Soaply

Soaply is the international, English-language name of Seepje, a Dutch brand of natural-origin washing products founded in 2013 by two school friends, Jasper Gabriëlse and Melvin Loggies [2][11]. The brand is built around the dried fruit shells of Sapindus mukorossi, a tree whose fruit contains saponin, a plant compound that foams and cleans when it meets water. From that starting point the company has grown a range that runs from laundry detergent and dishwashing soap to hand soap, shower gel, shampoo and conditioner.

The company behind both names, Seepje B.V., is based in The Hague. It became a certified B Corp in 2019 and raised €4.2 million from two impact investment funds in 2023. For a personal-care reader, the relevant part of the range is the hand, body and hair line; the rest of the catalogue is household cleaning. The brand is active.

The origin story is told the same way by the company and by the press. Melvin and Jasper, who had been friends since secondary school, saw a television programme in 2013 about how people in Nepal extracted a natural soap from the peel of a fruit and used it to wash their hair, their bodies and their clothes. The two set out to bring the idea to the Netherlands.

According to the Dutch startup publication Silicon Canals, the founders made contact with Hari, a shell farmer in Nepal, and paid for the first shipment of shells with their student loans [11]. The shells were meant for the washing machine, where the saponin they contain is released as soon as they come into contact with water.

In the company's own account, the years since have been a search "for the best natural ingredients to make clean soap." It says it now produces around 30 types of product and has made 5.7 million litres of what it calls clean soap.

By 2019 the company was publishing an annual impact report, which it called "het Bonte Jaarverslag". Figures from that report, reported by the Dutch sustainability outlet Duurzaam Ondernemen, give a picture of the business at the time. In 2018 its purchases from shell farmers in Nepal and India were said to equal more than 35 fair Nepalese annual incomes. Its packaging was made from recycled HDPE plastic collected around Rotterdam, and 31,672 kilograms of plastic had been reused that year. Around 16 people with physical or mental disabilities packed the products each week at sheltered workshops.

In August 2019 Seepje was officially certified as a B Corp [12]. B Corp is an international movement of companies that commit to strict requirements on social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability; by then more than 2,500 organisations worldwide carried the label. Co-founder Jasper Gabriëlse said at the time that the company had, over the previous three years, replaced more than 700,000 litres of synthetic detergent with its own products. He also described its new fabric softener as the first to be declared both 100 percent natural and vegan, a claim made by the company itself.

The next major step came in January 2023, when Silicon Canals reported that the company had secured €4.2 million from the ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund and the Fair Capital Impact Fund [11]. The money was intended to widen the range of soap products, strengthen the company's position in the Netherlands and Belgium, and speed up expansion abroad. Gabriëlse said the investment would help Seepje "become the world's most impactful soap brand", and that the investors would also help make its supply chain more transparent by improving how the company measures and reports its impact. Michelle de Rijk of Fair Capital Impact Fund noted that the founders had been working on the business "for almost a decade". At that point the products were sold online and in shops in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and South Korea.

In June 2024 the company introduced powder refills for its shampoo and shower gel, together with what it calls a 100 percent refill guarantee. The launch is covered in more detail under Products & innovation.

Soaply and Seepje are owned and operated by Seepje B.V., the company set up around the original Dutch brand. The World Fair Trade Organization's member directory describes Seepje B.V. as operating under the brand name "Soaply" [13].

The sources disagree on where the company is based. The legal contact details on soaply.com name Seepje B.V. at Mauritskade 1 in The Hague, the brand's About page places its team in the same city, and Silicon Canals also describes a Hague-based company [8]. The World Fair Trade Organization directory, which is undated, instead lists an address in Culemborg [13]. This article follows The Hague, where the company itself says it is based.

The two impact funds that invested in 2023 are financial backers; the size of their stakes has not been made public. There is no public record of the brand being acquired by a larger group.

Soaply presents itself as a natural alternative to conventional washing products made from fossil raw materials. Its About page puts the idea as a rhetorical question: "Why use all sorts of fossil-based junk when washing can be done naturally?" The homepage tagline is "For a cleaner and brighter world!"

According to the company, its products contain no microplastics, synthetic fragrances or synthetic dyes. The homepage cites a figure of 97.5 percent ingredients of natural origin and describes the hand soap as 99 percent natural and pH balanced. Seepje names sustainability, ethics and transparency as the standards behind its B Corp status.

