Teresa Ross wields an 18-inch knife when she slices her California sushi rolls.
But the only place this sushi will be served is in baths and showers.
That’s because Ross is cutting soap — wasabi-scented loaves of glycerin with colored glycerin sushi rolls running through the center.
Ross and her all-female staff make and sell the soap at Milagros for Body and Soul, an eclectic boutique in downtown St. Petersburg, Fla. Inside the fragrant emporium, more than 50 different loaves of bright-colored soap share shelf space with body lotions, lip balm, beaded crosses, saint-stenciled T-shirts and milagros, or miracles — small tin charms used in Mexican Catholic culture to ask God for specific blessings.
Outside, Milagros’ doorway is watched over by an image of St. Agnes, the virgin saint of girls. The store, at 1104 Central Ave., sits on a hit-and-miss stretch of street amid empty storefronts, cafes, art galleries and specialty shops. Business owners like Ross are key to the city’s efforts to reinvigorate St. Petersburg’s “dome district” into a vibrant arts-and-retail corridor.
“It is an up-and-coming district,” says Dave Goodwin, the city’s economic development director.
Ross moved her store here three years ago from a spot closer to the heart of the city when her lease ended. She brought her exotic soaps, her community of women co-workers, vestiges of her Catholic upbringing, creativity and drive. Now her hand-cut soaps are finding their way into hundreds of area bathrooms and are being distributed nationwide.
“I don’t consider myself an overly creative person, but I obviously had some sort of creative scratch to itch,” says Ross, a 46-year-old entrepreneur.
The business of soap
A mix of lavender, peppermint and blueberry rises off loaves of Milagros soap. Others evoke martinis, mojitos and Thai lemongrass. Each fragrance is matched by a design embedded into the glycerin. The loaf of the martini soap is light blue; a clear martini glass with green olives and red pimentos rests inside the gelatinous libation. Blades of green grass soap stick out of a yellow bar of Thai lemongrass.
Ross and her soap-makers use a melt-and-pour technique to create the popular bars. They melt 25-pound bricks of vegetable glycerin base in a big cauldron and then add one or a combination of essential or synthetic oils for fragrance. All told, they use more than 100 different scents in their soaps. Some soaps, like “Miracle,” include goat’s milk and oatmeal for more moisturizer.
The icons embedded in the loaves are pre-shaped, dyed and set into the glycerin base when it’s still liquid.
Milagros’ soap-makers also make body butter, lip balm, bath gels and a shea butter mix called “Anointment Ointment.”
All this takes place behind an open counter where customers can watch the soap’s conception. Customers can’t resist sniffing the fragrances of soaps on the shelves, one after another. Once the shoppers have made their picks, Ross slices half-pound bars — roughly 1 inch each — from the loaves with her hefty pizza knife. Customers also are invited to create personalized soaps with their own choice of colors and scents. The half-pound bars sell for $8 each.
Ross and her soap-makers now craft as many as 600 bars of soap per day. Most are sold to walk-in customers from the St. Petersburg boutique and a sister Milagros on South Howard Avenue in Tampa. The soaps can also be ordered through the store’s Web site, www.sisteragnes.com.
Last year, Ross says 80 percent of her sales — which she says reached about $500,000 — comes from retail sales of body products and religious memorabilia through her stores and the Internet. The rest comes through wholesale business to other boutiques that carry her products.
Milagros has evolved since its birth 10 years ago as a home furnishings store on Central at Fifth Street North. Ross wanted to include soaps in her inventory but couldn’t find any that fit her fancy.
Then an employee asked her a life-changing question: “Why don’t we make it?”
So they did.
“I had no idea how to do it so we just went online and got a few books, and trial and error,” Ross says. “There we are.”
A successful 'hair-brained idea'
Ross was a news programmer for CBS sports in New York when she followed her new husband to Florida in 1989. She felt like she “fell off the face of the Earth.”
She found work with a local production company. Then, almost a decade later, she had “the hair-brained idea” to open a retail shop.
At first she struggled with the career change. “I felt like I wasn’t doing anything worth anything,” she says. “If I went and sat on a couch somewhere, they would probably say I was depressed. … It didn’t seem important.”
When her marriage ended, Ross poured her heart into her evolving store. She experimented with new scents and designs. The more she made, the more people bought.
She sprinkled her shop with fragments of her Catholic upbringing — from a parochial grade school all the way through the University of Notre Dame. She orders milagros from Mexico and buys beaded crosses from local artist and lawyer Jane Grossman. Wooden crosses hang throughout the store. Silver-painted crosses speckle the blue walls.
“It’s just a really weird combo that’s worked,” Ross says.
A full shelf is devoted to 4-inch-tall Day of the Dead figurines dressed in everything from bathing suits to wedding dresses. The decorated skeletons are used in Mexican culture as part of the three-day celebration, from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2, to honor the dead and pray for relatives to be released from purgatory.
A mural of St. Agnes, martyred at 13 for refusing to marry and sacrifice her virginity, graces the door behind the checkout counter. Ross adopted the saint as the store’s patron to watch over the women — from a high school student to a woman in her 70s — who make her soap.
“I think growing up Catholic, it just becomes a part of your fabric,” she says. “We have fun with our religious undertones here. But for whatever reason, when people come in here, it touches a chord.”
And Milagros happened.