March 2026 Amber Grant Awarded to Soak iT Up

We’re excited to announce the March $10,000 Amber Grant recipient. Congratulations to Carla Scholz, founder of Soak iT Up.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Carla for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi everyone, my name is Jama Hernandez and I’m with WomensNet. And I’m so excited to introduce our March, 2026 grant recipients. We are so excited today to introduce Carla with Soak iT Up- she is our Amber Grant winner. We appreciate the time that you have taken to talk with us today to share a little bit about your business. So to begin, Carla will you tell us about Soak iT Up and who or what inspired your business.

Carla: My family ran a living museum of rural America in Door county, Wisconsin. It started when I was a baby- I grew up understanding how things grow and where they come from and how important it is to preserve everything and the earth. Sustainability has always been on my radar. But as a graphic designer, there were a lot of times when it couldn’t be on my radar. And so I was in the greeting card aisle years ago thinking about how wasteful it was to be sending greeting cards, and I designed greeting cards! So I was just very confused about the whole issue of, do you give something that’s going to be thrown away, or not? Then it hit me that my daughter had given me a Swedish dish cloth. And I loved the idea that this cloth, which was really cool, turned into a cleaning cloth. So I thought, why not turn that material into greeting cards? So that’s what I did. So they turn into soft reusable cleaning cloths, and I am just plugging away making them more accessible and help with the environment.

Jama: Thank you so much. And it’s super cool that you can keep reading the message that’s in there. So that’s kind of nice. Wonderful. Dish cloths and greeting cards mixed together is definitely unique, but what makes your approach different?

Carla: So I did some research and found out that Americans buy 60 billion greeting cards a year and consume six and a half million tons of paper towels every year. So both are single use and you can just visualize the waste that happens. So clards solves both of those problems at once. And I am proud to say I have a patent and I’ve been working hard to keep it affordable so you can be sustainable and nudge people a little. So that’s really the uniqueness of it. And one of the things that I really love is that my customers or the customers that receive them often say that every time they use it, they think of the person who sent it. And if a greeting card does that for months, it can’t get much better than that.

Jama: Absolutely. For sure. Do you have a lessons learned story that you’d like to share with us?

Carla: I had to think about this a little bit. Every hard thing taught me something- production, setbacks, rising costs, the tariffs, some personal losses. There were plenty of moments where I could have been, it could have been easy just to say, I don’t know, I can’t keep doing this. But I didn’t. Looking back, every challenge made the business stronger. And by that I mean I learned something it made me push myself and push everything I was doing and be braver. So I wish someone had told me early on to not be afraid of the hard stuff- get curious about it. And that’s where the real growth is. And the challenges don’t mean you’re doing it wrong, they mean you’re just doing it. And that’s the steps that have to be taken.

Jama: What a powerful lesson. Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you for participating in this interview. We know you’re very, very busy and so we appreciate the time that you carved out today to speak with us. And congratulations again.