About Tubby Tabby Soaps
Tubby Tabby Soaps is a tiny, (queer) family-owned company that makes small batches of handmade soap in Ottawa, ON. It was established in 2019, and a global pandemic later, we're still having as much fun making soap as ever!
Who owns Tubby Tabby Soaps?
Eli and Lia are a couple of queers who love colour, scents and cool designs. The soaps we make smell amazing, look fun and are definitely a little gay. Because we're big nerds, we love incorporating pop culture references and geeky themes into our soaps. Because we try to live by feminist, anti-oppression values, we do what we can to incorporate kindness, compassion and progressive ideals into our business. If that resonates with you, thank you for being one of our people!
Environmental stewardship
We give a heck about the environment. Currently we specialize in bar soap and shampoo bars, as they’re easiest on Mother Earth. We do what we can to reduce plastic and waste as much as possible. We offer a packaging trade-in program for any of our packages that aren't paper.
As part of our commitment to the environment, none of our products contain ingredients that are harsh on the environment. All of our soaps are made with plant-based (usually edible) oils that have a simple, necessary chemical added to make soap: lye. Alone, lye is very caustic and so it needs to be handled carefully. But once we add it to oils in a delicate balance, the magic of chemistry begins to transform those two ingredients into a mild, cleansing soap. Any products that aren't soap-based are made with biodegradable ingredients so that they don't cause damage if and when they end up in nature.
Soap has been made for millennia, and while it's easy to overcomplicate it, we’re all about keeping it simple. We make great soap with biodegradable ingredients, and they look cute as heck, too. What more could you want? 🙂
Do you use AI?
We believe that generative AI is incompatible with honouring human labour. Not only do we believe that humans should be able to make their art for fair pay, we also feel that human-made art is higher-quality. As such, we don't use AI to generate designs, photos, product descriptions or anything else related to our business. Any use of AI is totally unintentional—like when we search for an answer to a question and we have to scroll past the AI summary before we get to the search results. Our commitment to our customers is that we will always represent everything as realistically and accurately as possible, and for us, that means manually describing things, taking actual photographs and putting the hard work in to make beautiful things by hand.
Why Tubby Tabby?
We're often asked where our company name comes from. We serve a magnificently fat tabby cat named Abby who we love dearly. In appreciation of her roundness, we sometimes call her Abby the Tubby Tabby. So when we were first starting our business in 2019, we decided to name it after our cherished Abby, who we still consider the company's CEO. Please rest assured that she does not like actual (bath)tubs one bit, and we do not bathe Abby in our tub, ever, under any circumstances. To reward us for our good faith, Abby has agreed not to scratch our eyes out while we sleep.
We were so fond of Abby that we were keen to adopt two more cats, her little brothers named Winston and Oscar. Winston is also a tabby (though not very tubby) and Oscar is a floofy, black void. Abby still very much runs the household.
