We were lucky to catch up with Mary Hanlin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Mary thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I was born via emergency c-section with a burst appendix, later, in the NIC Unit I developed intestinal necrosis and underwent an intestinal resection. There is no record of how much was removed, I only know that I had my ileocecal valve removed. The healing & lived experience for people with resections is very, very different from person to person, day to day, and even hour to hour.

This led to a lot of digestive issues that were very challenging to navigate as a child & young adult. It was a very alienating, shameful, and difficult time. Later as an adult navigating work, college, family, and other responsibilities it was often easier to simply not eat instead of having to navigate inevitable and embarrassing restroom issues.

So when “before you go” spray hit the market they were seriously life-changing for me & I was excited to try them. But I found I was sensitive to most of the scent blends

I developed my version of a “before you go” toilet spray when I didn’t care for the scents on the market.

I decided to name it “Life is Shit” (tho I operate as a DBA under a different llc name) because for a whole lot of people living with digestive issues of all kinds their life requires constantly running the equation on what they have eaten, or can they eat right now v/s their travel time, task load, & immediate access to a restroom facility.

For some people there is an almost immediate transit time between food + facility access & that presents a lot of quality-of-life challenges. So, Our lives kind of *are* all about shit.

It’s a funny name. It will make you laugh when you see it. And the scents are just lovely – I wanted to create refreshing, comforting, and nostalgic scents – so while perhaps your asshole is burning off right now because you decided to pay that price so you could relish a slice of cheese pizza – you can have a little chuckle about the way things are while you’re there.

But also, you just keep going anyway. Spokane artist Harold Balazs created a sculpture with the words “Transcend the Bullshit” on top (that can now be found on prints, mugs, belt buckles,& even in neon so check him out.)

So if you are living with a condition that impacts your pooping experience you do have to – literally – transcend the shit. But also, this waste can be processed into rich fertilizer to grow a new and beautiful life that enriches us. So that’s the whole thing. : “Life is Shit – Grow Something Good.” And that’s the Mission of Life is Shit Spray & my business as a whole.

I see my business & Mission as a living embodiment of that – taking these shitty & challenging lived experiences I had and channeling that into a drive to start a business that creates products that meet needs in an effective, yet whimsical way without feeling too overdone or too “locker-room humor”.
In 2020 I found a Facebook Group of people living life after resections and I learned a lot. There were so many answers to questions I had – even if the answer was that there was no answer. Access to a GI specialist and an entire medical team was not something that could happen to me so this group proved to be invaluable.

I learned while many individuals can heat and eat food orally & eventually navigate a personal baseline of sensitivities & manageable daily routine many individuals need TPN feeding short term or forever & may also utilize colostomy bags.

So I decided I want to donate a % of my profits to buy medical supplies for people living with GI conditions, managing these conditions can take huge amounts of time and money. I am fortunate to not be managing port lines and elimination bags and if I can do anything to help the individuals and families managing these conditions make life a little easier without insurance hoops to jump through, etc, etc I want to do it.

I need to be able to do that because the number of times in 2020 & 2021 that I was moved to tears because someone had an answer for me, especially those people who had grown up like me – ashamed, embarrassed, and thinking we were alone in the world – only to find that there are many, many people with our same stories – & shared experiences – I believe that part of why I was inspired to start this whole thing was to be able to help people, not just support myself.

My future plans include growing the line beyond just the toilet & room sprays to offer more body/booty/ and home care offerings that don’t bullshit you & help grow positive & meaningful community support in measurable ways.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I offer “before you go” toilet sprays and room sprays.

The room sprays came along after I learned people were using the toilet sprays as room spray and I wanted to offer a blend without the glycerine that makes the toilet sprat effective because that glycerine will attract dust and dirt into surfaces,

I got into this out of necessity.

There was one major player in the “Before You Go” game offering one scent at the time it came onto my radar.
I loved the product. But I hated the scent. So I developed my own.

Right now I have a pine/mint scent, a cinnamon/clove scent, and a citrus blend scent and I am currently researching essential oil blends and plant-derived fragrance options to create a natural product.

Life is Shit is a toilet spray that handles your shit, without being made of shit, & that gives a shit – about people and the planet.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I wait tables to pay the bills right now. As well as doing some side gigs in cleaning and social media management.

To fund the business I was (and still am) allocating a % of my tips from every shift and saving it up to buy bottles product labels and so on.

I spend some money wisely – on education that I benefitted from a lot (shout out to Business Class by Sophia Amoruso and Creative Enterprise by Terrain in Spokane, Washington) and I have also spent some money on education that I wasn’t ready for, or didn’t have the budget to act on, or that I was afraid to take action on – I am still learning ads and getting ready to launch ads because I’m nervous, in the world of e-commerce I have a small amount of spend to play with.

From these experiences I have built a network of people who support me, believe in me and my mission, and tie me into an amazing well of resources, including an initiation to apply for a Small Business Program that included a matching grant.

I am fortunate I was able to borrow funds from a family member so I qualified for that program.

I continue to look for opportunities to secure funding, grants, and education for my business while putting anything I make at markets, from commission sales, or wholesale sales right back into the business while I grow it.

This next year I am focusing on how I can pay down personal consumer & medical debt while cutting other expenses so I can invest even more of my income into scaling the business.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Honestly, when I started most people “got” the product and it resonated with them but I did get some pushback from people and I had to learn that I can’t sell to everyone. And I don’t want to. And that is fine.

Then I had to learn that while I had a vision in my own mind of what an “ideal customer” was going to look like I honestly really didn’t know.

I had imagined that people my parents’ age would be turned off by this product name and that I would face a lot of criticism, I was ready for that so I started going to Markets in my tourist town and found out that this brand name fits in perfectly with old-school corporate humor – the number of retired professionals that “get” and are “in on” the joke surprised me at first but now I have come to enjoy how many people I make laugh when they walk by – even if they don’t buy from me that day.

I also had to get comfortable talking about poop – a lot – with strangers – which is NOT something I could have imagined in any world when I was a kid.

A lot of things people are living with and navigating are things we cannot see – that person walking up to my booth may “appear” to be in great health but they may be managing a pretty frustrating digestive condition or something else that impacts their elimination habits & now we are talking about it, just a few strangers discussing bathroom challenges on a Sunday morning in July. And it’s important because it normalizes this, there was and is so much shame around this bodily function and it’s not serving us very well to be ashamed of or embarrassed but most basic and vital bodily functions.

We can want effective odor control in our bathrooms and also not feel embarrassed about the facts of life.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lifeisshit.shop/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lifeisshitspray/?locale=%E5%80%97w6QbS&hl=am-et
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092307785471
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-hanlin-52108a168/

Image Credits

Mary Hanlin