How it all started!

🌸Welcome to Livingston Design Studio!

My name is Aletta and I love to create and make beautiful handcrafted products that are not only good for your skin and mind but also look after the environment. All our products are handcrafted at our home in rural South Taranaki.

I started making Soap in 2015 to reduce Palm Oil from our home. Soap making is very addictive and before I knew it I had more than enough bars of soap to last us a long time. After giving soap to family and friends I started selling them at local markets to fund my new addiction.

In 2020 not long after COVID I was made redundant from my job as a company manager that I loved and was very passionate about. After a few months I managed to get another management job in a completely new industry, thinking it would be good to get out of my comfort zone and try something new, but after 18 months of been in a very toxic an unsupportive environment I was physically and mentally broken.

After this second setback I decided that I would rather work 60-80 hours for myself than for a corporate company where at the end of the day I was only a number.

It was then, that we decided that it was time to turn all my hobbies into a business and this is how Livingston Design Studio started.

Adding Seawater to the soap came about after a walk along Ohawe Beach, I picked up a bit off seaweed and thought I could add it to a bar of soap, then the light bulb moment happened and I thought I'll make it with sea water. What I created was the bar I call West Coast.

Over time I noticed that this bar was far superior to all the other bars that were made with rain water, so from that point on seawater was used in all our bars.

Soap making is a passion, and my passion is to make a bar of soap that is full of skin loving oils, that is beautiful to look at and is affordable, and is good for the environment.

I hope that everyone that uses my soap loves and enjoys them as much as I enjoy making them.

 

Aletta