Made in New England | Atlantic Soap Co. in Falmouth, Massachusetts

Sometimes, a new Atlantic Soap Co. bar starts with the scent. That was the case with Nor’easter, a striking, swirled inky-blue soap with herbal, vegetal notes. The fragrance “just felt windy to me—this soap needed to be a storm,” says Caroline Laye, owner of the Falmouth, Massachusetts–based company.

Other times, Laye begins with the design. She wanted her exfoliating, mica-flecked Sand Bar to “literally look like you picked up a handful of sand,” she says. After getting the color just right, she turned to the scent, selecting almond, sea salt, and tonka bean to evoke the feeling of “lying on your warm towel in the sun, hearing the waves and being so warm and dry after swimming.”

But no matter the origin story, each bar—crafted by Laye with seawater sourced from the Falmouth village of Woods Hole—has an undeniable sense of place. These hyperlocal vibes have no doubt bolstered Atlantic Soap Co.’s popularity: Since founding her business seven years ago, Laye has created dozens of artful soaps including seasonal offerings and expanded her line with candles, shampoo and lotion bars, and lip shimmers.

Not bad for a self-taught soap maker originally inspired by a DIY magazine in a Michael’s checkout line. Laye and her husband moved to Falmouth in 2015 when he got a job at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. With a master’s in fine and decorative arts and a background in high-end retail and antiques sales, Laye started working in the kitchen and home department at Eastman’s Hardware on Main Street. There, she found herself drawn to the ever-growing soap selection. “I had 17 soaps in my shower at all times,” Laye says with a laugh.

It was in 2018 that she bought the aforementioned DIY magazine on a whim and promptly went down a saponification rabbit hole on YouTube. Laye gathered soap-making equipment and began experimenting with different scents, textures, and methods. “It’s pretty crazy how many different ways you can interpret a bar of soap,” she says. After making batch after small batch, Laye eventually landed on soleseife, a smooth, hard German soap crafted via cold process with a brine solution or seawater.

Among her first creations were the Chatham Kelp Beauty Bar (originally made with powdered kelp but now a collaboration with Chatham Kelp incorporating their sustainably harvested seaweed) and Ultramarine. With citrus, cotton blossom, and musk on the nose and an eye-catching design—clean lines of white and deep blue with a wavy top—the latter embodies what Atlantic Soap Co. is all about. “These fresh, clean, airy seaside scents are really what I’m drawn to,” Laye says. “Coastal, bright, and sunny. That’s been a constant.” (She also really likes the color blue—so much so that she almost named her enterprise the Ultramarine Soap Co.)

The following summer, Laye sold her wares for the first time at the Falmouth ArtMarket, now known as Artisans at the Harbor. But when the pandemic derailed her market expansion plans, she used the time to revamp her website with fresh photography, participate in a virtual Entrepreneurship for All business accelerator program, and work with a branding consultant. “I was like, I’m doing this for real,” Laye recalls. “This is really something that I’m passionate about, and I want to make this a big success. And all of that took me from my farmers’-market-and-craft-fair era into e-commerce and wholesale.”

Today, Laye still blends, pours, molds, and cuts her soaps and other products by hand in her cozy North Falmouth studio. The day I visited, she made a Sand Bar loaf, assembling her mise en place; adding the scents, pumice powder, and black volcanic sand; and demonstrating how she drags a fork’s tines across the hardening mixture to mimic the look of dunes on the finished product. (Studio coordinator Liezl Owen, her sole employee, was packing boxes nearby.)Next, the batch would head to the cutter and then to the drying racks, where the bars would rest for four weeks before being packaged in Atlantic Soap Co.’s signature white-and-gold boxes with light teal labels.

Each of her soap recipes requires different ingredients and techniques—and Laye is always concocting new varieties. Last summer, she introduced a three-soap Cabana Collection, which nods to different regions of the Eastern Seaboard—Cliff Walk for New England, Golden Dunes for the Mid-Atlantic, and Palm Paradise for the South—and features bright, preppy stripes. This summer, she’s turning her eye to the horizon with a four-soap Voyager Collection inspired by four corners of the Atlantic—the Labrador coast, Rio de Janeiro, the Atlantic coast of France, and the Cape of Good Hope.

After all, Laye has ambitions for her soap company that go beyond the Cape—and it’s right there in the name.

“There’s a reason that it’s the Atlantic Soap Co. and not the Cape Cod Soap Co.,” she says. “I do use seawater, which in a certain way makes the soaps hyperlocal, but in another way connects them to the vast Atlantic. It’s this sense of adventure and travel and unknown places that I haven’t been to, and cultures that are connected by this body of water. To me, the ocean is possibility.”

This feature was originally published as “Bathing Beauties” in the July/August 2026 issue of Yankee.

Courtney Hollands

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