Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Driving global change with Mera McGrew, Founder of Soapply

Transcript

Driving global change with Mera McGrew, Founder of Soapply · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Mara McGrew for Female Startup Club. Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of Female Startup Club. I'm your host, Doona Roisin, and joining me on the show today is Mara McGrew, the founder of Supply. Supply is a purpose-driven business that's doing good in the world, both on a local level and the global level.
• 0:30
  Mera started Supply to make the best soap for your skin and our planet, and they use every sale to help improve and save lives around the world. Every ounce of Supply is tied to a direct donation that funds water, sanitation, and hygiene around the world. More specifically, every eight ounces of Supply sold is tied to a $1 donation that goes towards a local grassroots organization in Ethiopia called REST.
• 0:55
  Mara started this brand with a big idea and a mere $5,000 and has grown into what it is today entirely through partnerships, word of mouth marketing and hustle. And if you're inspired by this episode and want some supply for yourself, female startup club listeners can get 20% off their first supply purchase and unlock a double donation attached to their order when they use the code FSC20 at checkout. Go to supplybox.com. This is Mara for Female Startup Club.
• 1:26
  So I'm so excited. I love to have you on the show. I'm wanting to know all about the origin story of Supply. And yeah.
• 1:36
  So Supply started with a pretty simple but ambitious idea to change the world by convincing people to change their soap casually. And I first had the idea when I was living and working in Africa. I was working in East Africa and I saw this gap around water sanitation and hygiene, specifically around hand washing. And what I saw was kids getting sick from things like dysentery and respiratory disease.
• 2:06
  and not just getting sick, but actually losing their lives. And I kept seeing it in the regions we were working. We were only working in 18 unique regions throughout East Africa though. And the question I had was kind of, is this something that's just isolated to this area where I'm working, or is this a global problem? And I quickly realized in talking with the folks that I knew at the UN, the World Health Organization,
• 2:31
  that this was something that was a global problem. It wasn't isolated to the areas where I was working. And there was an opportunity for the private sector to step in and really help make a difference. At that point, 1.7 million children under the age of five were losing their life before they were able to celebrate their fifth birthday. Because of diseases we could prevent through the simple act of hand washing. Today, that number has...
• 2:59
  become lower, that number is lower. Today, 1.4 million children under the age of five lose their life before the age of five because of diseases we could prevent entirely by the simple act of hand washing. So that's really what the light bulb moment in my mind was, was learning this crazy, depressing statistic and realizing that we could change that and we could change it with something as simple
• 3:27
  as cost effective as soap, something that costs pennies on a life in this case. And my question was, why isn't this already getting funded? And I started working with anyone that would talk to me, reading every white paper, every piece of research I could get my hands on to figure out what is the global problem? What role could we actually play as a for-profit company if we started a for-profit company?
• 3:54
  And long story short, I ended up deciding to move back to the U.S. to start a soap company. I figured that we could sell soap that would help get soap in the hands that needed it around the world. Again, pretty simple. Getting back to the U.S., the real question I had was, is there an actual need? Right. Soap is something that.
• 4:17
  You go to the grocery store. I live in New York City. You go to a bodega. There's soap for sale on store shelves. And the role that we would need to figure out and play would be how do we offer something that's better, that will actually create a sustainable revenue stream to fund this problem, if that's the goal. And quickly, in kind of looking at the market and doing market research, again, talking to anyone and everyone, right?
• 4:47
  The question became, how do we create better soap? And is there a need for better soap? And it turns out that while globally we're facing this access problem around soap and hand washing here in the U.S., where supply is headquartered and based, we have a soap problem of our own and it's around safety.
• 5:05
  The soap that we're using, we're putting directly on our bodies, lathering up with every day, multiple times a day. Right now, as we're recording this, we're in the middle of a global pandemic. We're washing our hands more than ever. You don't think about it all that often, but your skin, your hands...
