We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Valiant. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.
Alright, Sarah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the decision of whether to donate a percentage of sales to an organization or cause – we’d love to hear the backstory of how you thought through this.
Earth Love was created to heal the Earth, not profit off of it. For every order received, Earth Love plants a tree through One Tree Planted. This is extremely important to us as we are incredibly worried about the future of the Earth for the next generation.
Sarah, 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?
Originally an Interior Designer, I, became increasingly concerned about the future of the environment after I had my daughter in 2017. Always having been an environmentalist, I realized I had to do more and on a bigger scale. A friend introduced me to plastic free July, and after a lot of research, my findings on what plastic was doing to the earth horrified me. So I decided to come up with natural cleaning supplies that were not packaged in plastic (as almost all cleaning supplies are!). At first I developed only a dishwasher tablet and a toilet cleaning tablet out of my kitchen (this grew to include a Laundry detergent tablet and an all purpose cleaner tablet that you dissolve in vinegar and water). I found compostable packaging to wrap them in, and had the idea to just give them as gifts to friends and family. However, when the response to these was so incredible, I decided to apply for The Green Living Show in Toronto and attended as a vendor in March of 2019. By the end of the show, I had 15 wholesalers interested in carrying Earth Love’s products.
Today Earth Love is in over 130 stores across North America with lines of both cleaning and self care products including Laundry detergent tablets, Dishwasher tablets, Toilet cleaner, All Purpose tablets, A variety of shower melt scents and our new Facial Steamers.
All of Earth Love’s products use all natural ingredients and are packaged in 100% compostable materials. We believe that small businesses (and women owned in particular) are the only way forward to saving our environment. As a small business we care more about healing the earth than we do large profit margins. One of our biggest initiatives beyond our commitment to provide waste free products is to ensure that our forests are regenerated. Earth Love has joined with One Tree Planted and plants a tree for every single order placed (we increase this number for special holidays like Earth Day and Giving Tuesday). To date we panted over 600 trees and have prevented almost 50,000 plastic containers from being used.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Earth Love has experienced a steep growth trajectory practically since we started. Because of that, demand has consistently surprised us, and we have often invested in expanding only to outgrow the expansion mere months later.
Last winter we were at a point when we had been in our new warehouse for about 9 months. We came across a problem with our tablets where we realized we needed to maintain a higher humidity level in winter months. Not having the capital to invest in a new and pricy HVAC system to achieve this. We purchased a few extra humidifiers. The only thing was, unless we went back to load all the humidifiers late at night, the humidity would drop by morning, and we would be unable to produce our products. So for 4 months, I had to drive back to work in the freezing, dead of night 5 times a week (after I put my daughter to bed) to reload humidifiers. It was the only way to keep going. It was exhausting, but I did it!
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
I started making and formulating tablets on my kitchen counter. That slowly moved into taking over my basement. Everything was made by hand, and as we kept growing we realized there is no way we can keep making these by hand. If we want to prevent the most plastic from being used as possible, we have find a way for a machine to make these.
Contact Info:
- Website: earthlovehome.ca
- Instagram: earthlovehome
Image Credits
Bellwether X Inc.