Meet the Cork woman who has gone from making award-winning goats'  cheese, to skincare

Skin is our largest organ. It protects us from the elements, reacts to danger, cools us down and repairs itself. It is constantly being depleted, but, unlike our other major organs, we rarely think about feeding it to replenish what is lost daily, or what it needs to function at its best.

For some, a preoccupation with their skin goes way beyond the invasive cosmetic interventions we see cropping up on the high street. For them, feeding their skin moisture and nutrients is the difference between a good day or a day where soreness, inflammation, cracked and hardened skin must be tended to carefully and diligently.

In Donoughmore, a young couple are finding a solution to this issue with handmade soaps made with milk from their own small herd of dairy goats.

Dottie & Dora is a small on-farm business headed up by Siobhán Ring and her fiancé, Alan Twomey. In May this year, the couple won silver at Cáis Irish Cheese Award for their soft goats’ cheese flavoured with peppercorn barely a year after launching the cheese to market.

But within a couple of weeks, Siobhan and Alan announced they were shuttering their bottled fresh goats’ milk and soft cheeses business to concentrate on a range of skincare products developed as a sideline: handmade soaps made from their own goats’ milk and honey.

Working as full-time agricultural scientists, and both with PhDs to their names, I was curious to find out more about the initial idea for Dottie & Dora, and the reason behind the seemingly sudden pivot from producing food to eat to products that feed the skin.

“Alan and I are both from agricultural backgrounds,” says Siobhan. “We met at UCD where we both studied Agricultural Science. 

We went into the professional agricultural industry, but we always had a passion for animals and said we’d like to do farming either on the side or as part of our full-time role.

While Siobhan came from a dairy farming family and Alan a beef farming family, it was goats that caught the imagination and fitted the bill in terms of available space on a small one-acre area of land gifted to them by Alan’s family.

“I always had two pet goats - Tom and Jerry. We really liked the animals; they’re small so they don’t require a big land base, they’re environmentally efficient, really cute, and very inquisitive! They follow you around everywhere and are stuck into everything. They’re clever characters and that’s why we really like them.”

Siobhan acquired her herd number in 2022 and began to formulate a plan for how her and Alan could make a business from working with goats.

“I spent years watching what other people were doing. With goats, you have to put all the work in yourself - look after them, milk them, but also create a product that’s suitable for a market and then sell it.”

There’s no co-op sending a truck to collect goats’ milk for a guaranteed price.

“We said we’d start small with just a couple of goats, see how we go. One spring day I bought 12 two-day-old baby goats and reared them ourselves. 

After their first year they had their own kids, and we started milking those. That was the first time we started playing around and seeing what we could make. Cheese was the first thing we went into.

By way of a plot twist, despite growing up on a dairy farm and with plans to establish a goat milk business, Siobhán has a severe dairy allergy.

“I can’t drink milk; it can’t touch my skin - if it does, I have to wash it off. I’m also allergic to goat milk, so everything we made, Alan had to test for me. I assessed the cheese from a visual and textural perspective, but I couldn’t taste it.

“People always thought we got into goats because of my allergies, but actually it was just for the love of the animals!”

Tom and Jerry were the first of Siobhan’s pet goats, but Dottie and Dora were the first of their breeding goats, the foundation of their herd, and the inspiration for the brand.

In 2023, Siobhán and Alan’s herd increased to 16. They were milking, playing around with recipes and building infrastructure needed to separate milking from processing and production. By that July, approval by the Department of Agriculture came through and they went out to their local area to begin selling their fresh whole goat’s milk and handmade soft cheeses.

Demand was unexpectedly high, says Siobhán, admitting they had underestimated the time being a food producer would eat up.

“We were able to sell all our products. We said we’d start small and see how we would go; we didn’t have many goats, and our facilities were small - we didn’t even know if we would be able to sell our products. 

We were in eight shops locally, but our problem was that we both have two full time jobs, so we were trying to do this in between.

