Just Ducky: All-natural, ‘farm-to-bathroom’ self-care

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

August 18, 2025

OSCEOLA – More than a decade ago, Elizabeth Meyer – co-owner/operator of Just Ducky Soap – said she and her husband, Andy, settled on the banks of the St. Croix River to literally grow their business.

After meeting Andy in Missouri in 2008 and getting married shortly after, Meyer said they moved to Wisconsin – Clayton, more specifically – in 2009.
“I can actually say that’s where the business was born,” she said. “It’s a town of 500 people, but it’s right on the highway – just below Highway 8. [It was] such a lovely town, and I was pregnant with our first and selling my first soaps there.”

However, Meyer said she and Andy were united in their dream to establish roots for their business and embarked on a journey to find the perfect location.

“[We] had an idea to grow the ingredients for our soap – to have an actual farm that [grew] fruits and vegetables and herbs that were used for soap making – similar to ‘farm to table’ [but it’s] ‘farm to your bathroom’ for self-care,” she said. “We spent many years looking for the right kind of land.”

After their first land purchase and farm attempt – which “did not turn out well [due to] the soil” – Meyer said they found an “amazing property” in 2013.

“[We’re] near the St. Croix River in the St. Croix River Valley –  just one of those idyllic locations that looks like ‘Wild America’ at the back,” she said. “So, we’re able to grow things that both need a field and a forest.”

Meyer said their five-acre property – located at 2681 55th Ave. in Osceola – is home to not only their soap-ingredient farm but also their lab, manufacturing spaces and retail store.

“[Through] many trials and [over] many years, we now [grow] nine different varieties of lavender, 21 varieties of mint, bergamot, eucalyptus [and more],” she said. “We also have a lavender that we’ve developed along with [wild bumble]bees that we call Blue Belle, and it’s winter-hardy.”

With a large number and variety of plants and flowers in bloom every season at Just Ducky, Meyer said “we provide and [pollinators] show up.”

“Right now, we just started our second phase of blooming, and there are monarchs in our fields, so they help, too,” she said. “We’re just kind of a pollinator haven.”

Now, through more than a decade in business, Meyer said she, Andy and their team of eight employees have grown Just Ducky to the self-care staple it is today.

Great minds think alike

When she was just 13 years old, Meyer said she discovered she couldn’t “handle” the smell of “artificial fragrances.”

“So, I started learning how to make soap,” she said.

Embarking on a journey to make all-natural, artificial-fragrance-free soap, Meyer said she took some flowers off her brother’s rose bush to craft her first bar.

“We still sell that soap,” she said. “That was my original recipe developed at 13 years old, after a couple of iterations.”

That flagship soap – Rosewater – Meyer said, is one of Just Ducky’s most popular bars.

“My brother did take all of the soap when he found out what I was doing in the garage, and it cured his acne,” she laughed. “So, that’s kind of the very beginning [of my soap-making career].”

Growing up in Kansas, Meyer said she had a next-door neighbor with an affinity for horticultural challenges.

“[He] grew impossible plants in the Plains area of Kansas,” she said. “He was a Catholic priest who spent 26 years in South America, and when he retired… he wanted [to grow certain plants that didn’t] do well in Kansas.”

By the time she knew him, Meyer said the retired priest had already spent decades working with the land.

“[He was] seeing what would grow in the supposedly impossible terrain, and finding out what [he could introduce that’s] not an invasive [species] but instead the opposite – what will actually work in harmony with your natural, already-bare horticulture,” she said.

Learning from him as a young teenager, Meyer said she was “blessed” with all kinds of plant knowledge.

“[I’m] definitely fascinated by botany, but much more into chemistry,” she said.

Later in life, Meyer said she started her own house-cleaning business – on top of becoming a certified international water safety instructor and Red Cross lifeguard – which launched her into a fascination with why certain cleaning products irritated her skin while others didn’t.

“I probably pestered my local reference librarian to death – except that she also [had] very sensitive skin and [was] a willing test subject,” she laughed.

Upon meeting Andy, Meyer said she was “already knee deep” in her quest for answers.

“He was just as excited as me because he also has pretty sensitive skin,” she said. “We  launched on this entire adventure – almost centering our lives around figuring out how to make better products.”

That adventure, she said, eventually led them to Wisconsin – where they now hand-make their soaps, lotions and other products right next door to where they grow their ingredients.

“One of the things we still think is highly ironic is when we did finally reach this property – which, obviously, is exponentially better than we ever expected – we found out… this is the town Horst Rechelbacher, the [founder] of Aveda, lived in, and [he] was [still alive] when we moved [here],” she said.

Though they never met, Meyer said she and Rechelbacher “shared the same plumber.”

“When [the plumber] walked into my lab that I was building in the basement, he looked at me and [asked], ‘Do you know who Horst is, from Aveda?’” she said. “I said, ‘Yeah,’ [and he replied], ‘Your lab looks exactly like his.’”

Her “fascinating connection” with the founder of the popular skin- and hair-care company – both in lab style as well as location – Meyer said, speaks to the opportunities for Just Ducky in West Central Wisconsin.

