From the Diary of Joy D. Edwards

For founders with a product in mind, a formulator’s case for deciding what the customer should feel before choosing a single ingredient.

Sweet Surrender’s body butter began as something else. After a chemical burn on her scalp, Joy D. Edwards started developing something gentle for her own use. Several iterations in, some of it ended up on her hands while she was doing her hair, and she rubbed it in rather than wiping it away. She has chronically dry hands, and the difference in how her skin felt told her she had found a different product opportunity.

She went back through more iterations. Whipping gave her the texture she wanted, overwhipping made it deflate, and she kept refining the process. “The product that ultimately emerged wasn’t one I went looking for; in many ways, it found me,” she says.

That body butter is one of more than 12 bath and body formulations Joy has developed over roughly 12 years building Sweet Surrender, her luxury self-care brand in Henderson, Nevada. Sweet Surrender has been carried by 56 independent wholesale stockists, and she has produced shower steamers for a private-label client. Now she is bringing that experience to other founders through formulation, product development and boutique manufacturing, particularly brands that, as she puts it on her profile, “aren’t yet ready for large-scale manufacturing.”

What she offers them is the way she has always worked. She approaches formulation “from the experience I want the person using the product to have, then work backward from there.”

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Working Backward From the Bathtub

Her bath bombs are the clearest example. At the time, she saw oils and butters commonly used as binders, and she didn’t want a bath bomb that left the body or the tub feeling greasy. She spent several months, possibly close to a year by her own estimate, developing a formula with no oils or butters that was hard, generously sized, foamed and fizzed well, and still left the skin feeling soft.

Then she moved. When she left San Diego for Nevada in 2017, the difference in climate meant refining the formula again. It reinforced, she says, something she has learned repeatedly as a formulator.

“A product isn’t finished simply because it technically works; it has to create the experience it was intended to create.”

Joy D. Edwards, Founder and CEO, Sweet Surrender

The desert has kept testing that idea. She formulates and manufactures body butter there, and “when I say heat is part of product development,” she has written, “I’m not speaking theoretically.” In warmer months she ships body butter in thermal mailers, with ice packs protected inside plastic bags within her regular packaging. “That’s not an ingredient in the formula,” she wrote. “It’s still part of the product experience.”

The experience she designs for started in a particular room.

Where Sweet Surrender Started

A lot of Joy’s earliest thinking about Sweet Surrender happened in her bathroom, often in the shower. She was a working mother with three children, and those were, she says, “some of the only moments when I could be alone without someone needing something from me.” She used the time “to think, pray and search for answers.”

What she saw there was the idea behind the brand. She didn’t want to build bath and body products around what was popular. She wanted to create the relaxing, soothing and comforting experience she needed at the end of her own long days. “I didn’t have the language for it then that I have now, so I called it ‘luxury self-care,’” she says. The understanding underneath it, that “an ordinary shower or bath can become a few uninterrupted minutes of care,” has stayed at the center of Sweet Surrender since.

She founded the brand in 2014. “From the beginning, I wanted to create luxury self-care for women, particularly with dry and sensitive skin in mind,” she says. What has drifted at times, she says, is the messaging, not the brand. “I’ve occasionally allowed marketing trends and popular language to influence how I communicated the brand,” she says. The heart of Sweet Surrender, luxury self-care centered on the woman using the products and the experience Joy wanted her to have, “has remained constant. I’ve always found my way back to expressing that center more clearly.”

Twelve Years of Sweet Surrender

Sweet Surrender has sold through Shopify, Etsy, an earlier website and in person at craft fairs and events in San Diego and Nevada. Its wholesale range has included artisan soaps, bath bombs and shower steamers, and Joy’s own records track each of its 56 independent stockists and their order history. As founder and CEO, she leads brand strategy, product development, formulation, operations and growth across consumer and wholesale channels.

The years have not all been steady. She speaks of “my recent season of uncertainty, which forced me to pivot and cost me the continuity I had become accustomed to relying on.” Through those stretches she leaned on her faith. “Through every hardship and every time I felt I couldn’t keep going, I prayed my way through,” she says.

