Cleaning up: why some shoppers are all in a lather about Charlie's Soap.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: PICTURE THIS

It's a yarn that began with yarn. In 1976, Charles Taylor Sutherland HI's grandpa ran a division of Madison Throwing Co. in Mayodan that developed an oil that made boxcar-size spinning machines twirl like tops. But the lubricant accumulated lint and grime that gummed them up. He was told to find something that would clean them. His son, Charles Jr., and his son's brother-in-law, Ron Joyce--both worked for him--retired to the barn on his farm and, after tinkering with formulas, came up with one that worked. When the mill owners finally figured where the soap was coming from, they promised to keep buying it but demanded it be sold to the public. Employees liked what they called Charlie's soap so much that they had been pilfering the mill's supply. It seemed to clean almost anything.

Today, Charlie's Soap products have more to do with green than machines. They're sold in specialty chains such as Greensboro-based The Fresh Market Inc., Fletcher-based Earth Fare Inc. and Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods Market Inc., as well as some mainline grocers such as Winston-Salem-based Lowe's Food Stores Inc. That's not counting Sutherland Products Inc.'s own Internet sales and being Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc.'s top-selling cleaning product. While Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. and other multinational consumer-goods giants have squeezed mom-and-pop soap-makers out of much of the market, Charlie's Soap is cleaning up where it can. Revenue is expected to reach almost $4 million this year, up some 1,500% from 2002. "We hope to Fill the niches the big guys have left for us, so we can come biting at their heels," says Taylor Sutherland, the CEO and third Charlie in the family soap business.

Charlie's Soap has evolved into a 13-employee, four-building enterprise that includes a 60,000-square-foot warehouse for six products shipped around the world. Its heart is a four-level plant in downtown Mayodan that began life in the 1950s as the firefighters' meeting and dance hall. In 1983, Taylor Sutherland's father left the textile company's oil division, which had been acquired by a German chemical company two years earlier, and bought out his brother-in-law. That left him about $60,000 in debt, and what could have been disaster struck immediately: The mill began moving production to China. However, thousands of machines needed cleaning before they...