antique travel soap cases with holes to allow the soap to dry. 

So I started working on this project to solve my own problems and designed this product from scratch. I am not an industrial designer or a metal fabricator so there was a lot I had to learn about what it takes to make machine pressed stainless steel shapes. I am working with an Indian stainless steel supplier who I had worked with the year before when I made a plastic free store for SeaLegacy which was almost a successful project, it just didn't get promoted nor mentioned on their socials when it was finished. I designed a cool stainless steel bento box together and added their whale logo to it. This supplier respects my strict plastic free production demands even down to the shipping so I trust his work and we became friends after so much going back and forth. He will be the first person I visit when I get to Mumbai next year.  

You might say, why India? Because its was incredibly hard to find someone in the United States to produce this for any thing close to reasonable. I wouldn't be able to start up otherwise and even using Indian labor it turns out designing a stainless steel anything from scratch is incredibly expensive regardless. I tried contacting stainless steel manufacturing in the US and this was simply too small of an operation to even consider. Making stainless steel shapes require making a custom iron molds and that costs thousands of dollars and it has to be done right. There is dye maker that engineers the mold so one sheet of stainless steel can be pressed into the desired shape with necessary folds, edges, corners and all the other small details. Making a mold is a precise art and it takes a skilled dye maker to do it right. I compared the costs of making a mold in China and they were similar so I went with the Indian manufacturer because he was way easier to communicate with and we had already worked together. 

The Current R&D

So V 1.0 of the Dream Flyer Travel Soapbox had a list of things that went wrong. The size was the biggest fail. Finding the appropriate universal size for a soap bar wasn't as easy to determine as I originally thought. Yes, I did try to just copy the dimensions of the plastic ones but their sizes were also all over the place. I also wanted a specific indent design on to top lid that took up some room from the height. The drain ridges on the bottom were too small and the soap was getting stuck too often. I had made the width too small and the corners too round so even a new Dr. Bronners Soap Bar wouldn't fit because its corners were too square. In the end the whole thing had to be way wider and way shorter in height with better ridges. Now the whole evaporation hole situation is still something I'm tinkering. Should they go on the bottom instead of the top lid?? Maybe I will have both. 

I brought this up to some of my trusted friends and many would start coming up with these ideas where they were suggesting small drain pans and blah blah blah and I was like.. "YO, its just a travel soap box tho.." Based on my experience thus far of what it takes to develop custom stainless steel molds and shapes their ideas would start to near a $10k worth of testing and development. In the end the current version is still way better than the crappy conventional plastic soap carrier and frankly I want to get this out as soon as possible. 

So when is it available?

As of the date and time when I am writing this I am waiting to receive the V 1.2 prototype which I hope will be final and I can place the order. I will need to raise funds to get my first batching (as of this posting date I think I got it). I am already a couple of g's in the hole in development and I am considering doing a Kickstarter campaign to get it off the ground. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in helping out. There is a chance I will have it available by Xmas. Stay tuned.

Finally I Can "Get On My Soapbox": 

The result of this product has a triple entendre for me. The About section of this site over shares my entire story around my ultra strict plastic free packaging habits since 2014. I've refined my practices over the years. I have a strong philosophies around plastic free living because its what I am dedicated to and mostly lead by example. I'm already too aware of the plastic consumerist matrix so sometimes I get a wound up about the topic and maybe even preachy, thus I have been accused of "getting on my soapbox." Well, I am about to double down with a real soap box now. Its about to get real my peeps.

With love, your homie forever @miguelsolari23