• 5:21
  It's your largest organ. Up to 60% of what you're putting on your body can be absorbed directly into your bloodstream. And right now, you know, hand washing is up and people are realizing, oh, the soap I'm using, it matters. It has an impact on the health of my skin, right? You look down and your skin is cracked. Your nail beds are like splitting and it hurts. It's irritated. It's red. It's itchy.
• 5:47
  And people chalk it up to, oh, you know, maybe I washed my hands with water that was too hot. Maybe it's the wind outside and it's just chapped. Actually, oftentimes it's the soap that you're using and the soap you're using can make all the difference. So most soaps on store shelves are actually detergents. They're not true soaps. They strip your skin.
• 6:09
  Oh, I didn't know that. It's kind of crazy. Yeah. At the beginning, when we were looking at the opportunity to say, like, is there really an opportunity for us to create a product here that could fund this global problem? There were 2,100 soap products on store shelves sold in the U.S. that contained an ingredient that was either acting as a known carcinogen or endocrine disruptor.
• 6:37
  ingredients that the FDA had come out and said were unsafe for daily contact with humans, but were in a product that we're putting directly on our skin every day, multiple times a day. And I personally am someone who I'm buying heirloom tomatoes from the farmer's market. I am being conscious of the produce and the products that I'm buying at the grocery store. I'm reaching for products that are better for me and that are coming from a source that I ultimately know or hopefully know.
• 7:06
  And when it comes to what I'm putting on my body, I care, right? In the same way I care about what I'm putting in my body. And so quickly I realized while globally we were looking at solving an access problem, here in the U.S., the problem wasn't an access problem. It was a safety problem. And our kind of mission became, okay, create better soap. Soap that's safe for consumers, that doesn't come with questionable health or safety concerns,
• 7:34
  And supply is proud to be today made safe. So we go a step further. We're made with food grade organic oils, but we know that's not enough. You can be lied to, right, in sourcing even. And so we actually have a third party test our product, go through a 360 degree lab test to ensure that what you're putting on your skin is safe for you and our planet.
• 7:57
  right? What you're putting on your skin also goes down the drain, goes into our waterways, into our ecosystems, and it can have a devastating effect on the wildlife or the ecosystems that we all care about so much. So we quickly kind of said, if we're going to create a better product, it needs to be better for consumers, right?
• 8:15
  It needs to be safe. Duh. And then we care about the planet, you know, and the people that are in my life, they care about the planet, too. Let's face it. Like, baby orangutans are adorable. Let's keep them around. Palm oil does not need to be in the soap that we're buying.
• 8:31
  Um, it's in almost every product on store shelves. It's in almost every product in your bathroom, whether you realize it or not. So going a step further and saying, let's not just make this product better for consumers. Let's make it better for the planet. And what does that look like in terms of sourcing ingredients, including ingredients in our formula that are in fact better for the planet? And then also what is the packaging look like?
• 8:55
  Supply from day one has been bottled. Our Sinkside bottle is recycled glass. We silkscreen the label directly on the bottle itself, reducing packaging and waste. And our bottles are meant to be refilled and reused. 20,000 single use plastic bottles are being produced every second. Your soap does not need to be in one of them.
• 9:18
  So how do we create a product that is effective, is safe, is beautiful and is better? And then getting back to why I started supply, every ounce of supply is tied to a donation. We fund water sanitation and hygiene around the world.
• 9:34
  More specifically, every eight ounces of supply soap sold is tied to a $1 donation. We work one area at a time, one region at a time. All global funding and impact is currently focused in Ethiopia. In the northernmost region, Tigray, Ethiopia. And we work with a local grassroots organization called REST, the Relief Society of Tigray. A long-winded way to answer that. Wow.
• 10:00
  But wow, this is incredible. I'm just like sitting here in awe listening to you. It's all amazing. And things that I didn't know, I didn't know that about regular soaps that we're putting on our hands with those chemicals. Is it because, are those companies using those products because it's cheaper? Is that like the bottom line? Yeah, so...
• 10:19
  Like, why do people use it? I love that you're asking these questions because I think in a way, these are the questions I was asking too. I think a lot of companies are started by people that have been in an industry for a long time.