Established in 2010

My name is Kris and my husband is Eric. We are the owners of SkinnyFat Farms, which was established in 2010.

Since 1998 we were living and raising our family in a cookie cutter style home in Chandler Arizona. But, on September 5th, 2010 we suffered the tragic loss of our 18 year old son Brandon. Brandon was killed during a senseless act of violence about 3 miles from our neighborhood. The weeks following Brandon's death were painful and numbing. I felt an overwhelming need to "get away" from the area because everywhere I went I was faced with memories both good and bad. Losing Brandon caused us to consider moving. We wanted to buy a new house, in a new area, and maybe get a new start.

Eric always wanted a basement home and I always wanted property or a farm. We were lucky enough to find the perfect (well perfect fixer upper) that had both. In a relatively short time we were able to find a house, get through escrow, and were moved in by Thanksgiving 2010. 

By January of the same year we had chickens and began researching how to raise goats and other farm animals. We decided we would try our hand at raising Nubian goats, which were a breed of goat Eric and our daughter Zoe, who was 5 years old at the time, had seen at the Phoenix Zoo. 

Fast forward a year or so and we are raising and milking Nubian goats. We actually had around 11 goats and were hand milking 3 or 4 of them. Needless to say we had A LOT of goat milk. We were able to sell some of the unpasteurized milk for "farm purposes," but had quite a bit of milk leftover. After a few rounds of successful and unsuccessful cheese making we started looking for other uses for goats milk and stumbled upon how to make goat milk soap! 

At first we just made soap to give to family, friends, and neighbors as gifts. But as the popularity all goat milk products grew we started to get requests from people to buy our soap. Word of mouth sales and sales related to our Facebook page led us to become vendors the Downtown Chandler Farmer's Market, which led to this on line store through Shopify!

Our Blog Post's will continue to tell our story...Our many stories of how we have used the connection with nature and animals to heal and survive or grief. We have stories and information about all the lessons we have learned about farming and ourselves. We hope you look around our site, continue to follow our story,  and maybe even buy some soap. 

-Kris Oldenburg