Most soap brands don’t make national headlines. Buff City Soap has — not for a scandal or a celebrity endorsement, but for pulling off one of the more unusual retail expansion stories of the last decade: turning a garage-made bar of soap into a franchise system with hundreds of storefronts across the country. Here’s how it happened, and what makes the business model different from a typical specialty retailer.
It Started With a Firefighter, a Nurse, and a Bad Reaction to Store-Bought Soap
Buff City Soap began in 2013 when paramedic Brad Kellum grew frustrated that the soap he used on his tattooed skin was made from cow fat and synthetic chemicals.He started experimenting with his own plant-based formulations alongside his future wife, registered nurse Jen Ziemianin, working out of their garage in Memphis.
The early formulations weren’t sophisticated lab science — they were kitchen-table trial and error. After a few months of tinkering, the pair landed on a recipe built around olive, coconut, and palm oils instead of animal byproducts, producing a bar with a hard exterior and a long-lasting, creamy lather.
Like a lot of small consumer brands, it started at the farmers market level. The couple sold their first products at local farmers markets, to neighbors, and to classmates at the law school Kellum was attending at the time.The company — then called The Bartlett Soap Co. — opened its first 600-square-foot storefront in Kellum’s hometown of Bartlett, Tennessee, and generated $75,000 in sales in its first year.
The Rebrand That Set Up National Expansion
A soap company named after a small Memphis suburb was never going to scale as a national brand. In 2017, the company renamed itself Buff City — a play on Memphis’s nickname, “Bluff City” — and began bringing on franchisees to fuel expansion.
The geographic strategy was deliberately unconventional. Rather than targeting major metros like New York or Los Angeles, many of the earliest stores opened in smaller, rural markets, including Dyersburg, Tennessee, a town of roughly 16,000 people. The logic was accessibility over prestige: Kellum priced products low enough for regular, repeat purchases, with an explicit goal of making Buff City the “Starbucks of soap.”
Kellum didn’t stay at the helm through the brand’s biggest growth phase. He stepped down as CEO in 2019, handing the role to an outside executive, and shifted his own focus to product development and the in-store retail experience.
The Pandemic-Era Growth Spike
Buff City’s growth curve looks unusual for a brick-and-mortar retail concept, largely because most of its expansion happened during a period when foot-traffic retail was supposed to be struggling. The company quietly opened hundreds of new locations during the pandemic, growing from just 30 stores in 2019 to 260 stores within a few years.
By early 2026, independent location-tracking data put the count at approximately 254 Buff City Soap locations across 32 states, with Tennessee as the leading state at 36 locations, or roughly 14.2% of the total footprint.The top ten states account for about 66.1% of all U.S. locations, with the biggest clusters concentrated around metro areas like Shelby County, Tennessee; Collin County, Texas; and Jefferson County, Kentucky.
That kind of geographic concentration tells its own story: this is a brand that grew market-by-market from a Southern base, rather than parachuting into major coastal cities first.
Who’s Actually Funding the Growth
Rapid multi-state retail expansion doesn’t happen on farmers-market revenue alone. Buff City’s expansion has been fueled by outside capital investment, including funding from Guideboat and Crux Capital, and later a larger investment from growth-equity firm General Atlantic.
General Atlantic’s involvement brought more than money — it also brought retail-scaling expertise. Buff City’s CEO, Dorvin Lively, previously served as CFO at Planet Fitness during a period when that company tripled its store count to roughly 2,400 locations, a background that lines up closely with what Buff City is trying to do in personal care retail.
The company’s own ambitions are explicit: with General Atlantic’s backing, Buff City has set a long-term target of operating 1,000 stores.A LinkedIn post from an investor on Buff City’s board echoed that sentiment, noting the brand has already scaled meaningfully but still sees significant “white space” for future growth.
The Economics: What It Actually Costs to Open One
For anyone reading this as a franchise-interest piece rather than a soap-history piece, the numbers matter. Startup costs for a Buff City Soap franchise range widely, from roughly $350,000 to $1.1 million, according to the company’s franchise disclosure documents.
The company has been actively working to bring those costs down and shorten the payback period, which it currently aims to keep under four years. That timeline draws some skepticism from franchise consultants: one franchise consultant who teaches at Georgetown University has suggested franchisees should aim for a payback period of 30 months or less, to leave enough runway on a typical 10-year agreement to actually turn a profit.