“There’s just so much amazing potential –  in the land here and the area – [with] such [a] diversity of plants,” she said.

Hot process

Coming from “a scientific yet naturalistic upbringing,” Meyer said a business tasked with both growing the ingredients for, and manufacturing the soap is a fitting one for her to own.

“We’re at the point now where we’re building an entire [facility] specifically to house the lab and the manufacturing [operations], because we’ve also branched out into laundry soap,” she said. “It just keeps growing and getting bigger.”

At Just Ducky, Meyer said her soap is made using a different method than other businesses.

“Most handmade soap is made by a method called ‘cold process’ – so it has to be cured,” she said. “That bothered me, because every time I ran tests… there was too much variance [in the soap’s pH level].”

Meyer said through research, she discovered a different method developed in Asia – one she said French soapmakers utilized to make their “most sought after

The “hot process” method, Meyer said, begins with cooking the soap ingredients for sometimes more than 24 hours – depending on the desired outcome.

“Some of our facial bars take four, seven-hour days to cook,” she said. “So, 28 hours of cooking at a very low and slow temperature.”

The cold process, Meyer said, is more popular because it takes significantly less time.

“[Cold process is] actually a very quick way to make soap,” she said. “It’s a good way [with both] pluses and minuses, but what I couldn’t get [with it] was consistency, and I wanted [my products] to be reliable – exactly the same batch to batch – [and] as close as you can get to that with a natural product.”

When compared to cold-processed soap, Meyer said hot-processed soap is denser, lasts longer, suds more “and you do not have to age it.”

“Also, with that low and slow process, you get to add more ingredients at different time periods of the cook,” she said. “You can cook certain herbs less, which is absolutely lovely, because you can get very fresh rose water at the very end.”

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Meyer said she traveled to Malaysia and Japan – where “the finest hot process soap artists in the world” are – to study the method in person.

Her connections in the soap industry and beyond, she said, have allowed her to continually educate herself and source quality ingredients for her products that she can’t grow in Wisconsin.

“One of the things we source is wild, crafted tea tree oil from Australia… and we [source] from farms in Hawaii for the few things we can’t grow,” she said. “Then we get some ingredients from Florida, and Sicily –  that’s where [our] lime and lemon oils come from… So, there’s really no middleman. We get them directly from where they made those ingredients.”

Lucky duckies

The name “Just Ducky,” Meyer said, came from the feathered friends that call her and Andy’s property home.

“There was a huge fad for a while [where] people wanted pictures with ducklings,” she said. “They would buy these ducklings and then dump them in ponds.”

Abandoned ducklings, Meyer said, “became a real issue” in her area.

“So, we started adopting them,” she said.

Since then, in addition to their farm acreage, retail store, lab and manufacturing facilities, Meyer said her and Andy’s property has also served as a local duck rescue.

“We have all different breeds,” she said, adding that they recently took on a few rescue geese as well.

Just Ducky’s logo, Meyer said, also has a personal tie – as the cartoon duck, drawn by her mother, is based on one of Meyer’s beloved baby photos

“I only had about three little hairs, so she had to tape bows on the top of my head, and I never took a picture without my mouth open – totally thrilled and smiling,” she said. “So, [our logo] is my mother’s view of me as a duck.”

Transparent business

Having all of Just Ducky’s business operations on their property, Meyer said, was “vital” to her and Andy’s business plan.

“We wanted to be transparent – where people could walk right onto the property and see all the roughness and the goodness a farm holds, and actually know they’re walking right where the products are [grown],” she said.

Serving both wholesale and e-commerce markets at Just Ducky Soap, Meyer said customers outside of West Central Wisconsin can find her products in various stores and online – “we even ship internationally” – at justduckysoap.com.

“E-commerce is the backbone of our business, [because] we had a website long before we had a retail store,” she said. “We added the retail store to give people the experience and the ability to come on site.”

Since the beginning, Meyer said she’s always aimed to pack her products in 80% recycled materials – and, by utilizing Andy’s “degree in packaging,” she added it was an easily attainable goal.

“We have [achieved] that goal for years, and we’ve never dropped it,” she said. “We [use] recycled water bottles for our boxes that are clear plastic, [and] all of our other stuff that looks like plastic actually isn’t. It’s an Illinois and Wisconsin product – cellophane that is [made from] wood pulp.”

With more than a decade’s worth of products sold, Meyer said that it amounts to a lot of material recycled and families with sensitive skin served.

“We as a team, we all are dedicated to this,” she said. “We have generations now using [our products], and that’s what gives us the greatest joy – we can supply people with what works for them.”

Meyer said she encourages anyone with an interest in soapmaking or struggling with sensitive skin to try it out for themselves.

“I want competitors in the space so badly, so we can learn from each other,” she said. “I actually hope what we’re doing could be done all across the nation, if not all across the world… [because] we could always use a little bit cleaner Earth.”

For more on Just Ducky and its variety of soap products, visit its website or social media pages.