About me
Hi, I’m Mari, owner and soap artist at Factory Hollow Apothecary.
Two decades into a 9-to-5 career, I figured the artist in me was a thing of the past. Every so often I'd dabble — a little creativity smuggled into an otherwise typical workday — but nothing that felt like mine. Then, out of sheer desperation for a hobby, I poured my first bar of handmade soap, and it showed me something I didn't expect: I wasn't a former artist keeping her hand on the proverbial paint palette for occasional use. I was an artist who'd been looking for the right outlet all along — one who likes her creations to be practical and useful.
It started with beauty of swirling colors in the bar and the pull of translating regional folklore into something you could hold in your hand and use in everyday life. But it didn't stop there. I fell hard for the craft itself: the chemistry of saponification, the trial and error of building my own recipes, the quiet satisfaction of solving a real need I recognized in my own life and in others'.
Somewhere in that obsession, I became a small business owner — one who makes beautiful, genuinely useful pieces of artwork. Four ounces of lore, cast in soap, meant to be held.
The making of an apothecary
At the same moment I was learning the art of cold process soap making, I stumbled upon a small business whose founder built her company on the principles of conflict theory — the sociological, Marx-derived idea that social structures are shaped by competition over power and resources, and that business can be organized to correct for that rather than reproduce it.
As someone who's spent nearly two decades working in corporate accountability, watching a business run successfully on that model was the awakening I needed. It was the spark that turned my simple passion for art and soap into something bigger: an eagerness to bring Factory Hollow Apothecary into the world as a force for good.
Those same two decades have also shaped how I think about where my money goes. Making soap — with aspirations of evolving to offer other body-care products — is my own small way of taking back the means of production: every bar I make is a dollar that stays out of a conglomerate's pocket and goes toward something I believe in instead. I try to buy local and from small businesses whenever I can for the same reason — it's one more way to keep my money circulating among people actually doing the work, rather than disappearing into capitalism's grasp. The Apothecary is tiny right now, but we hope to scale over time, and bring jobs to our community.
About the name
Factory Hollow Apothecary draws its name and spirit from the real 1830s mill village of Factory Hollow, tucked along the Mill River in North Amherst, Massachusetts — a place where water-powered industry once hummed and now runs quiet beside Puffer's Pond.
That history of small-scale, hands-made production is the throughline of everything we make: premium, small-batch cold process soaps and stylized, place-based artwork, each rooted in regional history, intriguing folklore, and the geography of New England.
