BOGUE MILK SOAP
Our Philosophy
Soap is to the body what laughter is to the soul
Our History
The first handmade soap made by Susan Bogue was 1973 in the Ojai Valley, CA for the small artisan shop Dos Manos “two hands” of her mother Helen Bogue. She continued to make soap and develop new recipes until the brand was was officially established in 2009 when Whole Foods in Northern California began caring the throw back Shave soap Kits. Shortly thereafter, Susans son, Adam Newton-Bogue, returned to Ojai and joined BMS after 25 years in the restaurant business moving from “farm to table” to “farm to bath”. Bogue Milk Soap creates all its soap with a simple philosophy, the belief and commitment that every product is made with the best all natural ingredients available, handmade for superior quality and effective. We use organic, sustainable plant based oils, botanicals, butters and herbs, growing or obtaining what we can locally, and only steam distilled Pure Essential oil no fragrance oils or paragons. Our main ingredients Fresh, raw goat milk, olive oil and lavender are collected weekly from local farms. Organic comfrey, chickweed, plantain, calendula, chamomile, parsley, arnica, and cats claw are all infused in olive oil & sunshine at the soap shop.
Our Ingredients
Our artisanal, green bath, beauty and wellness products use meticulously researched botanicals, wildcrafted to be mindful and effective. Soaps use various clays, powdered herbs and diatomaceous earth for their collagen building, light exfoliating and skin balancing properties which also give a unique decadent appearance and a lush gentle lather. All products are cruelty-free, Non GMO, with No sulfates, paragons, alcohol, soy or silicone.
Susan Bogue
The native botanicals of Upper Ojai combined with the visceral, sensual effects of handmade soap first steered her to her passion for soap-making using local, organic and wild crafted materials. Long after the shop was gone, Susan’s passion for soapmaking grew with the challenges of the chemistry involved and the complexity of analysis for potential combinations to achieve a desired outcome, which ultimately culminated Bogue Milk Soap. The official BMS brand was born and she has been making her soap ever since; selling locally and building a following in Northern California.
Susan’s career has encompassed more than 40 years in sales and marketing, including retail, food, business-to-business software, sales & marketing programs and state level social marketing programs. She managed a sales force of twelve for a bakery of a chain of 32 stores, maintaining status as top store for 3 years straight; she developed and managed a sales force of five for a B2B software company that consistently blew away quotas every quarter, and developed a program and managed a remote team of account managers for statewide execution of a social marketing program for eight years, with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) as the client and community outreach organizations (CBOs) as the customer.
In 1989 Susan moved to San Francisco, where she entered the tumultuous arena of the tech bubble of business-to-business (B2B) enterprise software sales. She spent 5 years building sales programs for, whose major competitors at the time were Oracle and Microsoft. In 1994 Susan’s programs were Sybase moved to Boston where she hired staff, set up systems, implemented and executed the program. She turned down the opportunity to move to Boston and manage the program, mainly because she had grown up in Boston and remembered well what the winters entailed. This decision was the preamble to her decade of consulting in the San Francisco Bay area to develop, staff and execute sales programs in startup tech organizations. It was during this time that Susan expanded her love of soapmaking into an entrepreneurial venture that brought her line to Whole Foods Markets in Northern California.
With the collapse of the tech bubble, Susan realized that the technology industry for her, was unfulfilling. She took her program skills to the public sector and created programs for social change in low income sectors. This was definitely more fulfilling, and fun, than the frenetic tech industry, but Susan found more of her energy focusing on soap-making and less on business programs over the next few years. All this changed with the recession when jobs were scarce and many people depended on their entrepreneurial skills to change direction, and for Susan Bogue, she never looked back.
While Susan spent much of her career in the business arena, one of her first jobs was with a handmade clothing shop in Laguna beach, CA where she was head tailor creating the main line of custom shirts for the shop. All her life, she spent her free time on creative endeavors. In the 70’s, she and her mother Helen experimented in many handmade goods in upper Ojai, subsequently opening a shop called “Dos Manos” (Two Hands) with a couple of locations in neighboring downtown Ventura which became an outlet for local artisans. The native botanicals of Upper Ojai combined with the visceral, sensual effects of handmade soap first steered her to her passion for soap-making using local, organic and wild crafted materials. Long after the shop was gone, Susan’s passion for soapmaking grew with the challenges of the chemistry involved and the complexity of analysis for potential combinations to achieve a desired outcome, which ultimately culminated Bogue Milk Soap. The official BMS brand was born and she has been making her soap ever since; selling locally and building a following in Northern California.
Susan will continue to oversee all aspects of soapmaking for Bogue Milk Soap, including research and development of new lines.
