9 Creative soap designs

Looking for that special something to make your product stand out and catch the customer’s eye?  Last month we shared an article on how soap packaging can help create a product that stands out.  This month we are bringing a number of creative soap design ideas. These ideas help make the soap itself stand out. In these examples, you will see examples where packaging is used to augment the soap. In other’s you will see where the soap is eye catching and stands alone without necessarily adding a lot of packaging. 

These artisans are expanding the range of customers that would be interested in their products. Each of these products has gotten more specific in their target niche and seen great success with their products. Getting more specific about their niche also allows them to get more specific in their marketing to their target audience. Throughout their stories, you can see examples for how they are executing their strategies with these products. 

We hope seeing all these creative ideas gives you new ideas to consider for your products. We are proud to have soap makers from around the world included in this article- Click on the individual images to jump to their specific stories.

All of these products started as experiments by the artisans. They require trial and error to get just right.  What creative idea do these designs inspire for your work?

The Soap Bar & Co - Durban, South Africa

Popsicle Shaped Soaps

Belinda and Rayne started their soap adventure as a mother-daughter venture when they created The Soap Bar & Co. Their eye catching designs made me intrigued to hear the story behind how these were created.  Here is what they shared.

How did you come up with the unique ideas for these soap shapes? Tell us more about this creative soap design.

We noticed that our soaps are very popular with children and wanted to branch out and give them something fun, new and exciting. We spotted the popsicle molds from an online baking shop and our plan came together. We decided to launch these at our Christmas markets in 2023, using vibrant colors like red, green and pink. These specific soaps are glycerin based with fragrances like ‘Christmas pudding’ and ‘Caramalised Pear’ to bring in the festive cheer.

How did you create the packaging that you used with these soaps?

Regarding the packaging – we strive to be earth conscious and not use plastic packaging but unfortunately with glycerin soaps they if are not wrapped they “sweat” as they have a high moisture content giving them their highly moisturizing property.

As a result we made a decision to shrink wrap our glycerin soaps – but due to the odd shape of these popsicles this proved a bit tricky! After a bit of trial and error we succeeded and used a round label to wrap around the product, with branding space on the front and back. On the back, we included a large ‘Do not eat’ warning, since the colors made them look tasty to even the most well-trained eye.

We were very happy with the results – we felt our products looked premium and were appealing to market-goers – both children & adults. We found people walking past our stall would often be drawn in to get a closer look, particularly children. And, as market regulars know, this is a great first step towards making a sale. After 2 markets we sold out of this popular soap!

We are a small business and do everything ourselves. This means we don’t need to consider planning print runs and this also allows us to be flexible & make tweaks to our packaging whenever they’re needed. We printed our self-designed labels on our Epson printer, which were then cut out using our Cricut maker. These are two very handy tools which we feel have helped us a lot as a small business; they make packaging a dream!