The company's tone is informal. Its staff are called "Soapies", its office in The Hague is the "Washok", introduced on the About page as "our laundry room", and its operations team goes by "Soaperations". The About page says the team of 26 holds a Great Place To Work certification, an employer label, and mentions weekly boot-camp sessions and unlimited holiday days.

The brand sells through its own webshop as well as through supermarkets and drugstores.

The saponin-bearing shells of Sapindus mukorossi, sourced from Nepal and India, remain the brand's defining ingredient. The company explains the chemistry in plain terms: a saponin molecule has one end that is attracted to water and one that is attracted to fat. It clings to dirt and to water at the same time, so the dirt can be rinsed away, and it also lowers the surface tension of the water.

Soaply's personal-care line is small. It includes liquid hand soaps in scents such as Eucalyptus and Rosemary, Lavender and Tonka, and Vetiver with Cedarwood; shower gels such as Oakmoss and Neroli and White Peach and Cedarwood; and a hair range. The company recommends its Hydrate & Nourish shampoo, sold with a matching conditioner, for daily use, and Repair & Care for lifeless and damaged hair. Ingredients highlighted across the hair formulas include Moroccan argan oil, plant-based rice and oat proteins, hyaluronic acid and organic shea butter from Ghana. The shower gel uses betaine, a mild cleansing agent that the company says is made from sugar beet.

Several third-party labels apply to parts of the range. The brand states that its hand soaps contain at least 99.2 percent natural-origin ingredients and carry Ecocert COSMOS certification, while its laundry and dishwashing detergents are certified to Ecocert's Ecodetergent standard [2]. The company also says its products are dermatologically tested and approved by Dermatest, an independent testing institute, through patch tests carried out under dermatological supervision.

The vegan status of the range comes with a qualification. On soaply.com the hand soap is simply described as vegan [1]. The Dutch Seepje site is more precise: it says that almost all of its products carry the Vegan Trademark of The Vegan Society, with two exceptions. These are the dishwashing soap and a hand soap scented with fresh-pressed orange, because the orange peel used in them may carry non-vegan processing residues from suppliers [10]. The sustainability directory COSH reports the same exception.

The 2024 refill launch is the brand's most recent documented product development. The company argues that the Netherlands throws away 84 million shampoo bottles a year and that liquid shampoo and shower gel are about 80 percent water, which is heavy to transport. Its answer is a sachet of powder containing only the active ingredients. The user fills an empty Seepje bottle with hot tap water, adds the powder and shakes it; once cooled, the mixture becomes shampoo or shower gel. Under the refill guarantee, the company promises to send a free replacement bottle or cap if the original breaks, as long as the customer keeps refilling it with Seepje [7].

Much of the brand's identity rests on sustainability claims. It says its bottles are made from recycled plastic and can be refilled indefinitely. COSH, which rates brands on sustainability, adds that the bottles are 97 percent recycled HDPE, that the shell packaging is a cardboard box with a biodegradable plastic bag, and that the company has reused waste such as orange peels from the Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn. According to the same directory, the brand uses RSPO-certified palm oil, offsets shipping emissions through the GoodShipping Program and had created more than 40 fair annual incomes in Nepal by 2021 [14].

The social side of the business is part of the same picture. Packing work at sheltered workshops, direct links with shell farmers and published impact reports all feature in the company's description of itself and in the 2019 press coverage of its B Corp certification.

The B Corp certification in 2019 is the brand's most visible external recognition; COSH gives the company's score at the time as 84 points. Coverage has come mainly from Dutch business and sustainability media rather than beauty publications, notably Duurzaam Ondernemen on the B Corp certification and Silicon Canals on the 2023 investment round.

Soaply is active. The company continues to run the English-language soaply.com storefront alongside the Dutch seepje.com site, and the Dutch certification page refers to stricter B Corp standards coming into force from 2026. The most recent dated news post on soaply.com is the June 2024 refill launch, written in Dutch, which suggests that the English-language storefront is updated less often than the Dutch Seepje operation.

The World Fair Trade Organization directory lists Seepje B.V.'s membership as suspended, without giving a reason [13]. No controversies involving the brand have been reported.