Adam Newton-Bogue
Adam Newton-Bogue’s philosophy encompasses working with people who have passion to match their talent – leaders from all design industries, artists or artisans in any medium, musicians, DJs & producers in the constantly changing music world, chefs and bakers and soapmakers, and of course farmers from whom it all starts and ends. He strives always to create projects, products and creations that are refined, artisanal, mindful & effective, healthy for the mind, body, spirit & planet.
Newton-Bogue spent much of his youth in the 70’s & 80’s traveling between west coast family in Ojai, CA and east coast family in NY & DC, with entrepreneurial families on both coasts. His family had restaurants and retail, such as a shop of handmade goods in Ojai/Ventura opened by his grandmother Helen Bogue and mother Susan Bogue in 1974 and a top notch bakery in DC opened in the early 80’s by his grandfather and run by his mother and father. This environment was the original impetus for his passion for fine food that brought him much acclaim.
Adam has a deeply seated philosophy of what is required to prepare and deliver great food, as well as create great natural products, which he absorbed and developed during his time in the Food & Beverage Industry of New York City. For him it is a simple philosophy: find the best quality ingredients as close to the original source as possible, select the best of the best for the unique properties they bring to the dish and hone a recipe to perfection; then deliver it to the customer as quickly as possible.
Adam’s time in New York City began after college and a European fashion foray, settling there in 1991 to manage Restaurant 44 located in the renowned Royalton Hotel by Ian Schrager (Studio 54, Palladium, Delano Hotel, Mondrian Hotel, Gramercy Park Hotel, Public). It was this time in NYC during the build crazy .com tech boom of the 90s, opening venues around the world working with Schrager at Morgans Hotel Group designed by Philippe Starck, working also with prolific restaurateurs Brian & Keith McNally (Balthazar, Pastis, Schillers, Minetta Tavern, Morandi Tavern, Odeon, Lucky Strike…) along with Jonathan Nahamais & Michael Callahan (Indochine, Bond Street, Republic, Kittichai, Coco 66, Town House), and Geoffrey Zakarian restaurateur and Celebrity chef The Next Iron Chef, Chopped.
Newton-Bogue’s experience at Schrager Hotels and with designer Phillip Stark fueled the conceptualization of his visionary restaurant, CAFETERIA, a highly successful, trend-setting 24-hour Restaurant/Lounge he opened in 1998, and still as busy today as when it opened, after more than 20 years of operating every hour of every day. followed by “the carriage house”, a fine dining restaurant he opened in 2003.
At CAFETERIA, he worked with designer STUDIO GAIA of Thompson & W Hotels to create a unique atmosphere and menu for an ambiance often commonly described as “1960’s ‘mod’ meets 1990’s Philippe Starck” and “palm spring modern” that exploded onto the NY restaurant scene. For the carriage house, A.N.B. was inspired by fresh South American cuisine in a menu with NY style seafood blended with Latin flavors in a venue of uniquely original design and cuisine that received rave reviews. The carriage house brought a bold, new design aesthetic to the scene with mid-century modern inspirations and 21st century bold statements like a 14’ by 70’ desert photo-mural reaching from the front door to the kitchen and a Richard Neutra inspired 12-foot bright yellow bar suspended from the ceiling by a network of cables. “the carriage house” became a regular stop for students on architectural tours. It was at the carriage house in the early 2000’s that A.N.B. first worked with chefs to bring ‘farm to table’ organic, sustainable, locally grown food to a growing ingredient conscious customer, this philosophy has carried over into the bath, hair & body products of the mother & son business Bogue Milk Soap, which he calls ‘farm to bath’.
Later, in Los Angeles, Adam consulted on the launch of a CAFETERIA-inspired concept called Kitchen24 and stayed to take over the historic Sunset Strip diner “Dukes.” Seeing the potential after 42 years with one owner, Newton-Bogue brought Dukes current with new farm fresh dishes, brought back the original music scene and had a private lounge, The Morrison Room, designed and built above Dukes, paying homage to its one-time resident, the Doors Jim Morrison.
After these venues, he collaborated on projects on both coasts collaborating to restructure operations for older establishments like the St. Jerome’s Bar in the now bustling Lower East Side NYC, while beginning to develop the business of Susan Bogue’s soap line, Bogue Milk Soap, whose first cornerstone product, a men’s shaving kit, began selling in Whole Foods Market in 2009 .
Adam Newton-Bogue’s philosophy encompasses working with people who have passion to match their talent – leaders from the interior & graphic design industries, artists or artisans in stone, wood and metal, musicians, DJs & producers in the constantly changing music world, and most of all farmers & chefs from whom it all starts and ends, to bring projects and products, creations that are refined, artisanal, mindful & effective, healthy for the mind, body, spirit & planet.
Find out more about the Ojai Valley
NYT 2015
NYT 2005
NYT 1988