By day, Laura Johansen is a corporate HR executive, guiding personnel through a maze of forms, policies, and benefits packages. But at night, a kind of alchemy occurs, transforming this mild-mannered desk jockey into a latter-day mad scientist. Off goes the suit, on go the gloves and goggles as Laura shifts to her real passion, handcrafting soothing bars of soap from all-natural ingredients for her home-based business, Real Fine Soap Company.

The source of Laura's Jekyll-esque trans-mutation? It's not a magic potion or a summoning of dark spirits. Instead, Laura's metamorphosis into a home-based soap mogul is spurred by more benign forces: her own need to create and the nurturing legacies of her mother and grandmother.