Tomboy founder - and sole employee - Jessica Newens decided to create a cottage business so she could afford to live in the San Juan Mountains, home to the most wilderness high country in the 48 contiguous United States. Life in the rugged mountains of southwestern Colorado comes with its challenges, but Jessica finds them easier to face down as her slow-motion development of a carefully crafted company takes hold.

In 1995, soon after Jessica began to explore the idea of creating a cottage business, she stumbled on a book titled The Complete Soapmaker in a catalogue that somehow found its way into her post office box.

Kismet. Jessica was immediately taken by the idea of making and selling soap. Not only did she find soap an appealing medium for beautifully subtle colors and textures, but creating bars of soap allowed her to incorporate her growing passion for herbs into a utilitarian product. "I love the idea that nothing is left - that the entire product is used," she says of bars of soap.

Soon Jessica was experimenting with making cold-processed hand-crafted soaps. "Traditionally, soap is made using a hot-process method," she explains, "which means literally cooking it on the stove. Lye is always used - there's no real way to make soap without it - but with hot-processed soap, the chemicals are neutralized by cooking at a high temperature." By not boiling the mixture, she adds, cold-processed soap "retains a lot of healing benefits" of the herbs and essential oils.

Jessica mastered her soapmaking skills, testing the results on family and friends, and began developing the original recipes that now make up Tomboy's permanent product line. Everything is hand-crafted, and begins with an intuition and ends with careful product testing.

Tomboy Soap Co. today is housed in a down-at-its-heels historic loft building in Norwood - once home to the Fraternal Order of the Goodfellows. Forty-five minutes away from the booming resort town of Telluride, Norwood is a sleepy little ranch town (most of its inhabitants now work in Telluride) where several minutes can pass without a single car or pickup truck going down main street.

Tomboy Soap Co. is still a one-woman show, with Jessica doing everything from hauling upstairs 50-pound sacks of lye to creating and packaging the products to designing and printing the labels. Her painstaking blend of form and function is apparent throughout the Tomboy product line, from the elegant metal and kraft paper canisters that hold bath salts to the tight-fitting, easy-opening tins for the balms to the elegant green presentation bags.

Jessica earned a degree in English from Lewis and Clark College in 1992 and then moved to Telluride that same year. She has lived in Norwood since 1995, with her husband, Joel, and their three cats.