Ann Warner & Lindsay Flowers
Co-Founders Junie Moonie’s Natural Soap Company
How do you turn your home into a soap-making factory, I ask Louisiana couple Lindsay Flowers and Ann Warner. “Well, you need a kitchen,” jokes Flowers with her Starbucks-pastry-sweet southern drawl. “And you need lots of room for storage.”
The two co-founders of Junie Moonie’s Natural Soap Company, based in small-town Hammond, La., are romantic partners and both registered nurses who found themselves up to the elbows in an ardor for soap-making. In 2000 they turned their home into an essential oil laboratory, storing the raw shea butter and olive oil in tubs in a 35’ x 35’ foot workshop detached from the house.
Hammond, a town nestled between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is small and conservative, but Flowers claims no one there has an issue with her and Warner being gay. “Everybody has been open.”
It’s that open community that pushed Junie Moonie’s to success even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “For six months, we had no electricity, no mail service, no phones,” Flowers says. “Our community was hit pretty hard… It was just an outpouring of concern from them to us. We have a big personal relationship with our customers.”
Junie Moonie’s also maintains an unwavering commitment to philanthropy. Along with setting aside a portion of their profits for the Human Rights Campaign and the Humane Society, they contribute to the fight to overcome breast cancer by selling a special Breast Cancer Awareness Soap (a little pink ribbon is buried in the center), which a Baton Rouge women’s hospital once gave as gifts to all patients who had mammograms.
Amidst the scents of lavender and the healing power of tea tree lingers the realization that running a company isn’t all about artistic expression and customer appreciation. “Money is always a challenge,” says Flowers, and she adds, “If we did it to the level of mass production, we probably would lose the passion.” –IJ
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