About

I got turned down for a job making soap

In 2001 and 2002 I was working at a rock quarry outside Canmore, Alberta. I had an RCMP application in and figured the quarry was decent physical training while I waited.

My girlfriend's (at the time) mom worked at the Rocky Mountain Soap Company, and when they moved production facilities they needed an extra pair of hands. It was a two-day job, mostly me and their soap maker hauling stuff between buildings. We talked the whole time. He mentioned he was leaving soon.

So at the end of the second day I asked the owner if I could have the job.

He said no, they were looking for an engineer.

I went home, found some basic instructions on the internet (this was before YouTube existed), bought olive oil and lye at the grocery store, ordered a digital scale online back when that was a hard thing to do, and made my first batch.

Then I made soap for sixteen years without selling any

I made it for myself, mostly. I never liked the Irish Spring I grew up on. Sometimes I gave bars away as gifts. That was the whole business plan for a decade and a half, ie not a business at all.

In the meantime I did other things. From 2003 to 2011 I was a collision repair technician (autobody mechanic) and I hold a Red Seal in the trade. In 2011 I left the shop, started over at the bottom of the hospitality industry, swallowed a lot of pride and did a lot of undesirable jobs, and eventually joined the opening team at the Shameful Tiki Room in Vancouver in 2013. I managed the bar for 7.5 years before retiring (temporarily) from bartending in August 2020. I won a couple of bartending competitions along the way, and the bar took Best Cocktail Experience four years running at the Golden Owl Awards while I was at the helm. In 2022 I was lured back into the bartending world to run a Tiki themed night on Sundays at the Sons of Vancouver distillery in North Vancouver, which I did before re-retiring from bartending again in 2026.

Cocktails and soap are both a mix of science and art. I've always had a penchant for interesting combinations of flavours and aromas, and that drives how I do both.

Why I started this in 2018

By then I'd been running someone else's bar for five years, doing what I'd call inter-preneur work, the kind that mostly benefits the owner. I wanted to build something of my own.

But more than that, I wanted Port Coquitlam to have it.

I like towns that have cool little artisanal shops where things are actually made. PoCo has no shortage of American corporations. It has fewer places where somebody is in the back, making the thing they sell you. I wanted to add one.

That's the whole reason this exists.

How I make it

I invested about $12,000 in real equipment when I started, like an oil heating tank and a very large mixing pot on a tipping dolly, modelled on the setup I'd seen at the company that wouldn't hire me. I rent a tiny little shop in a weird little mall on the worst corner of Coast and Prairie in PoCo, as my apartment is too small to have me AND soap. No luxury of turning an extra room in my house at no extra cost into a soap factory here.

One batch is 312 bars. I make every one of them myself.

Then they sit. Four days in the mold, then five weeks curing on a rack before I'll sell you one. There's no way to hurry it and I've never tried. There's usually somewhere north of ten thousand dollars of soap in my shop that isn't ready yet.

I've developed my own base oil blend and twenty scent profiles, all blended by me.

My name is Shea, by the way. Like the butter that's in almost every bar.

What I won't do

No palm oil. Not in anything. No dead animal's fat either. 

No plastic in my packaging, ever. My labels have been sugarcane fiber with a vegan, toxin-free adhesive. I'm moving over to boxes now though, made and printed in Surrey as the old label stock runs out. It's more of a challenge, but it's worth it.

Essential oils only. No fragrance oils.

Come by

The shop is at 1524 Prairie Ave in Port Coquitlam, open Wednesday to Saturday, 1pm to 5pm. You can watch me make it. That's sort of the point.

PoCo Soap Co. is the soap of PoCo.