Soap Company O’LIVE Aims To Provide Soaps That Promote A Natural Lifestyle
Soap Company O’LIVE Aims To Provide Soaps That Promote A Natural Lifestyle. O’LIVE was started in 2011, literally on the founders’ kitchen counter. The founders started making natural organic handmade soap in their kitchen with a batch of just under 10 soaps so that they could move towards a natural lifestyle and above all aid to help relieve its daughter’s eczema. Shortly after the first batch, Zikhona started sourcing olive oil, and pure essential oils from local farmers, as well as unrefined raw shea butter from Ghana.
In 2013 the company started selling at its local farmers market and were supplying a few stores due to increasing demand. The company also introduced more handcrafted products in its range and a year later it was supplying more stores as a result. In 2016 Sipho left his job as an engineer so that he could join the company full time and consequently they moved to bigger premises outside the home. What had started as a hobby, the business had now grown from producing a few handmade bars per day to now hundreds of natural organic handmade soaps per day.
It wasn’t long after its move to its current premises that the company started taking commissions for private label soaps for other clients. O’LIVE currently produces private label bars of handmade soaps for other companies like skincare brands and olive estates. The company is passionate about reducing the amount of chemicals and synthetics people unwittingly use on their skin, and its mission is to create organic and natural, handmade skincare goodness.
The company is in love with the uniqueness and nature that is the Cape Floral Kingdom. Most of its supplies comes from here and some are grown by small-scale farmers in rural communities. It values the ability to source directly from the growers, as it believes this has direct impact on growing the local economy.
