This Mississippi School Bus Driver Built a Soap Business on TikTok

In the spring of 2020, when the world was forced to stay indoors to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, part-time school bus driver and entrepreneur Jessie Whittington decided to share her growing passion with TikTok: making soap. On her TikTok handle @countrylather2020, she began posting videos that gave the #SoapTok community, a collective of soapmakers and soap enthusiasts — one of the many self-governing sub-genres of the platform — a behind-the-scenes look into the soap-making process and her life in Mississippi as a small business owner. After joining the platform, Whittington immediately saw a jump in interest in her soaps, inspiring her to create a website to sell her inventory. “I would say the increase was almost instant,” she said of the influx of orders from the TikTok community. 

Whittington’s content spans from creating soap and cutting the large block into bars to processing orders for customers, all infused with her undoubtable charm and endearing southern hospitality. Her “Hey, hey, hey, Tikity-Tok” catchphrase at the top of each video will make anyone smile as she welcomes viewers into her cozy, makeshift soap-making workshop in her home.

It was Whittington’s mother who first introduced her to goat milk-based soaps in 2015 to help soothe her dry, sensitive skin. The moisturizing qualities of the goat milk really helped a skin problem that Whittington had dealt with her entire life. However, like most high quality skincare products, these soaps typically come with a luxury price tag. “I’m a cheapskate,” Whittington admitted. “I said, ‘You know what, somebody made that bar of soap, surely I can make soap. So I did, just to see if I could do it.”

Whittington took the labor-intensive process of soap-making as a challenge, and put her DIY skills to the test. “I've always been kind of a hands-on kind of gal,” she said. “I've always been tough. I decided I'm gonna learn how to do something, you know? I just learned how to do it, and I did it.” And though Whittington succeeded in making soap the first time she tried, it came out with a store name stamped across the side from the plastic shopping bag she used as a liner in her homemade mold.

It only took a year for the married mother of two to consider that she wasn’t the only person who could benefit from quality soap with moisturizing ingredients (like shea butter and sweet almond oil) that’s also reasonably priced. So in September of 2016, she created Country Lather Soap Works. She began selling her creations in her town of Ramsey Springs, Mississippi, (about 30 minutes outside of Biloxi). The line offers all-natural, handmade soap bars, bath bombs, shower soaks, and bath salts, however, it’s her “no frills” soaps (with only essential ingredients and minimally-designed packaging) that has business booming. The small town granted Whittington a handful of customers, however, to scale, she knew she would need to expand outside of her rural community.

Along with millions of others, Whittington joined TikTok in March 2020. “We were in the thick of the pandemic and we couldn't go nowhere. We were all stuck at home and everybody was talking about TikTok,” she recalled. “So I finally downloaded it because everybody said there was funny stuff on there. I got it and I scrolled.” In September 2020, four years after starting her business (and having perfected her ingredient formula), Whittington introduced TikTok to her soaps and line of bathing toiletries.

Though she doesn’t consider herself a “social media-type person,” Whittington studied her analytics, followed the algorithm’s trends, and quickly gained traction. After a couple of months of posting, however, her follower count plateaued around 300, and her views were not moving as she expected. Whittington wanted to “go live” so she could have authentic conversations with her audience directly, but she needed at least 1,000 followers to use the feature. So she turned to the #SoapTok community.

“I picked up a box of lard. It was like half full and I threw it on the countertop where I make soap, and I just started talking to the camera,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I'd love to make soap live for y'all, but I can't because I'm not at such-and-such threshold,'” she said. And of all the videos, that one flew off." Within 24 hours, Whittington had gained over 1,500 new followers and she reached 3,000 users before the video's engagement began to lose traction.

With a much larger reach, Whittington was able to go live — her viewership ranges from 100 to 2,000 people each session — to show off her growing collection of soap offerings and connect to other content creators in her niche. Now, her account boasts nearly 70,000 followers and over 680,000 likes, and #SoapTok provided her with a community to share her journey with. “It still feels like someone should pinch me or I should knock on wood,” she said.

