A look inside Diddles’ Fremont warehouse

FREMONT – A local cheesemaker and entrepreneur is turning goat milk and handmade Mexican metal art into one of the Fremont area’s most unique small businesses.

Amanda Fischer owns Diddles Soap and Gifts, a business making and selling goat milk soap and imported metal yard art. From a farm just outside Zittau and a warehouse along State Highway 96 in Fremont, she juggles production of thousands of bars of soap a year with unloading a semi-truck of hand-welded sculptures from Mexico each spring, co-running a landscape business with her husband, working as a part-time cheesemaker at Union Star Cheese Factory and raising three children.

A herd of her own
Fischer traces it all back to the day she wandered down the road from her family’s farm.

“While my brother was milking the cows, I went down the road and started working at the neighbors when I was eight, because goats are way cuter,” she said.

Instead of cash, she was paid in goats. After about three years, she said she had brought home about 50 goats, and soon was “pretty much just working for hay for the rest of my life.”

That passion followed her to the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where she studied animal science. She said she found a farm near campus to house her herd, bringing them along and growing the group to more than 100 goats by her senior year. She also earned a cheesemaker’s license and initially envisioned a career making goat cheese. Instead, she now makes cheese from cow’s milk, while her signature product has become goat milk soap.

Fischer began making goat milk soap in 2010 to use as favors for her wedding. The homemade soaps were such a hit that Fischer joked her family was “fighting over who got the last couple of bars” that were left over, which inspired her to keep making more. She initially grew the business by selling her soap at craft shows and the Oshkosh Farmers Market, and eventually launched a website to ship her products across the United States.

Today, Fischer relies on just two goats, which each produce about eight pounds of milk a day, to create her signature bath products. She makes about 8,000 bars of soap per year, each containing just about a quarter-ounce of milk. Her goat milk product line also includes foaming hand soap, chapstick and a laundry detergent crafted by a collaborator in Clintonville.

The science of soap

Fischer described the soap-making process as both scientific and tightly controlled. Because the chemical reaction generates intense heat, she uses frozen goat milk to keep the soap from burning. Since her goats produce milk for only a few months each summer, she freezes enough during the milking season to last the rest of the year.

Fischer combines a mixture of the milk and sodium hydroxide with a vegetable-based blend of coconut, palm and olive oils, completely avoiding animal lard. The resulting chemical reaction, called saponification, takes about 20 to 30 minutes before the yogurt-like mixture is poured into round molds.

After sitting for two to 10 days, the soap is removed to cure for a six-week period. Fischer said she takes it a step further by aging her bars for six to nine months, which draws out the moisture to create a harder, longer-lasting product.

“Soap is like wine; it gets better as it ages,” she said.

From Mexico to Fremont

Another distinctive piece of Fischer’s business is the metal art that spills across her warehouse and decorates local yards, campgrounds and waterfront properties. Her main sales channel is Facebook Marketplace, where she says she meets two to three customers a day. One of those online connections reshaped her supply chain.

“A person sent me a message on Facebook and said, ‘Hey, I saw all the metal yard art you’re selling, and I make metal yard art. Would you want to buy mine and sell it?’ And I’ll try anything once,” Fischer said.

The man turned out to be the original maker behind pieces she had been buying through a wholesaler. Now she orders directly from his small shop in Mexico, where a handful of workers hand-cut and weld the items. Each spring, a semitrailer delivers about 15,000 items to her warehouse, and she said it takes two to three months to unpack them between her other responsibilities.

Although he does not speak English and Fischer does not speak Spanish, the two communicate using Google Translate and photos of works in progress. Over time, Fischer said she has worked with the artisan to replace designs such as armadillos and alligators with wildlife more familiar to Wisconsin customers, including raccoons, white-tailed deer, opossums and pelicans, while also adding whimsical aliens and other unusual figures.

“There’s always somebody who’s like, ‘Oh my God, I absolutely love whatever specific item, and you actually have that,’” she said. “I love just helping people and making people happy.”

Never sitting still
Fischer once worked as head of quality at Agropur’s Simon’s Cheese plant on the north side of Appleton, logging around 80 hours a week. Eventually, she said she and her husband, Joseph, decided self-employment suited them better.

Today, the couple operates a lawn care and landscaping business, Onpoint Landscapes, while raising three children on a farm near Zittau. She also works at Union Star to maintain her cheesemaker’s license. When regulatory changes prevented Union Star from shipping cheese directly to customers, Fischer absorbed that operation and began fulfilling those orders through her online store.

“Long story short, I don’t sit still very well,” she said of her daily balancing act. “It’s definitely a lot more work. It keeps me busier, but we wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

An unconventional storefront

When COVID-19 hit, she said she used grant funding to open a storefront for Diddles Soap and Gifts. Fischer has since relocated the business and is now in her fourth location since the pandemic.

Her current site is a warehouse in Fremont that serves as a pickup location by appointment only, rather than a traditional walk-in retail store. Customers can find her products on Facebook Marketplace by searching directly for her name.

She also runs a Diddles Soap and Gifts Facebook group, where she announces new inventory arrivals and posts the specific days her warehouse in Fremont is open for pickups.

In addition to handcrafted goat milk soaps and Union Star cheese, Fischer’s online store diddlesdairy.com offers bath products, kitchen towels, gifts and metal yard art that can be shipped directly to customers.