The questions she asks at her worktable, she now also asks in public.

Good for What?

On LinkedIn, Joy works through formulation problems one at a time: grainy body butter, scrubs that leave the tub oily, whether a waterless scrub used in the shower needs a preservative. The same habit runs through all of them. One of the most important things she learned, she has written, was to stop asking only “Is this a good ingredient?” and to start asking “What do I need this ingredient to do here?”

She applies the same test to a whole formula. A formula should be judged, in her words, “against what the product is intended to do and the experience it’s intended to create.” When a tester says a body butter is too greasy, she treats that as useful feedback that isn’t yet enough to act on, and looks for a target first. Her suggested reframe is plain: “This is what I intended. This is what I created. What’s causing the difference?”

When a batch goes wrong, she resists fixing it straight away. “An imperfect prototype contains information,” she wrote, and “sometimes it’s the batch that teaches you the most.” Her method for learning from it is short: start somewhere reasonable, evaluate what you made, change one variable deliberately, document the result, repeat. “A recipe tells you what somebody else did,” she has written.

For a founder, one of her questions is about scale. A good ingredient still has to make sense for availability, cost, supplier consistency and manufacturing once a product moves beyond a small test batch.

“A beautiful formula that cannot reliably become a viable product creates an entirely different problem.”

Joy, Founder and CEO, Sweet Surrender

That concern with what a product actually delivers is also where she takes issue with her industry.

What Goes Inside the Package

Joy would like to see more products developed from a genuine understanding of the people they’re meant to serve, “rather than having inclusion added at the marketing stage.” She first noticed the pattern as a consumer, she says. Ingredients such as coconut oil or shea butter would become popular among Black consumers, and brands would add the trending ingredient to an existing concept, change the imagery or packaging, and market the result as though it had been thoughtfully developed for Black women. Her experience as a formulator and business owner, and having to learn marketing as part of building Sweet Surrender, made those strategies increasingly apparent to her.

The gap she describes has been measured. In 2022, McKinsey found Black consumers three times as likely as non-Black consumers to be dissatisfied with their options for hair care, skin care and makeup.

“If you say a product was created for a particular consumer, I believe that consumer’s needs, experiences and perspective should meaningfully influence what is inside the package, not simply who appears on the outside of it.”

Joy, Founder and CEO, Sweet Surrender

She says the industry has made progress. Her own standard as a formulator: “if I say I developed something with a particular woman or need in mind, I want the formulation and the decisions behind it to support that claim.”

Where Joy Is Now

After more than a decade of developing, refining and manufacturing products for Sweet Surrender, Joy is opening that work to other founders: formulation, product development and boutique manufacturing. “It feels like a natural extension of what I’ve spent years learning: not simply how to make a product that works, but how to develop one around the experience a founder wants to create for the people they hope to serve,” she says.

The founders she has in mind are growing beauty and wellness brands that need technical guidance before they’re ready for large-scale production. Sweet Surrender’s wholesale program continues alongside, for stockists who want to carry the brand’s products.

“Outside of work, my faith is central to how I live my life,” she says. “I pray about everything: the things I’m grateful for, the things I’m afraid of, and the things I don’t yet know how to handle. My faith in God has carried me through some very difficult seasons, but it has also taught me to believe that possibilities I once only dreamed about may actually be possible for me.” She’s now actively working toward them.

Twelve years in, the order of things hasn’t changed. “The woman comes first,” she says. “The products are how she expresses daily care for herself.”

The Joy D. Edwards Playbook: Starting From the Experience

Decide what she should feel before you choose the formula. Joy works backward from the experience she wants the person using the product to have.
Ask what each ingredient needs to do here. Not whether it’s a good ingredient, but what it’s there for, at that percentage.
Change one variable deliberately, and document the result. Then evaluate, and repeat.
Observe a failed batch before you fix it. An imperfect prototype contains information about the formula, the process or the storage.
Design for the life the product will live after it leaves your worktable. Wet hands in the shower and a desert summer in transit are part of the product experience.