Did you know that there may be harmful chemicals in your cleaning supplies? That’s right! Conventional cleaning products can contain chemicals such as bleach, ammonia, and phosphate. These ingredients are not only harmful to the environment, but they are also harmful to our health. Seeing an opportunity to not only keep homes clean but also promote a healthier lifestyle, Anne Ruozzi created Therapy Clean alongside her husband and business partner, Jim Dudra.

Ruozzi, who was born in Venezuela, wanted to enhance people’s cleaning experience by providing a safer and more enjoyable way to clean. Therapy Clean offers plant-based products, such as an all-purpose cleaner, dish soap, and more, that use essential oils and are designed to clean most hard surfaces in your home with ease. Their stainless steel cleaner, which launched on Amazon in 2017 and generated over $200K in sales within two months and almost $1M in 2018, is a favorite among customers and continues to have strong year-on-year growth.

While Therapy Clean’s products have now amassed over 17,000 positive reviews on Amazon, Ruozzi has had to overcome several challenges to get to this point. In 2010, the Latina and her partner had to declare bankruptcy for their first company, Eco Touch, when the sales of their eco-friendly car care products failed to meet expectations. However, they decided to salvage their proprietary machinery and formulas and repurposed them for their new company, Filling Factory, which produced private label automotive cleaning products. With the profits from Filling Factory, she founded Therapy Clean.

The company is now expanding into brick-and-mortar stores with retail placement in over 1,000 locations across the country, including Meijer, CVS, and Target, as part of its mission to provide safe, effective, and enjoyable-to-use home cleaning products.

“Gone are the days of petroleum based cleaners that are not only toxic to our health, but perpetuate the dependency on fossil fuels” – Anne Ruozzi, Co-Founder of Therapy Clean

We caught up with the Venezolana about scaling her business, what differentiates her plant-based cleaning products from others on the market, and more.

PLUS: Two Latinas want to make your life easier by solving common organization issues

Tell me a little bit about yourself and how the idea of Therapy Clean came about?

I was born and raised in Venezuela and moved to the US with my family when I was 14. After attending college in Boston I moved to New Hampshire to pursue a career opportunity and shortly after, I met my life partner, James Dudra. Both of us have a pretty strong entrepreneurial spirit so we decided to try going off on our own – together.

For anyone who’s bootstrapped a business, no matter what field you’re in, you know how stressful it can be. It really takes a lot of time, effort and mental stamina to stay in the game and keep moving forward.

Fast forward five or six years into our venture, we had two kids! This meant we always had something to clean, organize or do when we got home. To us, the very act of cleaning brought peace to our family. We actually enjoyed it! But what we found is that there were no products in the market at the time that focused on the actual experience of cleaning. That is how Therapy Clean was born.

What differentiates your plant-based cleaning products from traditional cleaning products?

Therapy Clean formulas are based on three principles:

1- They must be efficacious. We learned this through our previous experience formulating for the automotive industry with our first company, Eco Touch, a line of eco-friendly car cleaning products brand. We formulate our products so that they outperform other brands and provide higher value to consumers.

2- The products must be plant-based, use ingredients that come from renewable sources, and be harvested in ethical ways. More and more, consumers today demand a more natural alternative to traditional solutions. Beyond that, it is also the right thing to do. Therapy Clean uses food-grade preservatives in the formulas, which is another major point of differentiation to most other brands in the market today. So as you clean around your kitchen area, you can feel good about the products you use. All the formulas are free of parabens, phosphates, ammonia, synthetic fragrances or petroleum distillates.

3- Last but not least, the products are mood-enhancing. We do this through our custom-blends of multidimensional essential oils. Our blends create base, mid and top notes, much like smelling a well-designed perfume, using only essential oils. These blends were carefully crafted and studied in the university of Geneva’s Brain and Research Lab where, using FMRI, we can see which parts of the brain light up when consumers smell the products, adding a level of pleasure to the process of cleaning. Whether it’s our Calm, Energize or Uplift scent, the moment you spray the products and wipe the surface, the “bloom” triggers a subtle yet positive emotional experience.

What challenges have you faced while building and scaling your company, and how have you overcome them?

I could write a book here…there are simply too many to list. To summarize, I would say that having challenges is part of scaling and the only way around them is to embrace them head on, learn from them and grow stronger because of them. It comes down to having a mindset that instead of going: OMG, I can’t do this anymore, you’re thinking OK, what is this challenge trying to tell me? How can I learn from this? What will it look like on the other side?

We’ve almost gone out of business at least twice now, but instead of closing the door and sending everyone home, we decided to pivot instead. All of this experience adds value at the end and makes Therapy Clean an even stronger company. For example, our first company, Eco Touch, didn’t resonate with consumers as well as we’d hoped- car lovers didn’t prioritize eco-friendly cleaning products and eco-conscious consumers weren’t big purchasers of car cleaners. Instead of calling it quits, we pivoted Eco Touch into our second company, Filling Factory, where we used our existing employees and infrastructure of filling lines to offer private-label services to other brands in the industry. This was our first lesson in the power of pivoting to succeed.

How do you educate and market your products to consumers who may not be familiar with plant-based cleaning products?

More and more, consumers are tuning in to wellness-enriching options. We see it in the surge of supplements, natural foods, and natural personal care products. Cleaning products are a perfect complement to anyone’s existing regimen to improve their spaces.

We have been fortunate to win several awards for product performance compared to other national household brands that don’t have plant-based formulas, which has been a great opportunity for exposure to new consumers who really care about the products they use to clean their homes.

Many of our products are successfully sold through Amazon.com. What we find is that once a consumer tries one of our products, they usually want to try others. We are a small company with a limited marketing budget, so we rely on social media platforms and reviews to spread the word about our products.

This year, for the first time, some of the products will be sold at 200 CVS stores across TX, 258 Meijer Stores in the midwest, and in April, we will debut 7 of our cleaners at 425 Target locations across the country. The packaging was designed to stand out, so our hope is that consumers will identify it as something new and better for them and their lives.

How do you see the market for plant-based cleaning products evolving in the future?

Plant-based cleaning is the way to go. Gone are the days of petroleum based cleaners that are not only toxic to our health, but perpetuate the dependency on fossil fuels. The technology available from plant-derived ingredients is just as powerful as what is derived from traditional petroleum-based ingredients.

However, as with anything new, challenges arise, such as sustainable harvesting of the ingredients. What is the point of going plant-based only to destroy parts of the planet in the process? That’s why we ensure that our suppliers are aligned in our mission- to harvest in areas that don’t negatively impact the environment, to treat their farmers fairly, to rely on renewable practices and not source from suppliers who are endangering wildlife or destroying key forests in the process.