About us

About Tubby Tabby Soaps (owners & team)

Tubby Tabby Soaps is a tiny, (queer) family-owned company that makes small batches of handmade soap in Ottawa, ON.

Eli and Lia are a couple of queers with a magnificently fat tabby cat named Abby. Abby is essentially the love of our lives. In appreciation of her roundness, we sometimes call her Abby the (you guessed it) Tubby Tabby. Our company name is an homage to our beautiful and beloved fur baby. Please rest assured that she does not like actual baths one bit, and we do not bathe Abby in our (bath)tub, ever, under any circumstances. To reward us for our good faith, Abby has agreed not to scratch our eyes out while we sleep.

The soaps we make are one-of-a-kind, fun and definitely a little gay. We love colour and you can rest assured that there will be cool designs involved. Currently we specialize in bar soap and shampoo bars, as they’re easiest on the environment.

None of our products contain harsh surfactants or detergents that aren’t biodegradable. All of our soaps are made with natural (usually edible) oils that have a simple, naturally-occurring chemical added to make soap: lye. Alone, lye is very caustic and so it needs to be handled carefully. But once you add it to oils in a delicate balance (as we do), the magic of chemistry begins to transform those two ingredients into a mild, cleansing soap. Soap has been made for millennia, and while commercial soaps use all sorts of environmentally-damaging and carcinogenic ingredients to improve the foaming or appearance of the soap, we’re all about keeping it as simple as possible. We make good soap with biodegradable ingredients, and they look cute AF, too. What more could you want? 🙂