Artisan Soaps Consistency Question?

I've been enjoying the artisan soap adventure, and have one question: Are they all soft soaps, or least malleable, or are there any/many harder milled? So far, Mama Bear seems to be the only one I've come across that is not a soft soap, as well as Synergy, if that's considered "artisan". BTW, I'm not complaining at all, just curious if there are soaps that I am missing out on. (So far, my artisan adventure has taken me to Mike's, Strop Shoppe, B&M, Stirling, MW, Catie's Bubbles, Dapper Dragon, Tiki, Mama Bears, Synergy, RR). I've got samples en route from Maggards and QC.

I'd hate for the SSAD monster to miss out on something good.

Thanks.

If I'm not mistaken, Queen Charlotte soaps makes a hard soap as well as a croap.

If I'm not mistaken there are 2-3 hard Razorock soaps. They specifically have 'hard' in their title description. Haven't tried them though.

Yep, several on your list come in pucks too?

To answer your question, artisan soaps come in all forms, hard pucks, softer pucks, croaps, and creams.

There's LASS (Los Angeles Shaving Soap Company) that is a soft puck.
I use a shave stick (like a glycerin soap) from Ginger's Garden for my travel kit.

The hardest I know of, because it's dried out for months before being offered for sale, is Martin de Candre.
After about 8-10 shaves I can barely see a dent in the surface - it's incredibly dense and extremely good.

Soft soaps are more forgiving in a number of ways.
Easier to load, lather, move into a container of your choice, etc. They also are FAR easier to design into an effective shaving soap. You can write an excellent soft soap recipe out in a single line of text without abbreviations. For these reasons, there are a lot of good artisan soft soaps on the market. A quality artisan hard soap is more difficult to find.

A pucks primary advantage is that it can be sold without a container. However, some sellers of soft soaps offer refills in moldable bar without the container, getting around even that advantage. Personally I found it easier if not cheaper in the long run just to put everything in a container. Hand-wrapping a puck of soap and making it look not awful is more investment in time and money than just dropping that same puck in a tin and putting a sticker on it.

What does that leave? Hard soaps can (but don't always have to be) be more efficient. And then the less obvious, that hard soaps are actually capable of things soft soaps aren't. A good rule of thumb for easy shave soap production is that more Potassium (soft) soap is better in a recipe. But there are advantages to sodium soaps as well. Depending on the particular traits you want in a soap, you can actually find yourself in a position where you want to make a soap softer without increasing the potassium hydroxide in the recipe. So, it's not unlikely that as time goes on, more and more artisans will extend their lines to include harder shaving products. For newer artisans, developing a reputation for an exceptionally easy to lather soap is very important, and that's a big part of why the overwhelming majority of CP and HP artisan shave soaps out there are soft soaps.

I myself do prefer hard soaps just due to their giving me a sense of a higher quality product. As an example. I've tried TFS soft and hard soaps. The soft is a fair bit easier to lather. I still prefer the hard soap.