We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sasha Stone a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sasha, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

Traditional retail works linearly. A raw material is extracted, manufactured into a product, sold to a consumer, used by the consumer and thrown away by the consumer. Companies making products without providing a way to sustainably dispose of them when they are used up and it becomes the customers burden.

At Green Life Trading Co. we obsess with the end of life of our products. If it can’t be refilled, reused, composted or recycled we don’t offer it. We even offer an in house composting service for folks who don’t have access to composting. Once a product has been used up, customers return them to our store to be composted with our local composting partner. We provide educational materials to help our community recycle correctly and we offer wine bottle, tote bag and glass jar reuse programs to keep these items in circulation. Like I said, we’re obsessed with end of life.

Sasha, 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?

Green Life Trading Co. is a Wisconsin based sustainable home goods store and refillary. Our mission is to provide friendly and accessible resources for thinking big and shopping small. Whether it’s in-store or online, we hope to bring a sense of eco-friendly ease into shopping for the greener version of your everyday essentials. We offer everything from refillable laundry detergent and solid dish washing pucks to shampoo bars and lotion bars that will have you ditching the plastic bottles and never looking back.

Environmental Policy, a senior-level class filled with Global Studies and Conservation and Environmental Science majors is where the idea for Green Life was born. Our discussion prompt was something along the lines of: What actions do you personally take for the environment? The room was practically crickets. Seeing folks dedicating their careers to environmental causes didn’t have the tools to make sustainable decisions in their daily life gave me the Oprah “aha!” moment.

At Green Life we practice what we preach. Our shipping boxes and materials are always reused. Our excess cardboard go back to our community for reuse, sent to our composting partner or get recycled. Our tape is compostable and we offset our shipping emissions. We are here to fight green washing–marketing something as sustainable when it really isn’t– and show folks that businesses can, and should, run sustainably.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The week we planned to open our first brick and mortar store in Madison, WI was also the week of the first stay-at-home order. I had a store full of bulk products, the idea was that folks would fill their own containers, weigh them, and pay. It is a very interactive model and not one that easily shifted to the online COVID landscape.

Our COVID pivot ended up being one of our most successful programs. An only bulk refillary. We began offering our bulk powders, dish, laundry, bath salts, in paper bags and liquids in returnable pouches, things like shampoo, floor cleaner and face wash. With the pouch we send customers return mailers to return the pouches so we could sanitize and reuse them. Although it is not an entirely zero waste program, we can reuse our pouches almost 10 times before they need to be retired and the small, light weight pouches mean we are keeping our shipping space and weight low. Today, we are proud to say we have one of the most expansive online refillaries in the US.

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

As a business owner, especially when you’re just beginning, you want to please everyone. A customer wants this product, another customer calls that product green washing. you don’t want to tell anyone no. In the beginning I took every criticism to heart, I believed that the person complaining was speaking for everyone. The day I learned I couldn’t please everyone was freeing. A customer said, “I see you have 2 ounce bottles, and I see you have 4 ounce bottles, but do you have 3 ounce bottles? Something in me clicked, I realized not only that I don’t have to respond to every request, but also that there is nothing wrong with say no. “No unfortunately, they don’t manufacture that size, no I’m sorry to say we don’t offer that product.” You need to say No a lot in business, get comfortable saying it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://greenlifetradingco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greenlifetradingco/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-stone-98bb855b/