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Christmas 2021. They went out. I stayed home and made soap. Did you know the first bar of soap I ever made cut my stomach open too? I should explain how a grown man ends up in that situation. In January 2021 I was at home like everyone else. I had just wound down another business, and I was cleaning out my office to have something to do. At the bottom of a drawer I found an old A4 notepad. Years before, I had filled a page of it with product ideas. Things I thought a person could build a proper business around someday. Halfway down the list, in my own handwriting: soap for men. I had no memory of writing it. But sitting there in a locked-down house with nothing but time, I thought, right. Let's have a look at that. The normal way to start would be finding a manufacturer. I emailed soap factories abroad and asked for samples. A few answered. A few even took my money. Then nothing shipped. For months. Every soap factory on earth was flat out making hand sanitiser that year, and actual soap was the last thing on their minds. While I waited, I watched a video of a woman making soap in her kitchen. Oils, a scale, a stick blender. It did not look too complicated. I figured I would understand the product better if I made a batch myself. Purely research, I told myself. Amazon was about the only company still delivering to Ireland. So the ingredients came from Amazon. I made soap in my kitchen on the first day. It was not good. I want to be honest about that. Genuinely poor. But it was soap... I had actually created something out of nothing. And that was interesting to me. At the time we were not allowed to travel more than 5km from the house. There was nothing else to do. So I made soap the next day too. And the day after that... Within a few weeks I was making soap multiple times a day. Every surface in the kitchen had something curing on it. My wife watched all this and genuinely wondered (and verbalised) if I was having some kind of breakdown. Other people baked bread that year. Not me. Now. The stomach. Early on I had a romantic notion about making a bar with sand from the local beach and water from the Irish Sea. Natural exfoliation, I thought. Lovely. What I did not know is that the sand on that particular beach is mostly crushed shell and broken glass. I used the soap that evening. Dragged it across my stomach and opened the skin up like I had been in a bar fight. Lesson one, learned the hard way: knowing where an ingredient comes from is not the same as knowing what it does. That became the whole project, really. Finding out what every single thing in a bar of soap actually does. I tested constantly. At the worst of it I was taking hour long showers with seven or eight different bars lined up, washing one arm with one and the other arm with another, taking notes with wet hands. Constantly sniffing myself. There was a lamppost outside my house where the dads of the road met in the evenings for a socially distant beer. Standing two metres apart with cans, like this was a normal thing men did. I never arrived empty handed. There was always a bar or two in my jacket for them to smell and mock me about. My kids went to their remote classes with piles of soap in the background. And slowly, batch by batch, I started to understand how soap actually works. Which is something almost nobody who uses soap every day has ever been told. Here is the short version. Coconut oil is what gives soap its cleaning power and its big foamy lather. Nearly every mainstream soap and shower gel is heavy on it, because lather looks great in an ad and it is cheap. The catch is that coconut oil also dries out your skin. Use enough of it and the soap takes the dirt off you along with the natural oils your skin needs to be comfortable. You will not feel any of that in the shower. It shows up later. Tight skin. Itchy arms. That weird feeling on your back in the evening that most men put down to the weather, or the hard water, or getting older. A lot of the time it is just the soap. There is a second thing I found out, and this one annoyed me. There is an unwritten rule in commercial soap making that you keep shea butter at around one to three percent of a recipe. (look at where it falls on their ingredient lists if there at all). Not because more is bad for you. Because shea butter is expensive, and at industrial scale those percentages are the entire profit margin. Nobody told me the rule. I was a man alone in a kitchen reading that shea butter is very good for skin. So I put loads in. The recipe I eventually settled on is more than half olive oil and shea butter. The expensive half. That is the part that leaves your skin feeling comfortable after a shower instead of tight. Around it, three other oils, each with one job. Coconut for the clean and the lather. Castor for a nicer feel in the hand. Sustainably sourced palm to make a harder bar that lasts weeks longer in the shower. Five oils. Every one there for a reason. Nothing there for the label. And somewhere in the middle of all this, the manufacturer samples I had paid for finally started to arrive. Months late, in battered boxes. I used them for a week. And I realised something that quietly changed the entire plan. The soap from my kitchen was better. Not close. Better. I sat down with my phone calculator to try and figure out could you viably create a proper handmade business. That scaled. I thought so. Now. One of the lamppost dads will