There’s something magical that happens when you know the hands that crafted something you use every day. Your morning routine transforms from a mundane task into a moment of connection. Your soap bar becomes more than a cleansing tool. It becomes a link to the women whose skill, passion, and artistry brought it to life.

At Unwrapped, being female-led isn’t just about who’s at the top. It’s about the incredible women whose hands shape every bar, whose knowledge guides every formula, and whose care is literally embedded in every product that makes its way to your bathroom shelf.

The Heart of Our Workshop

Step into our workshop on any given day, and you’ll find women who treat soap-making not just as work, but as art. These aren’t factory workers following rigid scripts. They’re skilled artisans who understand that each batch of soap is alive, responsive to humidity, temperature, even the season.

Meet Fatima, our head soap maker, who can tell by touch whether the saponification process is progressing correctly. She’s been working with us since our early days, and her hands have shaped thousands of bars. When she blends the oils for our Ylang Ylang & Geranium soap, she’s not just following a recipe. She’s using years of experience to adjust for the day’s conditions, ensuring each batch meets our standards for that perfect, creamy lather.

Then there’s Aisha, who specializes in our more complex formulations. She’s the artist behind our Coffee soap, carefully balancing the coffee-infused oils so they provide just the right amount of exfoliation without being too harsh. Her background in chemistry means she understands the science, but her intuition guides the art.

Where Tradition Meets Innovation

Our soap makers come from diverse backgrounds, but they share a common thread: deep respect for traditional methods combined with an eagerness to innovate sustainably. Many learned aspects of their craft from mothers and grandmothers who made soap for their families, using techniques passed down through generations.

Sarah, who handles our essential oil blending, grew up helping her grandmother make traditional Aleppo-style soaps. She brings this ancestral knowledge to our modern formulations, understanding how different oils behave not just chemically, but intuitively.

When she creates the blend for our Lavender soap, she’s drawing on memories of her grandmother’s garden, of learning which lavender flowers were best for soap-making, of understanding that the essential oil should be added at just the right temperature to preserve its therapeutic properties.

The Daily Dance of Creation

Each day in our workshop is different, but there’s a rhythm to the work that reflects both precision and creativity. The morning usually begins with checking the soaps from the previous day, how they’ve set, how the colours have developed, whether they’re ready for the next stage of the process.

Maryam, our quality control specialist, runs her hands over each bar, looking for any imperfections, testing the hardness, ensuring that what bears our name meets our standards. She’s developed an almost supernatural ability to predict how a soap will age, how it will perform, how it will feel on the skin.

“Every soap tells a story,” she says, “and part of my job is making sure it’s a story we’re proud to tell.”

The Art of Scent

Creating the signature scents for our soaps requires both technical knowledge and artistic sensibility. Our fragrance specialist, Layla, works with essential oils like a perfumer works with precious ingredients.

For our Black Amber soap, she spent weeks perfecting the blend, understanding how the warm, sensual base notes would interact with the natural charcoal powder, how the scent would develop and change as the soap cured, how it would perform when the bar gets wet and creates lather.

“Scent is emotion,” Layla explains. “When someone uses our Jasmine soap in the morning, I want them to feel uplifted before they even realize why. That’s the magic of working with natural essential oils. They don’t just smell beautiful; they affect how we feel.”

Problem-Solvers and Innovators

Our women aren’t just following established processes. They’re constantly improving them. When we wanted to incorporate desert sand into our candle containers, it was Nadia, our production manager, who figured out the perfect ratios, the ideal curing conditions, the techniques that would ensure each container was both beautiful and functional.

When customers asked for travel-sized products, it was the collective creativity of our team that developed our Travel Essentials set, figuring out how to maintain the quality and performance of our full-sized products in smaller formats perfect for on-the-go use.

Beyond the Workshop: Community Impact

What we’re most proud of is how our commitment to female-led production creates ripple effects in our community. Our soap makers don’t just work for us. They’re entrepreneurs, community leaders, and role models.

Khadija, who manages our packaging operations, has used her experience with us to start her own small business creating sustainable packaging solutions for other local brands. Amina, one of our original team members, now teaches soap-making workshops in her neighbourhood, sharing both the technical skills and the entrepreneurial confidence she’s gained.

This is what female-led production really means. Not just employment, but empowerment. Not just jobs, but the transfer of skills, knowledge, and confidence that allows women to build their own futures.

The Knowledge Keepers

Our women are the guardians of something precious: the knowledge of how to create beautiful, effective products using traditional methods and natural ingredients. In a world increasingly dominated by industrial manufacturing and synthetic ingredients, they’re keeping alive the skills that sustained communities for centuries.

When Zahra teaches a new team member how to tell when soap has reached the perfect trace, that moment when oils and lye have emulsified just enough to hold together but not so much that the mixture becomes too thick to pour, she’s passing on knowledge that can’t be learned from books or videos. It’s embodied wisdom, learned through touch, timing, and experience.

A Personal Invitation

Next time you hold one of our soap bars, take a moment to appreciate the journey it took to reach you. Think about Fatima’s experienced hands guiding the saponification process, Aisha’s careful formulation ensuring the perfect balance of oils, Sarah’s artistry in blending the essential oils, Maryam’s careful quality control, and all the other women whose skill and care are literally embedded in that simple bar.

You’re not just holding soap. You’re holding the embodiment of female entrepreneurship, traditional craftsmanship, and the belief that business can be a force for empowerment, sustainability, and beauty.

Because at Unwrapped, we believe the most beautiful products are those made by people who love what they do, who take pride in their craft, and who understand that every bar of soap is an opportunity to make someone’s day a little more luxurious, a little more connected, and a little more beautiful. Our women don’t just make our soaps. They are our soaps, infusing each bar with their skill, their care, and their unwavering commitment to creating something truly special.