Vellum St Soap Company

Our s**t smells good, for when yours doesn’t 💩

Actually natural tallow based soap & skincare, without any bulls**t🐮💋

Locally minded and sustainably focused, Vellum Street Soap Company officially began over a decade ago, when I (founder Melissa/Missy/Millie depending on who’s addressing me) was a chef focused on ingredient nutrition quality & food waste. We source many ingredients that would generally be discarded from area restaurants, farms, and butcher shops, seeing their value and saving them from waste bins and trash streams. Approximately 70-80% of our ingredients and packaging come from less than 100 miles of our studio in the Wissahickon Valley of Philadelphia.

Lips, hands, face, or ass, tallow’s great for skin when it’s been fed grass!

Moochas Grassias, amigos 🐮💋

Quite frankly, we’re pretty disinterested in trends and find them quite boring 🥱

When we (and by “we” I mean “me”, Melissa/Millie/Missy) founded Vellum Street in 2015, almost no one was making tallow or lard skincare. I remember standing in the aisles of Whole Foods, our first retailer (a giant one at that! Pre-Amazon acquisition days, when it was still an awesome store), begging people to try Tallow on their skin. This was in the heyday of vegan skincare being the trend of the moment and almost no one wanted to give me and my beef fat the time of day.

That being said, we persisted, and like all things of quality, interest grew, not only for our VellummStrewt, but for an entire new industry around Tallow skin care. Like all things that grow in popularity, it started getting exploited by folks who sought itas just a way to make money, and here we are today, with tons of new brands, some talent formulators dedicated to high-quality ingredients and product production, and some venture capital backed behemoths just looking to make a buck.

The same thing is going on with the dot cake, aka cortadillos. They’re fun, eye catching, and tasty, so they’ve been exploited into a trend. Does this mean I don’t think you should partake? Hell, no, run out and get yourself one, they’re delicious! Don’t buy one from a giant corporation that doesn’t care about you or the ingredients though! If you can, find a local to you, Panadería and get yourself the OG version with bright pink frosting on a pan dulce cake. And/or scoop one from your friendly neighborhood bakery that’s added them to their display case. I promise you not only will they taste better than one churned out by a soulless big box corp looking to relieve you of your hard earned cash, but the entire experience will be so much more delicious for your soul ❤️🧡💛🩵

Moochas Grassias for being here, Moochachos 🐮💋

Quite frankly, we’re pretty disinterested in trends and find them quite boring 🥱

When we (and by “we” I mean “me”, Melissa/Millie/Missy) founded Vellum Street in 2015, almost no one was making tallow or lard skincare. I remember standing in the aisles of Whole Foods, our first retailer (a giant one at that! Pre-Amazon acquisition days, when it was still an awesome store), begging people to try Tallow on their skin. This was in the heyday of vegan skincare being the trend of the moment and almost no one wanted to give me and my beef fat the time of day.

That being said, we persisted, and like all things of quality, interest grew, not only for our VellummStrewt, but for an entire new industry around Tallow skin care. Like all things that grow in popularity, it started getting exploited by folks who sought itas just a way to make money, and here we are today, with tons of new brands, some talent formulators dedicated to high-quality ingredients and product production, and some venture capital backed behemoths just looking to make a buck.

The same thing is going on with the dot cake, aka cortadillos. They’re fun, eye catching, and tasty, so they’ve been exploited into a trend. Does this mean I don’t think you should partake? Hell, no, run out and get yourself one, they’re delicious! Don’t buy one from a giant corporation that doesn’t care about you or the ingredients though! If you can, find a local to you, Panadería and get yourself the OG version with bright pink frosting on a pan dulce cake. And/or scoop one from your friendly neighborhood bakery that’s added them to their display case. I promise you not only will they taste better than one churned out by a soulless big box corp looking to relieve you of your hard earned cash, but the entire experience will be so much more delicious for your soul ❤️🧡💛🩵

Moochas Grassias for being here, Moochachos 🐮💋

We’re a skincare company, not a content company, and it shows 😝

There are a lot of buzz words flying around the tallow skin care world, most of them carefully curated to sell you the idea of an eco minded, sustainably focused, healthy for you product and lifestyle, when in reality all it is is a brilliantly marketed sales pitch. Vellum Street is a sustainability based company FIRST, the actual products we make come second. We exist to show you what beautiful, useful, and luxurious gems can be created from the things we tend to so readily discard, to shine the light on often overlooked parts of our daily lives. We are committed to using as many local waste or low use ingredients and components as we can, from the local grass fed tallow & pasturedlard we use in everything we make, the discarded citrus peels & previously steeped tea leaves & botanicals we infuse those animal fats with, to the upcycled glass candle containers we keep from the trash steam...we strive to give these elements new life and value.

It takes a lot of work, patience, and time to produce our products in the way we do, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. We hope you appreciate the thoughtfulness and care for the land, the animals, and the people that go into every little thing we do as much as we do! 🐮💋🐷

What do all y’all think, more Sled Dog Soap deliveries? 🧼🐶

I set an example. That’s all anyone can do.

Everyone has an opinion & everyone thinks that theirs is right. For almost every opinion, cherry picked research can be found to back it up. We all have cognitive biases & we choose our facts, generally, based on them. We gravitate towards people who tend to hold those same opinions, further strengthening the echo chambers of our beliefs & reinforcing their righteousness.

When I started Vellum Street, the goal to make a gentle, synthetic free soap to treat my skin issues (stemming from a 20+ year auto immune condition, misdiagnosed by specialists) using kitchen scraps from my bakery, I didn’t have money, or even an actual business, in mind. I was doing it for myself & friends also suffering. I was doing it to try & be less wasteful. Because of this, I have always based my decisions for Vellum Street on the best ones I could make for healthy skin & a healthy environment (which are intrinsically intertwined) & that has brought so many wonderful folks into the workings of this little biz thats now my full time gig. For that, I’m grateful for the like-attracts-like effect.

When VS started, 100% of the glass packaging we used came through our relationship with & their nonprofit . As we’ve grown, that number sits now at about 60-70%, as we’ve needed to supplement with some newly purchased glass from the amazing . We are so lucky to partner with BU, allowing us to use glass “trash” to its full potential, giving us clean & hardy containers that won’t leech into our products like plastics can, that can be used again & again & again, cutting the need for shipping even more heavy glass packaging from places outside our immediate community. Contrary to what you might think, using waste items can often be way more expensive than purchasing new due to the time it takes to source, collect, clean, & prepare them!

While the bulk of the work to maintain homeostasis in the environment certainly rests upon the massive corporations of the world, it doesn’t hurt for us little guys to be thoughtful in our practices as well & there’s no reason we can’t have some fun w