Pittsburg soap shocker rocks consumer market
By HUDSON OLD
Famous Photographer
Pittsburg, Texas – Soap store.
Guy with natural rolling slabs of useful shoulders under the T-shirt chosen to go with jeans newer than his work boots comes in.
He’s a parent, looking for something for teenage acne.
She’s got just the thing, $20, delivered with instant ingredient-based product description for this specific bar. Also, everything holding her soaps together is water soluble, made to melt and go away. Keep it in a soap tray that drains.
Questions?
First shop décor to the right of the front door, the “Man Soap & Grooming Essentials” notice that slowed him down coming in pulls him back to the display of manly “body bars, shave bars and beard oil.”
Seeing where he’s looking, without stepping from the counter she’s next explaining the product lines formulated specifically for him.
There’s a line of “Bath Bombs.”
“Shampoos”
There’s “Car Scent,” with instructions in explicit fine print for clients to be certain they’re getting maximum performance.
There’s a multi-purpose bar with hemp seed, olive and coconut oils, tea tree and lemon essential oils that are good everywhere, hair, face and body.
Just like grandma’s, everything in here’s made in the back of the shop on days the front door’s locked.
In his arm, the guy’s got a toddler girl easy-riding on his hip. His baby girl’s stylishly dressed, beautifully groomed – she wants down and he lets her go amid shoals of displays arranged, boxed, stacked, and lighted, an adult setting.
So from behind the counter, she opens an adult conversation with the toddler.
“You were a baby girl the last time I saw you,” says Shelby Rust, family friend and proprietor. From conception to product line development and manufacture, through the homey website featuring her photography, she’s Rustville Essentials, as is clearly branded on every bar imprinted with the logo she designed.
The guy makes a slow pass, 4 or 7 minutes through the store. She rings up $104 and change, after tax.
For soap.
He never flinched.
These Pittsburg guys are tough.
I’m thinking of following him out, telling him that for under $10 I can get him hooked up with a friend in Mt. Pleasant with the over-the-counter natural lye soap at Mason’s Hardware. It’s by the register, same as you’d expect at any hardware store, right?
Or, there’s the likewise all natural pine-tar based bar found at Clinic Pharmacy, also in Mt. Pleasant, leaving me wondering why I’m buying $12-a-bar soap from somebody who posted signage answering my question before I ask it because the shape of my tea tree and lemon shampoo bar once had changed since my last purchase.
“Same weight / New Shape / No Color, No Synthetic Fragrance,” the sign said.
Her grandfather, Cary White built her first soap molds to spec. He lived out on the lake. He delighted in building things for her.
The summer she came she was in 7th grade and he built her a bridge over a cove, paving the path to the neighbor, a teacher likewise on summer vacation. Sandra McCurrey had a big screened porch with tropical birds and fish. A sculptor, she turned clay to art.
“She always invited me to stick around,” Shelby said. They made papier mache necklaces, ear rings.
Now, when making soap, she uses a slender wooden dowel and stirs swirls of color through some of the bars she makes. The soap thing started when she was bathing her first child, when she began reading labels.
She sold me my first $12 bar of shampoo by telling me what was going to happen if I used it. So I did, just to see if she knew what she was talking about.
She said my hair might get stiff for a couple of days as it “detoxified,” being washed clean of preservatives and silicone, but if I’d keep the bar in a well-drained soap dish and keep using it, when I ran out I’d come back and buy more because after I got it clean, I’d like my hair better.
“That’s usually how it goes,” she said, which turned out to be right.
So there it is – I got to Pittsburg to buy soap. It’s a nice trip.
Leaving Mt. Pleasant, if you’ll drive over to Mt. Vernon and start from there, you can cross the lake and
come into Pittsburg on Highway 11, which turns into Quitman, which is where you’ll find Rustville Essentials on the south side of the street, just after the curve turning into the straight shot through town.