“We thought maybe we’d scale up in time and increase the herd, but the reality was we couldn’t do it from a time perspective. On a normal day, we’d be up at 5am milking goats and out the door by 8am to do our normal jobs, rushing home at 5.30pm and up again in the cheese room until 10pm before we ever decided to put on the dinner, do any animal husbandry or deal with anything else that might happen. Our weekends were spent delivering to shops, collect money, figuring out our next marketing move - and this was at 15 goats.”

It was clear that scaling up was the only solution to support a transition from full time employed to self-employed. But on doing the maths, Siobhán and Alan realised they would need a herd of 200 goats and an inward investment for expanding the on-farm infrastructure of €600,000.

“We love working with the goats and interacting with customers, but a bigger scale would mean massive investment, and we underestimated the amount of labour that was required. We were working an efficient system for the product we were making, but just couldn’t shift the hours.

“The reality was we had no life when it came to the cheese.”

Friends of Siobhán who knew of her allergies and severe eczema skin condition asked if she had considered making soap from the goats’ milk.

“I was very sceptical. I have bought so many skincare products, paid a fortune for them and then only used them once. But as I had the milk here, I decided to try it. 

I even tried it myself and discovered I can use the goat milk soap, even though I can’t drink the milk or eat the cheese.

Having become her own guinea pig, the goat milk soap is the only thing Siobhán now uses. But it’s not just her own opinion, feedback from customers has been overwhelmingly positive.

“It doesn’t dry out my skin. My skin feels nourished after using; you feel moisturised after rather than feeling just clean and dry.”

Up until this summer, the soap was a side project. Now it held the key to Dottie & Dora becoming the sustainable enterprise Siobhán had always dreamt of.

“The cheese and milk have a very short shelf life: if it’s made today, it needs to be gone within the week. The soap was only toddling along, but we began to see it as a sustainable business where we can live a life alongside it. So, we decided to diversify into goats’ milk soap and put more time into it.”

The Cáis Irish Cheese Award arrived at the point where this decision was all but made.

“It was great recognition for what we had 

produced; everything we learned was from YouTube, books, experimenting. It was great recognition in that way for our first year, but we knew it wasn’t sustainable.”

By pivoting to making beautiful and functional skincare products from their own milk and honey produced on the farm, Siobhán and Alan were able to continue working with the goats they enjoyed in a way that worked for them and their goats.

“We know exactly where our ingredients [for our soap] are coming from. Most soap is made with oils, detergents, parabens and all different things. 

One distinguishing feature of our soap is that we use 100% goat milk which means you’re getting all the vitamins and all the cleansing properties from the goats’ milk: we’re not diluting it down with water at all.

“We use our own honey because we have our own bees, and in the lip balm we use our own beeswax.”

Work is now in full flow to expand the range with new soaps, balms and body butters on the horizon. Unlike when cheese was the core product, Siobhán is chief tester ensuring every item passes muster as her skin condition provides invaluable insight into what people who suffer with their skin need.

“I’m not going to put a product out there if it’s not good for people with problem skin. A lot of people like to see fancy colours and fragrances, but I’m not into that. I have to moisturise my skin ten times a day; if I’m not, my skin becomes rock hard and flaky. These products really help me manage that better.

“Our herd size is 20 goats now (and two alpacas!), with six milking kids. Changing from making cheese to soap facilitates a better work-life balance for us, and when using goats’ milk in soaps, it must be frozen.”

Essentially, this means taking only the volume of milk needed for a year’s soap production. Freezing is an essential step in the process, extends the milk’s shelf life, and supports a natural and less intensive milking cycle for the goats.

In a way, this is an example of slow food in action: small herd size, taking only what is needed and finding innovative ways to preserve it - not as food for eating, but as food for the skin.

“Even the soaps take six weeks to cure, hand-turned every few days.

“It’s like anything handmade,” says Siobhán, “nothing is exactly the same every time you make it. I might use the same ingredients, but I might mix them slightly differently, or the properties of spring milk will be different to that taken in autumn and the soap will end up slightly different.”

It was a bold decision to turn away from cheesemaking so soon after receiving a prestigious Cáis award, but in doing so Siobhán and Alan have found a business that perfectly balances their love of farming, goats, craft, business and lifestyle.

Find Dottie & Dora popping up at craft fairs and markets, or visit their online store: www.dottieanddora.ie