We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sami Heller. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sami below.

Sami, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

We started our social media accounts before launching and ran some ads—that’s how we got our first customers.

We’d been posting updates and reminders about our launch day of December 1st, 2022 and we were worried that we weren’t going to get any orders at all. We felt so much relief and excitement when our first ever order came through on launch day!

Sami, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

New Moon Refillery is a zero waste and refill shop in the Belmar area of Lakewood, CO. It’s essentially like the bulk section of a grocery store, but with soaps. You can bring your containers from home to refill again and again to help reduce single-use plastic packaging.

I moved to Denver from Minneapolis and noticed that there weren’t many non-packaged or bulk food options in the Denver Metro. This was a big difference from the Twin Cities where there are several co-ops with extensive dry goods selections and almost every major grocery store has some kind of bulk food aisle.

Because of that, I initially wanted to offer mainly food products. However I quickly realized why perhaps not a lot of people were doing that. The food licensing process was difficult to understand and had a lot more costs, which was very intimidating to me as someone who’d never had a business before. Because of this, I decided to start with refillable soap products and go from there.

There are several awesome refill shops in the Denver Metro, and we’re different because we love data! If you shop with us, we give you a personalized dashboard at the end of the year (similar to Spotify Wrapped). We take your real purchases throughout the year and send you a personal impact report!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We take our commitments seriously, even if there is a blizzard! We registered to participate in an Earth Day event in April 2024. In true Colorado fashion, there was snow and wind for the outdoor event.

However, the event wasn’t cancelled, so we showed up with our tent, table and snow boots. We ended up having such great interactions with community members who braved the weather to attend the event! Everyone who came out was so kind and interested in our mission.

Despite the weather, it was one of our favorite events that we’ve done!

Have you ever had to pivot?

I mentioned food products in an answer earlier. We did end up carrying nonperishable food products for about a year and a half. However, once we opened a storefront it became much harder to carry those products.

We ultimately decided that it just didn’t make sense for us to carry them anymore, and we unfortunately had to sell off our food inventory as of January 2025. It was a difficult decision, but it was best for us financially and operationally. We tried and it didn’t work out, and that’s okay! We continue to learn along the way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.newmoonrefillery.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/newmoonrefillery/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/newmoonrefillery/