For the last few years, I’ve been buying bar soap from a friend who makes custom soap as a hobby in the greater St. Louis area (Nerdy Bird Nest). In early 2025, after buying my latest batch, I had a wacky idea: What if we worked with Jenna to make soap that smelled like the themes for several of our games?

We already find a variety of ways to make game nights more immersive (thematic music, food, drinks, etc)–why not add to the immersion with soap that reminds us of the gritty landscape of Scythe or the vineyards of Bordeaux?

It seemed like a great fit for our series of silly-but-real April Fools products, and Jenna agreed…but she said it was already too late to have the soap ready in time for April 1, 2025. So we decided to plan ahead for 2026.

The extra time was a big help, as it gave Jenna time to experiment with different ingredients, fragrances, and colors. After a few months, she shared with me a total of 6 different bars that smelled and looked like Euphoria, Scythe, Finspan, Viticulture, Apiary, and Wingspan:

Making soap is just a hobby for Jenna, so I asked her for full honesty in regards to how many bars of soap she could comfortably make over the next few months and still have fun with the process. She said would be comfortable making 100 of each bar, which is far more than she’s ever made of even a single type of soap in the past.

So while Jenna made the soap (a process that is just as much about waiting for the soap to set as it is about mixing the ingredients), I collaborated with our graphic designer to design two sets of boxes. We decided to sell the soap in sets of 3 so we could reach more people (200 people instead of 100).

I looked into box manufacturers in the US, but I found the same thing I’ve found with various US manufacturers: Less customization, less personal, limited communication, odd scaling, and higher costs. In contrast, Panda made the process incredibly easy. They quickly printed the boxes and sent them to us, and I handed them off to Jenna at our monthly cookbook club.

I also looked into the possibility of shipping the soap from the US over to our fulfillment centers in Canada, Europe, and Australia. There were several key problems with that idea, though: The shipping would have significantly increased the price of the soap, it would have spread such a small quantity even thinner, and most importantly, each region has its own regulations and certifications for beauty products that added risk and expense. So I made the call to only offer the soap on our US webstore.

Real April Fools products are always a bit odd, as people generally assume they’re not real. However, enough people clicked through to our webstore on April 1 that the soap sold out in just over 10 minutes.

I genuinely never want to have such a limited stock of anything, but I think people understood that there was an individual human behind the creation of these soaps–Jenna is just one person, not a factory, and there truly was a limit to how many bars she could make. However, Jenna can make more, and if/when she does, she’ll share them on her Etsy store.

If you were among the 200 people who bought the soap on April 1, I look forward to hearing your thoughts upon receipt. For everyone else, what game world would you like to see as soap?

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