The Notice Before the Soap

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two soap boilers spent the same winter on the same good intention, and only one of them wrote anything down.

Two soap boilers in one town, the same tallow, the same ash lye and the same copper.
Both meant to add a fourth soap to the three they already sold.
One spent the winter at the vat and came out in March with a bar and no words for it.
One spent a single evening at the kitchen table writing the notice he hoped to print.
The second man's first boiling went in nine days, and it was not the soap he had set out to make.
What did a sheet of paper do that four months at the copper could not?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two soap boilers in the town I've never named. A yard each, a brick furnace, a copper you could bath a child in, the smell of hot tallow that gets into a man's coat and stays there till Lady Day. Both were good. Both had sold the same three soaps for years, and both decided in the same November that three was not enough.

The first boiler went straight to the copper. He meant a fine soap, the sort a woman keeps on the washstand rather than at the sink, and he spent four months getting it right. Tallow and olive, then tallow and coconut, one lot cured nine weeks and the next twelve. By March he had a bar he was proud of, white and hard, which held its scent and did not go to paste in the dish by Thursday.

Then, the thing being finished, he sat down to write the handbill and found he had nothing to say. He had spent a winter on how and not one hour on who. So he wrote what he knew, which was the recipe. A fine new toilet soap, well cured, delicately perfumed, sixpence the bar. It sold slowly, mostly to people who already bought from him and would have bought a brick if he had wrapped it. Nobody who bought one could tell a neighbour what it was for, because he had never decided. By June he had taken a penny off, which is what a man does when he has run out of ideas, and put it down to a town that would not pay for quality.

The second boiler, that same November, did something his neighbours took for doing nothing. He sat at his kitchen table after supper and wrote the notice: not an advertisement for a soap he had made, but the notice he would like to be able to print one day, six lines of it, a promise at the top and a price at the bottom.

He could not fill it. He got as far as a new soap from the yard by the bridge and stopped, because the next line wanted a reason for a woman to carry sixpence down the lane, and he had not got one. He knew what he wished to make, and had never settled what he would claim.

So he wrote three notices, each with a different promise and the same price. One promised a soap that kept its scent to the last of the bar. One promised a soap that would wash wool without hardening it. One promised a soap that would not crack the hands of a woman doing a Monday wash, which his own wife complained of every winter of her life.

He took the three sheets round forty kitchens over two evenings, in a quarter where the women took in washing, and asked each which of the three described the trouble she actually had. Not whether they were nicely written. Which one was about her week. Twenty-nine of the forty put a finger on the hands, four cared about the wool, and nobody mentioned the scent.

He had set out to make a perfumed bar for the washstand. He spent January making a soft, over-fatted bar with a little fine oatmeal in it, cured long and sold plain, for hands in and out of soda water six days a week. The notice was already written, most of it by the women themselves, including the line about hands fit to handle good linen on a Tuesday. His first boiling went in nine days and his second in seven.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Write the advertisement before you make the thing, because the advertisement is where you find out whether there is anything worth making. It is not the last job in the sequence but the cheapest instrument you own for thinking, and most trades leave it until its findings can no longer change anything.

Consider what a new line of work consists of. A promise, a price, and the making. Only the third costs money, and it is the one nearly everybody begins with. The promise then gets settled last and in a hurry, out of whatever the making happened to produce, which is how a man ends with a good bar of soap and a handbill describing its ingredients. He is not short of words. He is short of a decision.

For a plain six-line notice will not come for a thing you have not decided. You cannot write who it is for without choosing who it is for, nor what it spares her without knowing what she does at present instead. When the lines will not come, the temptation is to blame the pen and send for somebody clever with words. The fog is almost never in the pen. It is in the plan.

Then there is the matter of carriage. Paper travels and a copper does not. Three notices in a coat pocket reach forty doors in two evenings, and each door gives back what no amount of thinking in your own yard will yield: which promise they point at, and what they say while pointing. That is not research of the sort that fills a drawer. It is the offer itself being tried on, in front of the person expected to pay for it.

And mark the real prize, which is not the money saved. The second boiler did not merely sell faster. He made a different soap, and no excellence applied to the perfumed bar would have arrived at the oatmeal one. The order of the two tasks decides what you end up making, and by the time the copper is cold the deciding has been done for you.

Two cautions. First, this is no licence to sell what does not exist. You are carrying a question round the doors, not an order book, and if you do take an order early, say plainly that the thing is not made yet, name the date and keep it. Second, do not take a yes for an answer. People are kind to a man with a sheet of paper in his hand, and a pleasant question only ever gets a pleasant answer. Ask which of three, not whether, and ask when the trouble last happened. A woman who can date it is describing a want. A woman who says it sounds lovely is describing nothing.

Three questions, and the first wants doing before Friday:

1. Can you write the six lines? Take the thing you mean to add next and write the notice now: who it is for, what it does for her, what it costs, what she does next. If it comes out as a list of what the thing is made of, no further work at the bench will mend it.
2. Which of three promises do they point at? Write three notices, one promise each, the same price on all three, and put them before ten real customers. Count the fingers rather than the compliments.
3. What are they doing about it now? Ask each of the ten what they presently use and when it last annoyed them. That answer is your price ceiling and the first line of your advertising.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did a sheet of paper do that four months at the copper could not? It made him decide who the soap was for, in words a customer could agree or disagree with, while deciding was still cheap. The copper can only make what a man has already assumed, and charges a winter to do it. The paper charged ninepence and told him his assumption was wrong.

The verse:

The copper takes a winter and the paper takes a night,
And only one will tell you, soon and plainly, you are wrong,
So write the notice first and walk it round to forty doors,
For words are cheap to alter, and a boiling is not.

Until next time. Go and write the six-line notice for the thing you mean to sell next, before you make a single one of them.

P.S. The test is not only for new things. Write tonight the six-line notice for the work you have sold for eleven years, and see whether it comes. If it does not, the trouble is not that your advertising wants rewriting. It is that the thing it advertises was never decided either, and has been carried this far by the goodwill of people who knew you.

Also in the archive: Show It Rough, The Coming Soon Page and The Leaking Coach.