Our Story
It started as another experiment.
Stacy had been rendering tallow at the ranch and making tallow balm since the spring of 2024. In the fall of 2025, she decided to try soap. There wasn’t a business plan behind it—she simply wanted to see if she could make a good bar of soap from something she was already working with.
The first batches were for family and friends. The process was a little daunting at first, but she quickly found herself drawn to it: the challenge of getting the batter just right, experimenting with scent and color, and seeing each batch take shape.
She kept a few of those first bars. “It’s nice to look at them and remember where I started,” she says.
What started as another experiment became something she genuinely loved making.
“I tried rendered tallow in place of shortening.One morning I fried ham for Kate before school,and she told me it tasted like I’d fried it in lotion.That’s what sent me toward balm, and then soap.”— Stacy
Where Cedar Creek came from.
The name goes back much farther than the soap.
In 1999, Stacy and Jake bought their first piece of property together—farmland in Kansas with West Cedar Creek running through it. They shortened the name to Cedar Creek, first for Cedar Creek Ag and later for Cedar Creek Tallow Soap.
Both come from fourth-generation ranching and farming families in north-central Kansas and northwest Colorado, but they struck out on their own in 1998. That history is part of the backdrop of Cedar Creek, even though the soap itself came much later.
Something worth sharing.
At first, Stacy was simply making something she liked for the people around her. Then she started the Cedar Creek Tallows Facebook page, and orders started coming in. People came back for more. Gathered Grace in Craig asked to carry the soap, and what had begun at home slowly started reaching beyond family and friends.
She still enjoys the part that first drew her in: blending fragrance oils into scents of her own, and working with color. Black Cherry Bliss is one of her own blends, and the one she reaches for most. “We can have six soaps in the bathroom,” she says, “and if we run out of that one, we’re grabbing another bar.”
No two batches come out exactly alike. Temperature and humidity change how the batter behaves from one day to the next, so even two batches made back to back on the same day differ a little. The weather sees to that.
She has also learned that customers sometimes love the very scents she wasn’t sure about. Spiced Winter Tea, for example, became one she could hardly keep in stock. Her seasonal soaps rotate through the year: a fall collection, then Christmas and winter, then spring and summer. “Different seasons bring up different feelings and memories for all of us,” she says. “Hopefully my seasonal soaps connect with others, whether it’s for themselves or for a gift.”
Ranch life shapes the practical side of it too. There is always dust, dirt, cattle to check, and chores to do. Stacy wanted a bar that would get people clean without leaving skin feeling stripped or coated. She developed her own recipe around that balance.
She renders the tallow herself at the ranch, using tallow from their own cattle along with other trusted local sources she knows. And when a finished batch isn’t what she wants it to be, it doesn’t get sold.
One ingredient stays especially close to home. Oats, Milk & Honey includes honey from bees kept on their property in northwest Colorado.
The soap is just another piece that fits in.
For Stacy, Cedar Creek has also been a way to make room for a creative side that had been on the back burner for a long time. Raising kids and ranch work came first, and they still do. Soap simply became another part of the life already happening around her.
What she hopes never changes is simple: the quality of what she makes, and the one-on-one connection with the people who use it. She loves hearing what people reach for, what they come back for, and what they enjoy about the soap.