About All for Better Health

Learn all about All for Better Health and it’s focus on improving life naturally.

How All for Better Health Began

It was 2004, and we lived in Bella Coola, British Columbia. A soap maker there encouraged me to try making my own plant-based soap. No tallow or lard. Just oils sourced from plants and sodium hydroxide.

My first batch of vegan soap refused to solidify. So seeking answers on the internet I went. I discovered two life-changing resources—TheSage.com and Zensoaps.com. I learned how to make lotions and develop soap recipes at Majestic Mountain Sage, and how to make hot process soap from Zensoaps.com.

Thanks to what I learned from those two websites, I sold soap and lotion bars in Bella Coola until we returned to the U.S. in 2007.

My career went in another direction for a few years. However, I continued making small batches of soap and lotion at the request of friends. Then, just before COVID-19, a webinar sparked the idea of launching my arnica lotion on Amazon. More on that later.

About Product Development at All for Better Health

I will always be grateful for my Home Economics degree. It required chemistry. There’s science behind lotions and soaps. And unlike some companies that insist you can’t scale up from a small recipe, I’ve proven repeatedly there are only two things that change significantly when you scale up—how long it takes to heat things up and how long it takes to cool them down. Once you know how to manage that component, small batch production depends primarily on an accurate scale.

Each product I sell has a story behind it. There’s a reason I’ve developed it. For example:

• Healing Touch Barrier Cream: After I learned that most lotions contain too much water to adequately protect cracked skin, I refined my Healing Touch Lotion formula. My husband was having trouble with cracked heels, so I asked him to use it instead of O’Keefe’s Barrier Cream to see if it would work. It did.
• Shampoo Soap Bar: We had hard water in Vancouver, so developing a shampoo bar was a challenge. Leveraging the information from Scientific Soap Making by Kevin Dunn proved far more successful than I could ever have imagined. For the first time in my life, my hair is shiny naturally.
• Arnica Lotion: Long hours writing and editing have their downside—serious tension in the upper back.

As I become aware of other natural sources for healing and health, I’ll develop additional products.

Why Amazon Is On Hold

Getting my trademark registered may have been worth it. However, dealing with Amazon Fulfillment hasn’t been.

• Algorithms are impersonal and inaccurate. They have forced me to have whole shipments of product sent back to me because of those inaccuracies.
• Products took six to eight weeks to get into warehouses. Once they did, Amazon often slapped on a different bar code, which meant products disappeared in the system.
• Amazon warehouses are too hot. When my soaps came back, I discovered several batches were orange. While this surface rancidity doesn’t render the soap unusable, it does make it ugly!
• Fees keep going up.

I may begin selling through Amazon again. However, I will never use Amazon Fulfillment again. Their warehouse conditions are beyond my control.