“I've got a few [SoapTok creators] that I text message on the daily and we run ideas by one another, ask one another's opinions on… business kind of stuff,” she shared. “It's been helpful in that format. We’ve got a pretty tight-knit community.” Whittington also turns to SoapTok to exchange ideas and crowdsource feedback on new products and content for her profile. She explained, “Most of the time it’s, ‘I'm thinking about making this kind of soap. What [ingredient] do you think would go well with it? Do you think it would sell well?’ Every now and then it might be something like, ‘Thinking about posting this type of video, do you think it would work?’”

Alongside the SoapTok community, which she calls “super uplifting,” Whittington also has a close relationship with her customers. “I've got a few [customers] that have my number and when they've got a special request, they text me. And I tell them, ‘Yes, I can do it’ or they know that I'll be honest: If I can't do it, I will tell them to try [this other soapmaker], and that's where the SoapTok community comes in,” she said. Her commitment to her customers and building loyalty (a factor that’s often missed with larger, faceless brands) has led to TikTok becoming a major stream of income for her small business and her family.

“If it weren’t for TikTok, I would not be where I am in my business,” Whittington said. “I think… 90% of my sales are from TikTok. TikTok has been a huge platform for me.” Before she started posting her products and her production process, the bulk of her sales were limited to word-of-mouth and a few wholesale accounts, which vastly limited her reach.

Among her SoapTok friends, Whittington also met the woman who she considers her best friend on the app — a fellow soapmaker from Long Island, New York, named Margaret. “I just kind of got to binge-watching her videos,” she recalled. After joining Margaret’s lives a few times, she followed Whittington back and the two began their long-distance friendship. “We eventually swapped phone numbers. We text pretty much every day,” she said.

Whittington’s customer retention speaks to the quality of her product. However, her success can truly be attributed to her charismatic demeanor and working the complex algorithm in her favor by posting at specific times (from studying her own analytics) and researching the trends in and outside of her niche. Her authentic approach to content creation, without the help of advertisements, has led to an overall positive experience on the platform.

“To be completely honest, I haven't gotten any real negative anything from any of my customers,” she said, and even boasts about not being able to keep her best-selling product, the Seaside Escape Soap Bar, in stock. The aquamarine-colored bar consists of shea butter, coconut oil, vitamin E oil, goat’s milk, and other moisturizing oils. “It sells pretty quick. It's just a good, clean-smelling bar soap,” she said. “I find that's mostly what people want.”

The success of Country Lather Soap Works has given Whittington and her family the opportunity to expand into a production warehouse, where she’ll be able to have the space to mass produce her products — of course with a series on TikTok for her audience to join in on the process. When the time comes, she wants to lean into a greater variety of soaps, eventually creating her own line of liquid dish and hand soaps. A major goal she has is to grow the business enough that she can hire workers from her local community in Mississippi. As for her audience, Whittington wants to reach 100,000 TikTok followers, a goal that given her trajectory, doesn’t seem too far off.

The sweet spot of scaling engagement on TikTok is a balance between casual posts (like interacting with new filters or trending sounds) and curated content in your niche. Whittington has a talent for doing both, but it doesn’t come without dedication, diligence, and persistence. “It's a struggle most days,” she says of posting a minimum of two videos a day and going live twice a week on top of raising two children with her supportive husband and working as a substitute bus driver for her school district. “But you know what? There are a lot of people that wish they had a struggle of sorts. So we take it as a blessing.”

She’s a one-woman show, actively posting to her TikTok while also making, packaging, and shipping all of her products. Though her children (15 and 12) are closer to the demographic typically associated with the platform, Whittington says she knows more about the app than her children. “I've taught them things about TikTok,” she said with a laugh. “So in that case, Mama actually knows a little bit better.”

To learn more about Jessie Whittington and Country Lather Soap Works, watch her story for TikTok Sparks Good, a video series highlighting the life-changing opportunities and meaningful connections happening on TikTok.