Emma Mann, left, daughter Sabrina Mann and sister Pandora Yniguez, making soap inside Three Sisters Apothecary in Penngrove.
Emma Mann, owner and founder of The Soap Cauldron and Three Sisters Apothecary, is making her mark in the North Bay as a strong businesswoman and forward-thinking community leader.
Mann has her finger in a lot of pots, or soap dishes as the case may be: She’s a founder of the Penngrove Downtown Merchants Association, the local representative on the Zone 2A Water Agency and member of the SMART Citizen Oversight Committee.
Mann’s ingenuity and business savvy have also led to imaginative new lines and collaborations with other small makers to create locally inspired soaps and shampoos.
The soap maker may be one of the busiest women entrepreneurs in the North Bay—but she hasn’t worked herself up into a lather by any means.
Finding her soapbox
Soapmaking for Mann began as a hobby born from a mother’s love. Her daughter Sabrina was born premature at just 3 pounds, so Mann learned to make natural soaps and salves, “as I knew this fragile being needed the best care possible,” she writes at soapcauldron.com. As her daughter blossomed and her soapmaking skills grew, Mann felt the time was right to create her own business. In 1999, she made the move and launched Soap Cauldron, which she describes as the “legal entity that holds Three Sisters Apothecary, Soapy Tails, which is our pet line, and then also our private label company.
Mann named the apothecary after herself and her two sisters, following the death of her middle sibling Marlo Gallagher. (Her oldest sister Pandora Yniguez is often at the shop on evenings and weekends lending a hand.) Mann says it’s sweet working with family; Sabrina, now 29, has been helping her make soap from the time she was 3.
“She’s been stacking the bars, she’s been blending, she’s been going to farmers markets,” Mann says. “She’s been helping me every step of the way until she went away to college.”
She opened the apothecary in 2011 in Petaluma and in 2022 Mann moved the business to a larger location in Penngrove, big enough to allow for a large retail shop. She knew a retail shop there had the potential to cover the overhead for the entire business including the property taxes.
Having the business operations all under one roof also allows for more flexibility in covering tasks. “If my shopkeeper is out for the day because she’s got to take her child to an appointment or whatever, everybody knows how to run the store,” Mann says.
When people enter the retail shop while they’re making soaps in the building, the aromas waft through. Using slow and age-old soap-making techniques, the small-batch soaps are scented with traditional rose and lavender as well as unique North Bay-inspired scents, like Gravenstein Apple, Santa Rosa Plum and Mission Fig.
Products can also be found on their website (soapcauldron.com), in businesses across the North Bay, at Whole Foods and on Amazon.
A thriving business community
Mann donates soaps to local organizations and charities. When Three Sisters was in Petaluma, neighboring business owners spoke of how Mann helped them in critical moments by sharing supplies and mentoring new business owners who were facing daunting pandemic challenges.
Mann believes a thriving local business scene benefits the entire community. When she moved the apothecary to Penngrove she observed a lack of cohesion in the local business community and immediately got to work calling monthly meetings for local business stakeholders, eventually forming the Downtown Merchants Association. She began work on a website, social media channel, holiday events and a calendar to promote local happenings. She says the majority of businesses in Penngrove are now members.
Mann also represents Penngrove with the Zone 2A Water Agency, a vital role given Penngrove’s location on a flood plain where nearby Lichau Creek can jump its banks during heavy storms, impacting residents and businesses. “The post office back parking lot gets flooded, the mail can’t come up,” Mann says about an occurring problem. “This is not long-term tenable. I’ve got a new mission. We are going to fix this.”
Since she’s been working with Zone 2A, Mann has managed to get Sonoma Water to clean up the creek bed where it was really impacted. She’s now pushing for them to clear up the channel—terracing it and creating north and south retention ponds to hold the water. She’s also taken advantage of a Sonoma County program that allows the repatriation of local silt to the Petaluma low-lying estuaries where there is significant erosion.
Mann was recently appointed to the SMART Citizen Oversight Committee and plans to lobby the rail agency to approve a station in Penngrove.
Staying one step ahead
Like any business owner, Mann has to be prepared for sudden economic changes—this year, she’s shoring up plans in case a rise in tariffs affects her overseas soap-making inventory.
“When I first got a whiff of these tariffs, I thought, ‘OK, I have a cash reserve that I’ve been building in the event of an emergency,’” Mann says about the rising costs associated with the Trump administration’s signature economic plan. “I am going to use 40% of that cash reserve to buy packaging [now] that’ll carry us through the end of December.”
Mann didn’t want to take any chances with a wait-and-see approach to changing economic conditions.
“Unlike what the administration thinks, the U.S. is not insular,” Mann says. “We are a global economy.”
The Soap Cauldron, for instance, gets some of its essential oils from abroad.
“Everybody knows rose essential oil is best grown in Bulgaria. That’s the climate for it. Cocoa butter grows in Africa and South America,” she says.
Adds Mann: “This is just the economy we have. We do some things really well here. But we partner with other companies that import raw materials. To assume that we’re not all interconnected, it’s just naive.”
When asked if she might have any advice for women starting out in business, Mann says she thinks many women already have the inherent skills needed to succeed in business. “I feel like a lot of women tend to doubt themselves and what they bring to the table,” she says.
“I would say any woman who can raise a child and manage a home is more than suited for business—because it’s the same thing. You have to have a budget and there isn’t a lot of flexibility in that budget. You have to be able to multitask, and you have to constantly be one step ahead.”
