Chapter 641: End of Year Meeting – Part 2

This had worked, to a certain extent, but the truly valuable items, like custom clothing for a nobles or wealthy business owners, still presented a significant problem.

First of all, such outfits needed to be at least somewhat unique, requiring Lucas, Isaac, Felicity, or one of the apprentices the latter two had begun training, to design something new and original.

Then, there were material concerns.

A custom-ordered dress or suit could not be made from rough Low-Rank Mortal Grade Tier 1 cloth, but the higher the Grade of fabric used, the more difficult it became to work with.

In order to solve this problem, Lucas had tried on multiple occasions to build a steam-powered sewing machine, driven by an LBM Mark 1, that could apply a significantly larger amount of force at a far superior speed, allowing even a Body Tempering Realm tailor to work with Spirit Grade cloth, but all his attempts thus far had been unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, the number of people shopping at or ordering from [Vision] was only growing, not shrinking, even though wait times for certain items had already exceeded half-a-year.

Suffice-it-to-say, Lucas’ solely owned clothing business was pulling in huge profits from its sales of shirts, pants, dresses, belts, bras, panties, boxers, briefs, and shoes, and would definitely be expanding further in the coming year.

Lucas was even considering opening more stores and factories in other cities, though he would need to find the right people to manage such facilities first.

The next of the young boy’s major successes was his soap factory, and regarding that, Rebecca actually had some interesting facts to deliver in her report.

The young woman who was among the first workers Lucas had ever hired, had done an exemplary job running and expanding the soap factory.

According to her, with the introduction of hot-processed soaps, monthly production had reached just over 600,000 bars of soap, plus another 150,000 or so jars of shampoo and liquid soap.

It was a very impressive achievement, especially since each bar of soap or bottle of shampoo earned a profit of around 70 Copper.

That translated to about 45,000 Gold per month or half-a-million Gold per year, and Lucas had no intention of stopping there, not by a long-shot.

Putting it bluntly, in Lucas’ opinion, the factory could never produce too much soap, and he had tasked Rebecca with constantly looking for ways to make that a reality.

There was, however, a significant problem with this plan.

Joel, another of Lucas’ original employees, who was now in charge of raw material procurement for multiple businesses, chief among which was the soap factory, reported that the price for fats in the market had been steadily rising ever since the soap factory began operating, having increased about 15% overall since the beginning of the year, and not just in Misty City.

Apparently, the soap factory was consuming so much animal fat that prices had begun to rise all over the Balfour March.

Lucas had already anticipated this problem cropping up eventually, but he hadn’t expected it to appear so soon; as such, when he heard about it, he couldn’t help frowning deeply.

He was all for making profit and for spreading soap to as many people as possible, but Lucas was also wary of driving up the price of essential products like tallow and lard.

A little bit of inflation, coupled with rising wages and improving economic conditions was a good thing, but sudden bursts of inflation were definitely bad not just for common folk, but also for businesses likes Lucas’ soap factory.

"How are our effort to switch from animal fats to imbi oil progressing?" Lucas asked.

The young boy knew that in the other universe, vegetable oils had quickly supplanted animal fats in the mass-production of soap before purely synthesized version became the norm. As such, Lucas was looking to do something similar in the Rockwell Kingdom, specifically using imbi fruits which greatly resembled olives from his inherited memories.

"The test samples we’ve created using a mixture of animal fat and imbi oil, and of pure imbi oil have all been outstanding, even better than our current products," Rebecca replied promptly, but her brow furrowed slightly as she followed up, "However, the cost of importing imbi oil from the Kore Sovereignty is quite high."

Not surprised by this, Lucas quickly followed up, "Factoring for that increased material cost, could we still make a profit without increasing our sales price if we switched to using 100% imbi oil for soap production?"

"Yes, but only barely," Joel stated bluntly.

"What’s the margin?"

"5 Coppers."

Hmm, that’s a bit too small, but if we use a mix of animal fat and imbi oil, it might work, Lucas mused to himself.

If he had wanted to, Lucas could just raise the price of his soap to compensate for the increased input costs, but he didn’t want to do that as he considered the proliferation of his cleaning products to be much more important than profiting from them.

Proper hygiene saved lives, which on its own was a good enough reason for Lucas to want everyone in the Rockwell Kingdom to be able to afford his soap; that said, his motives weren’t entirely selfless.

The fewer people who died in the kingdom, the faster its population would grow, something that would become more and more important as Lucas pushed industrialization forward.

Automation and advanced robotics would one day replace the need for masses of manual labourers, but that was a long, long way off. Early industrialization required a large workforce, and a large number of consumers to support the growing industries.

Perhaps it’s time I start building factories in other provinces, or even contracting out the production of soap to other forces, Lucas contemplated.

There was no such thing as a patent on the Blue Sky Continent, nor had anyone ever heard the words ’intellectual property’.

The way it worked in the Rockwell Kingdom, and everywhere else for that matter, was simple. When someone found a way to make a new, profitable product, they did their best to keep its production method a secret or sold it to a force powerful enough to deter others from trying to copy it.

This would certainly become an issue in the future that Lucas would need to address, but in the mean time, he could probably take advantage of his Master’s name to sign some agreements with willing partners in other provinces.

Doing this with this particular product might actually be the ideal way for Lucas to test out how such partnerships would work, as even if it failed, it simply meant that more people would know how to make soap.

Again, more people having access to soap was more important to Lucas than making money off of it, so the recipe escaping into the wild didn’t really bother him that much.