Highland Soap

Highland Soap, which trades as The Highland Soap Co., is a Scottish maker of soap, bath and body products, skincare and home fragrance based in Fort William in the West Highlands. It was founded by Emma Parton, who began making soap in her own kitchen and first sold it in her father's shop. From those beginnings it has grown into a family-owned company with its own workshop, a chain of retail stores in Scotland, a visitor centre beside the ruins of Old Inverlochy Castle and a network of stockists in Europe and North America.

The brand is built around handmade, small-batch production and ingredients tied to the Highland landscape, among them a bog myrtle essential oil that the company distils itself and kelp gathered from the wild for its Hebridean Seaweed range. Accounts of its start differ: the company places its beginnings in the 1990s, while a 2021 newspaper report names 2001 as the year of founding. The company remains active.

According to the company, Emma Parton started the business at home in the 1990s after finding it hard to buy organic skincare that was nicely packaged and pleasant to use [5]. In a 2023 interview she put the problem in plain sensory terms: the organic and natural soaps and creams she could find did not look, smell or feel the way she wanted, so she began making her own. Her first outlet was close to home. Her father had a small shop in Spean Bridge, and she started by selling her creations there [8].

The founding year is not settled. The company's own FAQ and Parton's 2023 interview both give only a decade, the 1990s. A May 2021 article in the Strathspey Herald, a regional newspaper, states that Parton founded the Fort William-based company in 2001 [7]. The brand's homepage separately says it has made its products with natural ingredients and essential oils for twenty years. None of these accounts explains the gap between the kitchen start and the later date, and this article follows the company's own account of a 1990s beginning while noting the newspaper's 2001.

Parton runs the company together with Archie MacDonald; when the National Trust for Scotland profiled the business in 2023, it introduced the two of them as Highland Soap's directors.

Little is publicly known about the step from kitchen to company, but by the 2020s Highland Soap was an established Fort William business with shops of its own. The Covid-19 pandemic brought one of its more unusual products. In 2020 it developed a range of scented hand sanitisers made with 70 per cent alcohol sourced from a Highland distiller. According to the Strathspey Herald, the sanitisers were later featured on ITV's This Morning, where presenters Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield hailed them as one of the best hand sanitisers on the market in the UK [7].

In May 2021 the company opened its seventh retail store, in Aviemore, creating three local jobs. At the time it reported 350 retail stockists across Europe and North America, and it had concluded an agreement with a supplier to retailers in Hong Kong that took its products to a third continent [7]. The company said its sales had risen by 25 per cent in the 2020/21 financial year, to four times their 2017 level, and that its workforce had grown by nearly 30 per cent in a year, to more than 50 employees. Parton linked the growth to changing habits during the pandemic, saying many customers had come to favour local, sustainable businesses and goods made by hand. These figures date from May 2021.

The same year the company committed to packaging its shampoo, body washes and conditioners in 250ml bottles made from biopolymer, a plastic produced from sugarcane rather than oil. Parton said at the time that the company planned to extend sustainable packaging to its other lines as soon as it could.

Highland Soap also began supplying shops run by the National Trust for Scotland, the charity that sells work by Scottish makers in its physical and online shops. According to the Trust, the range reached 17 of its sites within a year, although it does not say when this began [8].

A more recent project is the company's new home in Fort William. By March 2023 it had opened The Highland Soap Company Visitor Centre & Larder Café, set in six acres of grounds between the River Lochy and the 13th-century Old Inverlochy Castle. The site combines a shop, a café and soap-making workshops for visitors. The company's production workshop sits in the same setting, looking over the north face of Ben Nevis, the UK's highest mountain.

Highland Soap is independent. Its legal name is The Highland Soap Co. Ltd., a company registered in Scotland under number SC305568. It describes itself as a small, family-owned company that pays above the Living Wage [5]. No parent company and no acquisitions are documented.

The company frames its work around place. It says the Highland landscape has always been the inspiration for its products, and its tagline, "The Highlands. In Essence.", makes the same point in four words. On its homepage it sums up its approach as "Honest, simple, and natural".

