We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Susan Cho a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Susan, thanks for joining us today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?
In the case of zero waste, there’s a conflict between what typically makes money for a retail business on the one hand, and the goals of a zero waste lifestyle, on the other.. If you’re serious about reducing the waste you generate, you’re not looking to buy a steady stream of new products, which most businesses rely on. I do believe most people in Corporate America set out to provide a solid product or service for their customers. But since corporations exist in order to generate a profit, priorities inevitably get shuffled around.
Our founders chose to form a Limited Liability Company (LLC) instead of a corporation. This has allowed us to concentrate on our mission first, without having to concentrate primarily on generating profit for stakeholders.We enjoy offering innovative new products that make it easier to reuse or refill. But our greatest joy is in helping people get out of the consumerist “disposables” mindset.
Susan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
FullFillery came into existence in 2019 as a project to help the Takoma Park/Silver Spring/DC community approach zero waste; we were aiming for a refill station, run cooperatively. Refill stations have been popping up, allowing people to buy things like shampoo, hand soap, and various household cleaners in bulk, without having to buy plastic containers each time. Our local food coop already has an excellent selection of bulk foods, so we decided to concentrate on cleaning products.
None of us had retail experience, but we set about finding high-quality, non-toxic products to sell in bulk or without packaging, with minimal fossil fuel use. We place a lot of importance on how each product is manufactured–the sustainability of the materials used, how well it biodegrades when it eventually does need to be replaced, where the product is made, whether workers or animals are exploited, and the sort of enterprise we’re supporting by buying their products. It’s very rewarding to buy from B-corporations, which always have a mission to provide social benefits, not just private profit.
We also really love to find small vendors, maybe just a few people making their own products, selling locally and not on Amazon. Rini, especially, has good relationships with so many local people, we’ve been able to make special requests for creative products that fit our high standards. One of our close friends who volunteered a considerable amount of time makes solid lotion bars; we asked her to make a vegan version and she delivered! Another artisan friend carved soap dishes for us from wood scraps she happened to have.
We also got in touch with Emoke Gaidosch, a local soapmaker who is the paragon of zero waste soap production. She recycles used vegetable oil; by the time she’s done making her soaps, there is no leftover oil going down the drain. She is now one of 3 FullFillery co-owners (the others needed to step back as COVID took over everyone’s lives).
We concentrate on solid products, to avoid the extra fuel in shipping liquids. Some of them are unfamiliar to folks, but they often become customer favorites, like shampoo & conditioner bars, dish soap bars, home cleaning scrub, toothpaste tabs, even toothpowder. However, we now carry liquid products that we can make ourselves, such as castile soap, laundry detergent, and dish soap concentrate.
We have a lot of items we’ve labeled “Bring Your Own Container.” For some items like lotion, we utilize loop packaging, where the customer pays a deposit on the bottle, which they get back when they return the bottle. We can clean them to our standards and package the product so it doesn’t accidentally get contaminated. It’s more work for us, but our in-house chemist insists!
Our priorities include:
reusable materials from sustainable sources like hemp, bamboo, ramie, sisal, silicone, metal;
minimal packaging: shipped & sold in compostable/reusable packaging, if any;
local vendors: chosen from the community around us, as much as possible;
ethical purchasing: not tested on animals, mostly vegan-friendly, from like-minded producers;
non-toxic ingredients: safe for you, your children, and other animals in the ecosystem. most items include an unscented version.
One of our favorite recommendations:
Instead of using a disposable plastic spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner w/disposable paper towels, try filling one of our reusable glass spray bottles with one of our all-purpose refill blocks along with our cloths, repurposed from local thrift stores. The all-purpose cleaner is made 5 miles from the store, using recycled vegetable oil from a local commercial kitchen. Just launder them (the cleaning cloths) and reuse again and again. We wrap the all-purpose refill blocks using packaging paper from deliveries made to us.
Another very popular switch is for dental floss. Instead of using plastic for the floss and dispenser, we offer bamboo floss refills for bamboo or stainless steel dispensers with no plastic core. We buy the refills in bulk and wrap them in packaging paper from deliveries to us. The floss is even compostable!
My colleague Rini has started hosting craft workshops and community swaps. We really value having a thriving community with strong positive connections. We’ve had swaps for Halloween costumes, soccer uniforms, unwanted Christmas presents, and more. These bring people into the store and foster conversations about making positive changes in our lives.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
The person who came up with the idea reached out to her friends & acquaintances. I had worked with her as a member of the Board of Representatives for TPSS Coop, where she worked. Rini was one of her neighbors, with a non-profit of her own called Greenthinker. All 8 of us were recruited through personal relationships, and we met regularly for months, trying to come to a consensus on what exactly we wanted to do. Emoke joined us through a few business friendships.
This is another thing that is different from Corporate America. We’re all connected personally, working for the same mission. We’re pouring ourselves into this so that we don’t have to make every decision based on profit. It’s definitely a big challenge, but we really want to model a way for retail to be both financially and environmentally sustainable. We’re now a Benefits LLC with 3 co-owners, introduced below.
Susan Cho: My sphere of concern is largely centered on animals; I’ve volunteered for wildlife conservation projects, worked as a vet tech, and have been vegan for 16 years. I helped found FullFillery as a cooperative project, to help reduce waste. I now live in MA, so I take care of researching and ordering inventory, as well as managing business/financial accounts.
Rini Saha: My professional background is in teaching at-risk students Middle school and High School. I mostly taught History. I was always concerned about the rapid changing climate but did not know what to do about it. There was no recycling at the High School I was teaching at, so I wanted my student to do a leadership project getting recycling started. When I started to look into recycling myself, I realized it was mostly a failure, and I started to do a lot of volunteer work on waste reduction. I do a lot of marketing work for Fullfillery.
Emoke Gaidosch: I have been interested in environment-friendly living and reducing our ecological footprint for many years now. I’m a chemist (masters degree) and I make many of the cleaning and body care products. I closed my own business and joined the team two years ago. I now concentrate on making products for Fullfillery, helping with administrative work, and sometimes doing markets.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
We were very lucky to find Emoke, who had her own cosmetics business. Her products and production methods were exactly what we wanted, so we commissioned her to start making cleaning products specifically for us. Because her background includes stringent European standards for safe ingredients, we trust her to use truly safe and effective ingredients, not ones that just smell good or produce a lot of lather. She also vets the products that we buy from other vendors, sometimes catching ingredients that look fine but are actually harmful.
Through her, we have: solid shampoo & conditioner bars, body soap, body lotion, body butter, lip balms, facial masks, all-purpose cleaner, solid dish soap, dish soap liquid concentrate, castile soap, powdered laundry detergent. She’s also expanded into making paper-free cleaning cloths, reusable gift bags, cotton cosmetic rounds, and tote bags using thrifted materials.
One challenge has been that we’ve ramped up production so much, now that more and more customers are finding us and coming back regularly. We had to expand into a new space with a kitchen where some of the production will be moved. We also need to clone Emoke, because we rely on her so heavily for our flagship products! These things all increase our expenses significantly, of course. We have relied a city grants to help us with these expenses.
One thing that folks need to realize about manufacturing your own products for retail distribution: it takes a lot of time and space to package the products and affix all those labels. Factor that in to your production costs!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fullfillery.com
- Instagram: @fullfillery
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FullFillery