Revenue-wise, Buff City primarily earns money the way most franchisors do — through royalty fees, taking a standard 6% cut of franchisee sales — and reported $5 million in corporate-level revenue in 2021, plus another $15 million in deferred revenue tied to franchise agreements still being recognized over time. Like many fast-growing franchise systems, the company has operated at a loss at the corporate level, which industry observers note isn’t unusual during an aggressive expansion phase.
At the systemwide level, the picture looks stronger. Franchisees — who operate almost all Buff City locations — were projected to generate over $150 million in systemwide sales in a recent year, up double digits from the year before.
What Makes the “Makery” Model Different
Buff City’s real differentiator isn’t just the ingredient list — it’s the retail format. Each store, which the company brands as a “Soap Makery,” is designed as a clean, upscale, rustic, and minimalist body-products shop, producing high-quality, handmade, plant-based soaps, bath bombs, and body and face products on-site.Products are made directly on the premises, giving customers the chance to watch the production process in person, and every product can be customized to the guest’s preferred scent and color.
The franchise system standardizes nearly everything about that experience — product preparation, equipment, signage, pricing guidelines, staff training, and even the store’s decor, which centers on a signature reclaimed-wood counter and wood display fixtures.Stores also generate revenue beyond product sales by hosting private parties, including children’s birthday parties, and soap-making classes on-site.
That party angle turned out to be a bigger growth lever than it might sound. A 2023 Forbes profile specifically credited kids’ soap-themed birthday parties as part of the company’s expansion strategy, alongside its retail sales.
The Numbers Behind a Single Record Year
The scale of Buff City’s operations becomes clearer when you look at aggregate output rather than store count alone. <cite index=”14-3″>In one recent year, the company reported selling more than 4.5 million bars of soap — enough to stretch 275 miles laid end to end — along with over 1 million bath bombs, more than 75 million loads’ worth of laundry soap sold, and more than 450,000 birthdays celebrated in-store.</cite>
Those are the kind of operational numbers you’d expect from a much older, more established consumer brand — not a company that was mixing soap in a garage a little over a decade ago.
The Takeaway
Buff City Soap’s story is less about soap chemistry and more about retail strategy: a founder-led product with a genuine origin story, a pivot from a hyper-local name to a scalable brand identity, an unconventional small-market-first expansion strategy, and enough institutional capital to turn a regional favorite into a 250-plus-store national franchise chasing 1,000 locations.
Whether that 1,000-store target is realistic depends on execution — franchise economics, unit-level profitability, and market saturation will all matter more than brand sentiment from here. But as a case study in how a founder-market-fit product turns into a scaled retail franchise, Buff City Soap is one of the more interesting recent examples in the personal care space.
Three Lessons for Founders and Franchise-Watchers
Buff City’s trajectory offers a few takeaways that go beyond soap:
A rebrand can unlock growth a good product can’t. The underlying formula and store experience didn’t change much between “The Bartlett Soap Co.” and “Buff City” — but a name tied to a specific small town limited how far the concept could travel. The 2017 rebrand was arguably as important to the company’s growth as any product innovation.
Rural-first expansion is a legitimate strategy, not a compromise. Most retail concepts chase major metros first and treat smaller markets as an afterthought. Buff City did the opposite, building density in smaller Southern towns before expanding outward — a strategy that let it avoid competing directly with entrenched national retailers for prime urban real estate early on.
Institutional capital changes the growth ceiling, not just the growth rate. The jump from a handful of franchise locations to a target of 1,000 stores didn’t happen organically — it followed direct investment from firms with retail-scaling track records, including leadership with direct experience quadrupling a national chain’s footprint. For founders eyeing similar growth, the lesson isn’t just “raise money” — it’s raising money from investors and operators who’ve specifically solved the multi-unit retail scaling problem before.
Buff City still has real hurdles ahead of it: unprofitability at the corporate level, franchise payback periods that some consultants consider too long, and the basic challenge of maintaining a differentiated, handmade-feeling in-store experience across hundreds of locations run by independent operators. Whether it reaches 1,000 stores or plateaus well before that, its first decade is already a useful case study in how a two-person garage operation becomes a national retail franchise — and what it costs, financially and operationally, to get there.
