How a Second-Generation Soap-Maker is Using AI to Scale His Home-Grown Business

Growing up in a farm community in New Hampshire, my family had a homestead called Joy Lane Farm with a big vegetable garden and farm animals like horses, pigs, and goats. We had a bunch of extra goat milk, so my mom searched on Google what to do with it and discovered it had all these fantastic skincare benefits. She started experimenting with soap-making as a hobby, which turned into a side business, selling to natural food stores, friends, and local hotels—basically to cover the cost of the goats.

Then, my dad retired, and they were looking at moving overseas to work on a hospital ship. At that point, my wife, Katy, and I had been living in Ukraine, working at a nonprofit orphanage after grad school. We liked the idea of doing something with the soap business because everyone always talked about how great it was, and we wanted to sell something affordable and healthy that everyone could use. So, we asked my mom if we could buy her soap-making hobby. We bought it by doing farm chores and helping them close up their house and homestead.

It was a side hustle for us for five or six years, but from the get-go, we started adding to the product line, working on our branding, and really scaling the whole operation. The dream was always to make it full-time, but neither of us knew how to run a business or manufacture anything, so we did it slowly, bit by bit. Eventually we quit our other gigs and started running Joy Lane Farm full-time.

When the pandemic hit, our wholesale sales evaporated for a full year. We tried everything we could to come up with new ways of doing sales. That’s when we landed on Google Ads.

Because we still do everything ourselves – make all our products, do our own shipping, our own formulation – anything that saves us time is a massive help.

We love that a business can do a lot of good, and as much as possible, we want to scale that impact. I’d love to have 100 employees and a big manufacturing space, all while retaining the core of what we’ve built. Our goal, inspired by my parents’ work, is to eventually pay for a nurse’s salary on a hospital ship every year, and we’re already sending a percentage of our sales to the nurses and staff on the ship.

Performance Max campaigns are a huge part of making this vision for our growing business a reality. We’re leaning in and learning more because as much as it’s already doing, we know it has so much more potential.