Today we’d like to introduce you to Casey Padron.
Hi Casey, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
When I was in graduate school earning my master’s in music education, I had a reputation for being a bit of a hippie.
One of my professors joked, “Casey probably like, makes her own soap or something”. The same professor later assigned my class a project in which we would teach ourselves a new skill and write a curriculum about how to teach it. Keeping the joke running, I chose soapmaking for the topic of my curriculum. After a lot of research, I made my first few batches of soap and fell in love.
I kept soaping as a hobby for the next couple of years before I decided to start Pahvant Valley Soaps in the summer of 2021. My goal with Pahvant Valley Soaps was to make soap that connects with Earth by growing my ingredients or sourcing them locally when possible and drawing inspiration from Utah’s beautiful landscapes.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The biggest challenge I’ve had is balancing my business with my full-time teaching job. I teach band and orchestra at a local middle school, which keeps me very busy with concerts and extracurriculars.
As much as I love pouring all of my time and energy into soap making, I sometimes encounter situations where I have to say no to opportunities that I know would help grow my business because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all.
That is really hard.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
While I’ve been a professional musician for over a decade, I’ve found that soap is a more fitting creative outlet for me. The level of abstraction it takes to communicate something in soap–like the feeling of walking in the woods, the awe of red rock walls, the peace of sitting in front of a campfire–is both challenging and thought-provoking.
To me, soapmaking is the perfect marriage of art and science. You take that idea you want to communicate, choose the ingredients that represent that idea in terms of color, texture, and scent, and then use these very precise formulas to turn it into soap. I love putting these pastoral, rustic, naturally-inspired ideas into my soaps.
Utah is so full of natural beauty, there is endless inspiration in our landscapes. Marrying these visual ideas with soap ingredients that come straight from those places is what I love to do.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I have a bit of an obsessive personality. When I get fixated on something, I am in it 110%. Growing up, my obsessions were dogs, softball, and band. I’m still obsessed with dogs (and have two wonderful pups, Fisher and Luna), and I painfully gave up on softball when it started to conflict with the high school marching band.
My band obsession is still going strong, as it’s something I’m still involved in 15 years later! Nature has always been high on my list, too.
As a kid, I spent summers going on family vacations in the mountains in New Mexico, which gave me a love for the outdoors that led me to move from Texas to Colorado when I graduated high school and to spend as much of my free time trail running and backpacking as I can to this day.
Contact Info:
- Website: pahvantvalleysoaps.com
- Instagram: @pahvantvalleysoaps