Its stated mission is broader in ambition. Highland Soap says it uses organic and natural ingredients and sustainable packaging in a small-scale batch process to create what it believes are "the finest and most ethical soap and skincare products made in Scotland" [2]. In 2021 Parton went further in the press, describing the company as having always prided itself on being the greenest maker of soaps and skincare in Scotland.

Handmade production sits at the centre of this image. The company makes its bar soap by the cold process, a slow traditional method in which each batch is left to cure for around four weeks, and it describes the resulting soaps as mild and moisturising on sensitive, dry skin. Because everything is made by hand, it argues, it knows exactly what goes into each product. Ingredients it does not gather from the wild are, in its words, organic, natural and sustainable, and it says it buys only from suppliers whose supply chains it can verify.

Highland Soap's range is organised mainly by scent. Its collections include Wild Gorse & Vanilla, Lemongrass & Ginger, Wild Scottish Raspberry, Whisky & Honey, Scottish Bog Myrtle, Highland Lavender, Sweet Orange & Cinnamon, Wild Nettle & Heather, Rose & Patchouli, Hebridean Seaweed, Juniper & Lime and Gardener's Remedy. Within these lines it makes soaps, hand washes, body washes, bubble baths, shampoos, conditioners and shampoo bars, hand and foot care, natural deodorant, lotions and creams, lip balms, men's grooming products, candles and reed diffusers, along with gift sets.

Soap remains the core. The company sells two distinct bars: a 190g cold-process Handmade Soap and a 150g glycerine-based Organic Soap. Its homepage says its products are made with over 70 per cent organic ingredients [1].

Bog myrtle has a particular place in the range. The company distils the essential oil for its Scottish Bog Myrtle range in its own copper pot still, from plants it gathers in the wild [8], and it says it is the only company in the UK to do so [5]. The range includes the Scottish Bog Myrtle Nourishing Night Cream. In its FAQ, the company also says bog myrtle is known for treating skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis, and for anti-ageing; that description is the company's own. A second regional ingredient is kelp, which Highland Soap gathers from the wild for its Hebridean Seaweed range.

Beyond these, the company's ingredient guide lists more than 40 key ingredients across its products, from aloe vera, shea butter, cocoa butter and olive oil to nettle leaf, heather, wild gorse, organic Scottish oats, raspberry seed oil and sustainable organic palm oil [3]. Its vegetable oils are described by the company as RSPO organic.

The company also defines its products by what they leave out. Its handmade soaps contain no artificial synthetic foaming agents such as sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) or SLES, and its creams and lotions contain no paraben preservatives. Highland Soap says it avoids these ingredients because they dry the skin and harm aquatic life.

On animal welfare, the company states that its products and raw ingredients are cruelty-free and not tested on animals. Most of the range is vegan, with exceptions: the organic creams and organic lip balms contain beeswax, and a few soaps contain organic honey. No third-party organic, vegan or cruelty-free certification is documented, so these are the company's own statements.

Packaging is the most visible part of the company's environmental work. Its bottles, jars and lids are made from post-consumer recycled material and can be recycled or refilled, either in its shops or from one-litre glass refill bottles. Shampoo, body wash and conditioner come in sugarcane-derived plastic bottles, a change the company announced in 2021 [7], and shampoo bars are sold without packaging. For shipping, it uses home-compostable void fill made from renewable sources such as corn husks, and it says it never uses polystyrene.

The company also says its products contain no plastic microbeads. It links these choices to its labour practices, describing itself as a company that pays above the Living Wage and puts the environment first.

No industry awards are documented for Highland Soap. Its press coverage is largely regional. The Strathspey Herald reported on its Aviemore opening and growth in 2021, in an article built partly on statements and a photograph supplied by the company. The same report noted that the brand's hand sanitisers had appeared on ITV's This Morning. In 2023 the National Trust for Scotland featured Parton and MacDonald in its "Meet the Makers" series; the Trust also sells the company's products in its shops.

Highland Soap is active. In October 2026 its website was publishing regular news posts, the latest dated 9 October 2026, and operating an online shop. The company sells through its own shops in Scotland, including the Fort William visitor centre, and online. It also supplies gift shops, farm shops, health shops and museums in the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States [5]. The most recent public figures on its size, from 2021, put it at seven retail stores and more than 50 employees.