Seattle teen sells soap to fund travel obsession

As the saying goes, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ But for 13-year-old Joshua Puddy, it really begins with a bar of soap.

The Magnolia teenager caught the travel bug after attending a meeting of the World Travel Club, where students study a country for a year, then visit it for a service learning project.

He was hooked.

In the past couple of years he’s been to China and Belize. Now he says, “I’d like to travel for my entire life.”

His mom, Lisa, says traveling the world has been an experience she could only dream of for her son. Now, Joshua’s trying to raise nearly $3,500 for his Romania adventure. So he began making organic soaps to sell locally.

“We were trying to think of what to sell, that we could do at home,” he says. “Our first thought was dog treats, but they were too expensive.” Then, he came up with the idea of selling homemade soap. He melts it down in the family garage, pours it into molds, then wraps and sells the bars at local farmer’s markets.

“I’m quite surprised at how well it’s taken off,” his mom says. “How many 13-year-olds start their own business?”

In addition to the soap, she says Joshua forfeited his Christmas and birthday presents to fundraise for his trips. He doesn’t even have a cell phone – any money he does make goes straight into his travel fund.

Joshua says his travel adventures have opened his eyes to things he never thought he’d ever try. “While in China I ate fish eyeball (soup.) I decided I kind of wanted to try that. It didn’t taste like anything (but) was kind of weird,” he says.

And even though he’s only 13, Joshua is already thinking about how he can help some of the impoverished communities he’s visited.

“There’s things he saw that he’s going to try to figure out how to solve (those) problems for the rest of his life” Lisa says.

Joshua has already spent time working with an orphanage on one of his trips, and earlier this year he helped a small town and school in Belize recover from last year’s hurricanes.

Joshua will be in the 8th grade this fall, and he’s making future travel plans: Russia, Egypt, and Stonehenge are some of the places he still wants to visit.

And after graduating from high school, he says it would be cool to go into filmmaking, possibly working for National Geographic, which would allow him to combine his love of travel and film.

In the meantime, there’s soap to sell. He’s raised less than a $1,000 for the trip and knows that means there’s a lot of work left to do. He plans to raise more travel funds at the Fremont Flea Market before school starts in September.

His mom says she couldn’t be more proud of her son’s initiative. “It’s absolutely amazing. He’s applying himself and doing all this work to raise money for this continuing academic adventure, service learning project. The travel has been a defining moment in his life, I have no doubt it’s going to be something he carries forward.”