BACKGROUND
Bramble Berry opened in December, 1998 with the goal of providing the highest quality soap making ingredients and best customer support possible to soap makers around the country. As a soap maker herself, company founder Anne-Marie Faiola believes strongly in the importance of quality tested products and helpful customer service. She and her employees have a policy of returning all phone or email inquiries within 24 hours. “We want our customers to be successful,” explains Faiola, “and it is part of our job to make sure they will be.” From humble beginnings in Faiola’s living room, the company has grown rapidly and now serves thousands of customers from coast to coast from a 16,000 square foot warehouse in Bellingham, Washington.
PRODUCTS
Bramble Berry offers more than 2500 soap making products, including fragrance oils, soap molds, packaging, soap making kits, essential oils, nourishing oils, clays, and botanicals as well as supplies to make lip butters, candles, room diffusers, lotion, body butters, bath bombs, cosmetics and much more. Watching industry trends carefully, Faiola stays ahead of her customers’ needs by frequently adding new products. If you have a suggestion, please let us know and we’ll do our best to find it for you. Bramble Berry also tests all of the ingredients we sell to ensure it will work as expected and needed by our customers. Notes from these tests can be found in the product descriptions.
EXPERTISE
Brambleberry.com is a resource filled with help and information to make each product easier to use. To help people learn more about soap making, Bramble Berry has developed a site called www.teachsoap.com filled with ideas, a soap forum, frequently asked questions and a “soap gallery” featuring beautiful and unique soaps for soap making inspiration. Bramble Berry also runs an instructional daily blog at www.soapqueen.com and a video tutorial series at www.soapqueen.tv Also be sure to check out our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/BrambleBerry for lots of inspiring soap created by our fans and customers.
Anne-Marie Faiola, CEO and Founder
“A good business,” according to Anne-Marie Faiola, “comes from finding something that works and capitalizing on it.” For Anne-Marie, that something came from making soap, a business concept she started as a hobby and then turned into a multi-million dollar enterprise.
As a teenager, Anne-Marie learned how to be business savvy from her father, a doctor who also ran a network of clinics and who encouraged her to find her own business opportunities. Taking her father’s advice, Anne-Marie started making personalized soaps to sell to friends and family. Years later, after pursuing a career as a correctional officer and about to apply to the FBI, Anne-Marie realized that her true passion was business and decided to become an entrepreneur. Determined to start her own company that would provide the highest quality of products and ingredients for soap making, Anne-Marie left the criminal justice system and founded Bramble Berry Inc. in her living room. Desiring formal business training, she went back to school and received her MBA in 2007 while running her rapidly growing company.
For those looking to expand their skill sets, Anne-Marie launched www.SoapQueen.tv in 2009, a free Do-It-Yourself soapmaking series on YouTube where amateur and seasoned crafters alike can learn all the basics including picking your fragrances, mixing your colors and pouring your soap, all the way to more advanced techniques like swirling, embedding and layering.
With new products and DIY videos added frequently, Bramble Berry looks forward to meeting the needs of crafters for a long time.
“Success doesn’t happen over night,” she says. “It’s about replicating small victories everyday.”
View Bramble Berry’s Website Here
And on Facebook Here
E-mail: info@brambleberry.com