tell you the Guinness soap was his idea. That he stood there one evening, can in hand, and said you should make one out of Guinness. I honestly cannot remember if that happened. What I can tell you is this. When you make soap you dissolve the lye in a liquid. Usually water. But it can be nearly any liquid. And I had stout in the house. Of course I did. So I made a batch where the water was Guinness. At first it smelled so bad I thought I had made it wrong. Took me a while to figure out the value of curing a soap. Especially one made with beer... Curing lets the liquid content (and the beer smell) evaporate. Leaving a longer lasting, better performing soap. A few weeks later when I tried it in the shower. It was good. Properly good. The sugars in the stout gave it this rich lather, the smell was woody and spicy, the bar felt like something you could even pay money for. Lightbulb moment in the shower. The Black Stuff! I legged it out of the shower, sat down dripping at the computer, and googled whether Guinness had ever trademarked it. Slang for a pint of Guinness. "The black stuff". Nothing. They had not. And that is the day an idea became a company. And what this adventure has been called ever since. The Black Stuff. A soap business named after a pint. Later on I was even granted multiple trademarks on it too. Win. I launched that summer with six scents, all made by my own two hands, 54 bars at a time, because that is what my moulds held. I sold to America first. Partly because EU cosmetics paperwork is heavy for a one-man operation and I loathe admin. But mostly, if I am honest, because if it flopped over there, nobody in Ireland would ever have to know. I still didn't have much confidence in my product. I thought I would sell it to Irish Americans. Soap made from Guinness, soap made from Irish Rainwater and Waterfall water. Maybe a little gimmicky. About three customers (and a week) in, a Facebook message arrived. An American fella called Zayn. He liked the look of the products, he was travelling to Dublin, and could he buy from me in person. My wife was fairly sure this was how true crime documentaries start. I met him in town anyway, with his order in a bag, and bought him a pint of Guinness. Turned out he was a soap enthusiast. I did not know that was a thing. There are men who collect and trade handmade soap the way other men do whiskey, and there was a whole online group of them. That night he messaged me from his hotel. He had been smelling the soaps in his room. He loved them. He had posted a photo in the group. And could I meet him again tomorrow with a lot more, because his friends wanted some brought home. They invited me to the group, Craft Soap Reviews. I shared my story. It turned out my first hundred (maybe even a thousand) customers came out of that group. Men who had tried every handmade bar on the market and had precisely zero interest in the fact that mine was Irish. They bought it because others in the group were saying it was the best soap they'd ever tried. Really? My soap? Are you sure? I don't know what I'm doing lads. I'm making it up as I go. My scents are all made up by me. I've never done this before. I am simply making things that I like. Are you sure? Most of them are still customers five years later. I made every single bar we sold for the first eighteen months in my home. At one point my spreadsheet said I was thirty thousand euro in the hole on ingredients and packaging before I had earned a euro of it back. Eventually my wife looked around the house and said the sentence that ended the kitchen era. "I thought you were an entrepreneur? It looks like you have turned our house into a soap factory." She was right. So I moved it out. First to a small unit up the road with Davey, an old friend and the first person I ever hired. Then a year later to a proper workshop in Sandyford. There are 35 of us now. We make about a million bars a year. Every one still cold-processed, still cut by hand, still cured on racks for weeks because a rushed bar is a worse bar. Still 54 at a time. Same moulds I bought for the kitchen. The exact same recipes. The exact same methods. Somewhere along the way we ended up with twelve scents. And the question I get asked more than any other, in messages, at our workshop, and more than once by a man in an airport, is always the same one. Which one should I start with? The honest answer is that I cannot tell you. Nobody can. A scent description only gets you so far. You do not know a bar is your bar until it has been in your shower for a week. So we stopped trying to answer the question. We put together a starter box instead. Six of our most popular bars, three scrubby ones and three smooth, priced at what the six soaps cost on their own. The deodorant and the soap dish in the box are along for nothing. It's called the clean craic bundle. Grab it here: https://theblackstuff.com/pages/why-tbs John The Black Stuff, Dublin P.S. Everything in the box is covered by our No Duds Guarantee. Here is what actually happens with our scents: most people end up loving all six, and the favourite tends to be whichever bar is in the shower right now. But if we are wrong about one, we will swap it for more of whichever you love most. Free, no returns, no forms. Keep the odd one out and give it to someone you half-like. P.P.S. A customer in Tennessee once reviewed one of our bars with the words "smell grows on you." We put it on the website. That is the kind of operation this is.