WEST FARGO, N.D. — Perham, Minn., native DeVerne Augustus hadn’t lived in the Upper Midwest for decades, although a bit of that hard-working Minnesotan has followed him wherever he’s lived.
He’s run a hair salon with partner Dana Mathews, and made and sold everything from chocolate to beaded jewelry. Now Augustus has moved back to the area with Mathews, where they’ve developed their Wilds Soap — all-natural, vegan, handmade soaps, which they sell mostly through vendor shows.
“I always say idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” says Augustus, while busily measuring, mixing and pouring various soap batters on the kitchen island of their home. “I just always feel better when I have something to occupy my time.”
Mathews can vouch for that. “He doesn’t stand still very long,” Mathews says, while sitting on the floor and petting Gus, a fetch-obsessed Boston terrier who, along with Angel, a senior Schipperke, also occupy the couple’s artfully decorated house in West Fargo. They live in the Wilds Development, which provided the ideal name for their all-natural soaps.
The two also form the ideal team for this particular side hustle.
“DeVerne is kind of the scientific guy who can explain all the details of the soap-making, and I break the ice and get them to loosen up and start having a good time with us,” Mathews says.
Vendor shows give the soapmakers an opportunity to get on a soapbox about their soap. “We just want to get people to know there’s nothing artificial in it,” Augustus says. “We get people with skin issues who ask about ingredients.”
Their soap has been featured at venues like
the Wild Terra Cider vendor shows
and
the Very Merry Holiday Market at Drekker.
“It’s just kind of going on its own weight now,” Augustus says. “Like, now we get invited to participate in shows.”
While this dynamic duo’s combination of fun and helpful helps bring first-time consumers in, the soap itself seems to keep them coming back.
Their soaps derive all their fragrances from pure essential oils, creating fragrant yet understated olfactory cocktails of cedar, rosemary and lavender or lemongrass, sage and eucalyptus. Augustus also works to create distinctive scents such as sawdust or moss.
The 40 or so soaps they’ve developed sell for $7 each. Every batch is striking to look at, with marbling, swirls and colors created by an all-natural palette of clays, oils and plant powders.
One of their more popular bars is their fishing soap, which is scented with anise and lemon. Its ingredients and spicy scent are perfect for cleansing and deodorizing hands after cleaning and handling fish.
That soap is so popular that “we can’t keep it in,” Augustus says.
Full-circle back to Fargo
Augustus grew up in the Rush Lake area south of Perham. Early on, he showed an entrepreneurial spirit — helping to set up and run a small pet store in Fergus Falls at one point.
He moved west to Spokane, Washington, in 1991 and worked in various jobs, including sales, until he met Mathews, a hairstylist and salon owner, in 2001. They operated the Spokane salon together for over 15 years.
During that time, Augustus developed a number of interests that turned into complementary product lines for their salon. “We’ve always done something,” he says. “We had our salon, where we had a chocolate shop and a wine store.”
He’s also created beaded jewelry and dabbled in lapidary — cutting and polishing minerals and gemstones into semi-precious gems. “I just always feel better when I have something to occupy my time,” he says.
After Mathews retired and they sold the salon, they relocated to the Palm Springs/Palm Desert area of California, where they sold real estate. They liked it there, but longed for a place with cooler weather and a slower pace.
That brought Augustus full circle to the Upper Midwest.
They moved to Fargo in May ’21 and again started selling real estate. At the time, they wanted to build a network of community connections to help them grow their home-selling business.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
Augustus’s natural interest in DIY led him down a soapy path. “Really, the whole thing is we just wanted to meet people and build that sphere of influence,” Augustus says. “So when people come up to the soap table to chit-chat and, before all is said and done, they know we’re real estate agents and hopefully go away with some soap.
“We don’t just sell soap, we sell the places to use it in.”
The science of safe, sustainable suds
In a way, soap-making was the perfect pursuit.
All-natural soaps made sense after their years in the beauty industry, while focusing on healthy alternatives to the artificial chemicals found in many personal care products.
Augustus proceeded to research the science behind soap with the tenacity and precision of a chemist.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
Mathews says Augustus is the type of guy who can spend hours online doing deep-dive research on the secrets to creating
which looks, smells, lathers and cleans well — all while avoiding ingredients that are hard on the body and the Earth.
For example, he uses a proven online calculator to figure out how much essential oil can be added to a soap recipe without irritating the skin.
He also does
— a process in which slightly more oil than the lye can consume is added during the chemical process, so there’s always a tiny bit of moisturizing fat content leftover in the finished bar.
“Soap is kind of like baking,” Augustus says. “It’s different chemistry, of course, but if you’re going to make bread or cookies, you’d better follow the recipe or it isn’t going to work. Soap is the same way. I measure everything and all the ingredients, right down to the color. You have to make sure it’s the right amount … because if the balance isn’t right, you could have unreacted lye in your soap and that’s not good for the skin.”
They source most ingredients from
a Washington-based company which specializes in providing natural products to makers. Common ingredients include coconut oil, sweet almond oil, kaolin clay and activated charcoal.
They also steer away from
or other hormone disruptors.
Besides choosing ingredients to maximize consumer safety, they also consider environmental sustainability.
Their soap doesn’t include
which can help soap harden more quickly but is grown in a way that threatens the biodiversity of the natural rain forests. Large tracts of rainforest are cleared to plant a single variety of palms exclusively to produce palm oil, Augustus says.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
Augustus also adjusted the proportions in their recipe to find a way to create a hard, long-lasting bar of soap without needing to rely on palm oil.
In the end, this extra effort is worth it to them.
“We try to be as conscientious and sustainable as possible,” Augustus says. “We need orangutan habitat more than we need soap.”
Find the company at “wildssoap” on Facebook.
