We recently connected with Samantha Rios and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Samantha , thanks for joining us today. Let’s talk legacy – what sort of legacy do you hope to build?

A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to leave a legacy of greenery and support. I would love to have my land where I grow all types of food. A volunteer food forest where everybody is welcome to volunteer and take food as necessary. I want to help bring a basic necessity to my local community. I want people to try different fresh fruits that they’ve never even heard of before. I want to save a species from going extinct. I want my body to be composted and returned to my land. If I’m not mistaken once you bury someone on a property you won’t have to pay for taxes. Not only will my body fertilize the plants but it will help whoever is managing to have one less worry. I want there to be shade and butterflies and bees and fresh honey. In my opinion, this is how everybody should go about living. Grow your own food and manage your own livestock, maybe just maybe that will result in less cancer ending the lives of my community. I know it’s something that we all have within us, but I feel like eating toxic meat and veggies along with contaminated water doesn’t help our odds.
As of right now, I’m the owner of Sam Saves which I would love to eventually transition into Sam’s Farms. I don’t want to charge people if anything people could donate but I want this to be accessible and welcoming to all demographics. Do most people consider me delusional for having these aspirations, maybe, but doing anything out of the norm makes people uncomfortable.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m the proud owner of Sam Saves, I sell eco-friendly products. My goal is to help my fellow Houstonians to have access to sustainable products. Most of the items that I offer aren’t within your main box stores. I explain to them that almost everything I sell is biodegradable reusable or refillable, Which is how I believe everything should be made. In what world does it make sense to produce something (plastic) that will only be used once and then left in a landfill for generations to come? I want my community to know the effect of using organic products, like a balanced Ph and minimal to no skin irritation (some people have very specific allergies to natural ingredients) Along with selling organic products I offer a free composting service for my community, it’s for non-food items because the buckets lie within a store and we can’t risk the aroma ruining the experience for the customers. This works perfectly for me because it allows my customers to bring back some of the products that they’re no longer using. For example, bamboo toothbrushes, natural loofahs, and straw heat flossers to name a few. I also offer a code for people to start their curbside composting pick-up service with a free trial month, referral code: samsaves.
One last thing that I’m proud to be a part of is being an ambassador for this Free app called TREECARD with this app people can contribute to planting real trees just by walking. After 10k steps, you contribute to a real tree being planted. And treecard is different because they’re not just planting random monoculture. They’re working with local communities, to help them get access to food, water, and sustainable jobs. The perfect symbiotic relationship in my opinion, hey keep your land, plant some trees, get paid, and have a much more fertile and comfortable piece of land, sounds like a win-win situation. If you or anyone reading this would like to start their tree planting journey please use referral code: samsaves! . This will let them know I sent ya and will help me to continue pursuing my life as an entrepreneur.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

During the pandemic, I had two jobs, and I wanted to live rent-free so I was able to start investing in stocks and saving a significant amount of money. Eventually, I moved back to Texas and when I did that I decided that working a regular job for the rest of my life wasn’t something I was too fond of and that’s when the brainstoring started. Eventually, I landed on starting Sam Saves a business that would hopefully do good by planting the people and my bank account. I decided to spend all of my savings starting this business. I got a website, business cards, and inventory, and eventually the markets started it was a slow start but eventually, people started getting used to seeing me and they slowly started using my products seeing that these were worthy clean products they started coming back and string more thing. Slowly the checkout amount started to increase.
I was able to do those full-time for about a year until I stumbled across consecutive amount of slow months. This has led me to go back into the mainstream job industry. I still run Sam Saves during the weekends and when I have time in between. The economy just isn’t doing well enough for people to support small businesses like mine, I do hope one day to go back to full-time entrepreneur. It will probably be once I’m done getting my associate’s in Business administration.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Sometimes consistency isn’t the missing factor. For example, I was going to this market that I consistently went to week by week. I now realize I spent too much time there. For a couple of weeks, it seemed worth it but before I knew it my sales had plummeted there and they haven’t picked up since. People stop by and tell me how they liked a certain product they had bought from me but for some reason, they didn’t buy more. I’m not sure what happened, Let me just say that as scary and uncomfortable as it sounds sometimes you just have to keep on moving, doing different markets in different cities. If people liked what you had to offer they would continue to purchase online or in my case they would visit my physical location. I have a space within this non-profit store organization named Mala Market, this is where people get to refill on their shampoo, conditioner, and body wash, they can also stock up on shampoo bars, and compost. I love my space there and I hope that my being consistent there isn’t another lesson for future me to learn from.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.samsaves.com
• Instagram: @[email protected]
• Facebook: Sam Saves
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/sam-saves-houston?osq=sam+saves