Metaphor Organic was born in the Fall of 2009/Spring of 2010 when Adam Bienvenu and I were living in the Mission District of San Francisco, but in many ways, it started much earlier. Adam will have to write his own blog post about what combination of street art insight and product design savvy lead to our logo, box design, and general aesthetic. For me, the possibility of a small soap company was sown a decade ago when I was still in college. My English and writing major wandered toward a minor in contemporary ethics. Three years before "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, two other undergraduates and I assembled and taught a one-credit course in environmental ethics and consumer culture as our senior capstone project. So for two semesters I spent a lot of time reading blogs like "Gardening as an Anarchist Plot" and articles about how planting fruit trees in your yard is a good idea. Maybe gardening will yet save the world. At that point, we still thought that making conscientious decisions about even the smallest details of one's own life could, through leading by example, somehow spark a resonance of cultural change. I ended up thinking a lot about stuff like soap. At this point in my life, I'd only known Safeway, and I'd eaten a lot of meals out of cans. The organic grocery co-op in my college town was a wondrous discovery. And a little farther down the road was a roadside produce stand that also sold a few other household items. And for while you could buy bags of about 5 little puck-soaps there for like 5 bucks. That is probably what planted the seeds of Metaphor Organic in my imagination: this basic, natural thing, one of the necessities besides food and clothing, inexpensive, and made probably fewer than 10 miles away.