On Twitter, Sweet Soaps hawks everything from bacon soap to personalized gifts
Everyone from new moms looking to set up play dates to large retail corporations trying to sell a product has embraced the website as one of the most powerful megaphones of the cyberworld. Even President Obama “tweets.”
Ellen Cagnassola of Fanwood is no exception. When faced with the choice 12 years ago of entering the work force or staying home with her young daughter, Cagnassola, founder of Sweet Soaps, chose both personalized gifts.
Now she’s literally bringing home the bacon with her bacon-inspired soap (no, it’s not made with bacon fat, and its scent is like maple syrup). She does custom-made photo-embedded soaps and other poured and molded glycerin soaps.
She does it all while using Twitter and the internet to promote the products she makes in her small, home-based soap factory. With the help of two part-timers, she operates SweetSoaps from her basement, transforming a sparse cinderblock and concrete room into what she calls “something like a mad scientist lab” filled to the brim with tables, molds, containers full of supplies and a giant wax melting pot.
Mitsu Yasukawa/ The Star-Ledger
Cagnassola talked with The Star-Ledger recently about how she manages her home-based business and uses social networking sites to make it what it is today. She has lots of ideas for how others can become entrepreneurs without ever leaving home.
Research as much as you can online and find a need and address it. Be unique and fill a niche. And don’t feel like you have to know that much about business. When I started I didn’t have a business degree I had never taken a marketing class, but you really don’t need all that. Be patient, learn and listen and utilize all the technology out there. I worked hard at doing it for 12 years, and now I finally feel like I know a little something.
Today is my 33rd happy birthday
The first birthday celebration of mine that I remember is when I was in class four and we were in Kholapur, Maharashtra. Those were the days when non-Maharashtrians could also live in Maharashtra. I remember my father taking me to a small time smuggler operating out of his house to buy me a nice pair of trousers. Apparently this man visited Singapore and brought back to India small items which he would sell at a higher price because of the novelty factor.
Back then we were living off my father’s Armyman salary so new clothes could be bought only for Diwali and birthdays. And my father, like all fathers, wanted the best for his son – a nylon trouser.
My mother on her part took us to the temple in the morning, and made halwa for breakfast.
Since cakes were costly, we would sing Happy Birthday in front of a kadai full of halwa.
Just in case you didn’t know the here is the full lyrics of the Happy Birthday song:
Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear ________________
Happy birthday to you
Happy long life to you, Happy long life to you
Happy long life dear _________________
Happy long life to you
May god bless you, May god bless you
May god bless dear ______________
May god bless you
Though nobody in my family knew the happy birthday song lyrics, we loved singing it together. Like this:
Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Rajan
Happy birthday to you
La la la la la la, la la la la la
La la la la Rajan
La la la la la
La la la la, la la la la
La la la la Rajan
La la la la
With time the clothes my parents bought didn’t suit my taste. And they started giving me money to buy my own birthday clothes. I didn’t realize how I had snatched from them a moment of joy they loved to experience.
With time, mother lost her powers to take me to the temple. I was a grown up now and couldn’t be spotted in a temple. Mother’s halwa on the birthday morning became a mere formality and on one of the birthdays I even remember saying: “Can you just give me some toast? Halwa in the mornings somehow suffocates me.”
That day I broke her heart and stole her moment of joy. Back then, I hadn’t realized that the light in her eyes when I sat down to eat halwa on my birthday morning and she sat across me, was love and not the window’s reflection.
What goes around, comes around they say.
The last few days, I had been worried about spending my 33rd birthday all alone in Gurgaon – at least Rs 18,000 and 1800 kilometers away from people who love me.
Considering that timely calls – at 12 midnight – on one’s birthday are good enough consolation I waited for the calls last night. A call from my wife was ruled out because she was traveling by train and was reaching Madurai (where my mother stays) in the early morning.
Even as I waited for the calls, exactly at 11 p.m. last night (on the eve of my birthday) the Airtel Network conked out and there was no signal on my phone. I checked with a few of my Delhi/Gurgaon friends who were online and they confirmed the outage. At 12.40, the network came back….but my guess is that by then those that loved me had given up and gone to bed.
Since Rekha reached my home early, and my mother got busy with her grand daughter – our daughter Rhea – she also forgot to call me on my birthday.
As I said, today is my birthday and nobody who loves me is with me. Even my girl friend is in Mumbai