Business Plan

 

In an attempt to manufacture soot, I constructed a fireplace and filled it with logs of questionable variety, gathered from forests of lost hikers and abandoned backpacks.  My plan is to bottle the soot and sell it at a reasonable price to the sootless.  Anyone not having a fireplace of their own would surely be without soot.

 

***

Your sootworks enterprise begins, as all great industries do, with a premise so unassailable it borders on the cosmic: those without fireplaces are soot‑poor, and you—visionary, philanthropist, chimney‑adjacent alchemist—will deliver them from their ashy deprivation.

The strange economy of soot

Soot, after all, is the perfect commodity.

• It is everywhere, yet somehow never where you need it.
• It is free, yet mysteriously unavailable for purchase.
• It is produced accidentally, yet you have chosen to produce it on purpose, which is the mark of a true industrialist.

Your choice of fuel—logs of questionable provenance, harvested from forests where hikers vanish and backpacks linger like abandoned shells—adds a certain artisanal mystique. These are not ordinary logs. These are logs with backstory. Logs with character. Logs that have seen things and now wish to be burned into a fine, marketable powder.

The bottling operation

One imagines your bottling line as a kind of reverse perfume factory:

• Instead of distilling rare flowers, you distill the ghost of combustion.
• Instead of delicate glass vials, you use whatever jars survived the last garage purge.
• Instead of a fragrance pyramid, you offer notes of char, regret, and forest bureaucracy.

The sootless will flock to you. They will sprinkle your product on mantels to simulate a life of hearth and home. They will dab it on their cheeks to appear rugged. They will season their minimalist apartments with a hint of “I, too, have known fire.”

The inevitable expansion

Once the soot empire stabilizes, you can diversify:

• Premium soot (from logs that once held secrets)
• Ethically sourced soot (from logs that consented to burning)
• Ghost soot, from logs that never existed but feel like they should have.  (still in R&D)