Behind the Handmade Business: What Happens When Your Handmade Business Starts to Outgrow Your Hands?

There is a strange milestone in a handmade business that nobody really prepares you for.

You spend the beginning trying desperately to get people to notice you.

You make the products. You take the pictures. You build the website. You pack the vehicle for markets. You set up the tables. You talk to customers. You come home exhausted, unload everything, and then wake up and do it again.

And through all of that, you hope for one thing:

Growth.

More customers. More orders. More stores carrying your products. Bigger events. More people discovering what you’ve created.

Then, if you’re fortunate, it starts happening.

And eventually you discover something nobody really tells you about growth:

Sometimes your business can begin growing faster than your hands can keep up with it.

That’s where we find ourselves right now at Naturally Lathered Tallow Co.

And we’re still figuring out what comes next.

The Problem We Used to Dream About Having

When Naturally Lathered began, production was relatively simple because our business was relatively small.

We made products. We sold them. We made some more.

As we’ve grown, that cycle has become much more complicated.

Today, we’re no longer making products for just one place.

We’re producing for our website, our permanent market locations, wholesale retailers and an increasingly busy schedule of fairs, festivals and large events.

Meanwhile, the product line itself has grown.

There is tallow balm to make. Soap to pour and cure. Lotion to emulsify. Shampoo bars to press. Face products to formulate. Hair products, balms, scrubs and seasonal products to manufacture.

Then everything has to be filled, cooled, cut, cured, labeled, packaged, inventoried, transported and eventually sold.

And somewhere in between all of that, someone still needs to answer emails, order ingredients, maintain the website, create advertisements, post on social media, develop new products, manage bookkeeping, prepare for events and actually run the company.

That “someone” is still mostly us.

At some point, you look around and realize something:

The business isn’t struggling because people don’t want what you’re making. The business is struggling to physically make enough of what people want.

That’s a very different problem.

When the Owners Become the Bottleneck

We recently came across a concept in small-business literature that hit remarkably close to home.

Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited and Beyond the E-Myth, has written extensively about the difference between working in your business and working on your business.

The idea is simple.

When a company is small, the owner can be the person doing almost everything. But eventually the same thing that helped build the business—the owner’s willingness to do everything—can become the thing preventing it from growing.

That realization stings a little when you’re a handmade business.

Because our hands are part of the story.

We aren’t simply buying finished products, putting our name on them and shipping them out. We formulate our products. We make them. We obsess over them. When something isn’t right, we’re the ones standing there trying to figure out why.

That’s part of what Naturally Lathered is.

But there are still only so many hours in a day.

And there are only so many products four hands can make.

“Just Make Bigger Batches” Isn’t Really the Answer

It sounds simple from the outside.

If you’re selling more, just make more.

We’ve learned that handmade manufacturing doesn’t work quite that neatly.

A larger batch requires more raw materials. Larger equipment. More containers. More storage. More space to work. More finished-goods inventory. More labels. More cash tied up before a single product from that batch is sold.

Soap presents its own challenge because we can’t simply decide we need more tomorrow and make it tonight. Cold-process soap needs time to cure.

Other products require careful temperature control, sanitation, weighing, mixing, filling and quality checks.

And increasing the size of a batch doesn’t necessarily make all of the work surrounding it disappear.

Five hundred jars still need five hundred lids.

Five hundred containers still need five hundred labels.

Five hundred finished products still have to go somewhere.

Scaling production isn’t simply making a bigger pot of something.

It’s building an entirely different system around that pot.

The Financial Catch-22 of Growing

This may be one of the least glamorous parts of growing a small business.

Growth costs money.

More inventory requires more ingredients.

More ingredients require more cash.

Larger production may require better equipment.

More equipment requires more cash.

Eventually you may need more space.

And more help.

And shelving.

And packaging.

And insurance.

And countless other things nobody sees when they pick up the finished jar at your booth.

That’s where a growing business can find itself in an uncomfortable middle ground.

You’re too big to comfortably operate the way you did when you started…

…but you’re not yet big enough to effortlessly afford all of the infrastructure that would make the next stage easier.

