Color Of Money

Cleaning up with goat's-milk soap.

Sharon and Arvel Boatner's youngest son had a problem with dry skin. So when Sharon, 37, read that homemade soap might do the trick, she tracked down a 100-year-old family recipe for goat's-milk soap she could make on their goat farm in Hamilton, Texas.

"She would experiment every night on the stove," says Arvel, 54. Sharon spent 13 months and $20,000 perfecting the recipe the couple has sold since 1990 as Nanny's Best.

"We now have home [sales] parties, we sell to hotels, and we have about 600 distributors in the United States and nine foreign countries," says Arvel.

Nanny's Best products are still made on the Boatners' farm (they're also opening a manufacturing plant in Australia later this year), and their line has expanded to include such products as Grubber Soap and Texas Style Cowboy Soap Chips. Prices range from $3 for a family-sized bar of oatmeal soap to $12.50 for a 24-ounce bottle of Cactus Shampoo.

"I can sell anything to anybody," says Arvel. Nanny's Best sales atBODY to that: The Boatners sold more than 200,000 bars of soap in 1996.

This article was originally published in the April 1997 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Color Of Money.