Women's Business Development Council

6th Aug 2019

More than eight years after launching Komfort Zone, Yvonne Oxley has expanded her merchandise line to include 30 different varieties of natural soap along with lotions, beard oils, sugar scrubs and body butters...

The Backstory

Yvonne Oxley wasn’t at all comfortable with what the dermatologist told her. The expensive steroid cream that could help her young son’s eczema would thin the boy’s skin out leaving him susceptible to bruising and scarring. “I knew there had to be a better way,” she said, “so I did some research and found that natural soap could help. The relief was almost immediate.”

After months of purchasing the bars online, Yvonne was struck with an idea. “I figured it couldn’t be too hard to make the soap myself. I developed three recipes and started giving bars to family and friends. It wasn’t long until people wanted to buy more. And that’s when I realized I didn’t want this to be a hobby … I wanted this to be a business.”

Today, more than eight years after launching Komfort Zone, Yvonne has expanded her merchandise line to include 30 different varieties of natural soap along with lotions, beard oils, sugar scrubs and body butters. In addition to her full-time job as an executive assistant, she spends her evenings and weekends hand-making batches of products, fulfilling online and wholesale orders, promoting her goods on social media, and working on her product packaging and image. “I’ve sold well over 25,000 bars of soap alone at this point,” she said.