Sales can be growing while cash still feels painfully tight because you’re constantly feeding that growth.

It is an unusual position to be in.

You’re grateful.

You’re excited.

You’re exhausted.

And occasionally you’re standing in the middle of the production room wondering how on earth you’re going to get everything made.

Sometimes all four feelings happen at once.

Does Growing Mean Giving Up “Handmade”?

This is the question we think about more than almost any other.

We have big ambitions for Naturally Lathered Tallow Co.

We’ve never hidden that.

We don’t want Naturally Lathered to remain a tiny business simply because that’s where it started. We want to build a respected company capable of serving customers far beyond our little corner of Pennsylvania.

But we also don’t want growth to erase what made this company special in the first place.

So we’re beginning to ask a different question.

Instead of asking:

“How can we keep doing everything ourselves?”

Maybe the better question is:

“Which things actually need to be done by us?”

Those aren’t the same question.

Does putting a label on a jar ourselves make the tallow inside it more handmade?

Does spending hours folding boxes improve the formulation?

Does personally counting hundreds of containers make the finished product better?

Probably not.

Our time may be far more valuable developing formulas, making products, controlling quality, sourcing ingredients and talking with the customers who made this growth possible.

Perhaps preserving a handmade company doesn’t mean the founders must personally perform every task forever.

Perhaps it means identifying the parts that make the product ours and refusing to compromise them.

Systems Aren’t the Enemy of Handmade

This is another lesson we’re beginning to understand.

For a long time, “systems” sounded like something belonging to giant corporations.

Standard operating procedures. Production schedules. Inventory forecasting. Batch records. Defined workstations. Delegation.

None of that sounds particularly romantic.

But neither is realizing at 10:00 at night that you’re nearly out of something you need for tomorrow.

The more we’ve grown, the more obvious it has become that organization isn’t the opposite of craftsmanship.

It may actually be what protects craftsmanship as a company grows.

When a process is documented, it can be repeated.

When inventory is tracked properly, ingredients can be ordered before they become an emergency.

When production is scheduled based on actual demand, the loudest problem of the day doesn’t always get to decide what gets made.

And when repetitive tasks can eventually be handed to someone else, the people responsible for creating the products have more time to focus on the work that actually requires their experience.

Maybe growing a handmade company isn’t about becoming less handmade.

Maybe it’s about becoming more intentional about where the hands matter.

We Haven’t Figured This Out Yet

Normally business articles are supposed to end with the author explaining the solution.

We can’t honestly do that with this one.

We’re living it.

Naturally Lathered Tallow Co. is approaching its third year in business, and we’re experiencing growing pains in real time.

We’re looking at our production processes.

We’re looking at equipment.

We’re looking at purchasing larger quantities of raw materials.

We’re thinking about space, staffing, inventory, efficiency and which jobs we need to stop doing ourselves.

We’re learning where our bottlenecks are.

And we’re trying to make those decisions without losing the character of the company we’ve worked so hard to build.

There will probably be some mistakes.

Actually, knowing us, there will definitely be some mistakes.

But that’s part of building something.

Maybe This Is What Success Looks Like Before It Looks Like Success

It’s easy to look at an established company and see the finished version.

You don’t see the years when the owners were doing everything themselves.

You don’t see the production room that suddenly became too small.

You don’t see the nights when there weren’t enough hours to finish everything.

You don’t see the uncomfortable decision to buy equipment you aren’t completely sure you can afford yet.

You don’t see the first person they trusted to help make something they had previously done themselves.

You just see the company after all of those decisions have already been made.

We’re somewhere before that point.

And maybe someday we’ll look back at this period and recognize it as one of the most important stages in Naturally Lathered’s story.

Right now, though?

It mostly feels like we’re trying to make enough soap.

And tallow.

And lotion.

And shampoo bars.

And everything else.

But that’s the real story behind a handmade business.

Sometimes growth doesn’t arrive looking like success.

Sometimes it arrives looking like a production schedule you can’t quite keep up with, ingredients disappearing faster than you can reorder them and two people realizing that the little company they started has become bigger than four hands can comfortably hold.

So now we have to learn how to build the hands around it.

And we’ll let you know how that goes.