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Allison Evans from Branch Basics
Branch Basics is a wellness brand on a mission to help people remove harmful chemicals from their homes – starting with their cleaning products.
Inspired by the personal health journeys of co-founders Marilee Nelson, Allison Evans and Kelly Love, Branch Basics provides non-toxic, allergy-safe, and effective cleaning formulas – and shares invaluable information on healthy living.
So much more than just soap, Branch Basics is a vehicle for life-enhancing change.
Tell us about yourself.
I live in Houston, Texas, a mother of 3 beautiful daughters, and am a co-founder of Branch Basics. The journey to creating a massively successful wellness business started with a health scare.
While a senior in college, my PCOS turned into debilitating pain and total body breakdown. After seeing dozens of doctors, I turned to my Aunt Marilee – an environmental consultant who has spent the last 30 years researching how everyday chemicals impact our air quality and physical health.
Marilee guided me through the process of #TossingTheToxins – the removal of harmful chemicals from my diet, personal care, and household care routines that immediately brought me relief and eventually – total recovery.
I then teamed up with my best friend Kelly Love to find out how we could start a movement around detoxing our homes and get Marilee’s brain to the masses.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
I would tell myself to not rush into things – whether it was a conversation with a partner, employee, new product development, new hire…it’s always been best when I can step back, take a moment (or even a month!) and navigate the situation with more care and caution.
What problem does your business solve?
Branch Basics is committed to empowering customers with educational resources to help them draw connections between their health and their environments.
Data shows that indoor air can be anywhere between 500 and 1,000x more polluted than outdoor air, and research has proven that the VOCs and SVOCs in our indoor environments are harmful to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
Hiding in plain sight, VOC and SVOC compounds can be found in our everyday conventional chemical products (think: laundry detergent, scented candles, household bleach…) and even when these items are tucked away under the kitchen sink, they emit harmful chemicals into your indoor atmosphere and worsen air quality.
Removal of these products with harmful ingredients creates an immediate improvement in a home’s air quality.
Branch Basics provides consumers with a completely safe and non-toxic alternative to one of the most concentrated sources of harmful chemicals at home – our cleaning products – in addition to resources for other categories like paint, furniture, and personal care products.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
The personal health journey’s of each founder are our greatest inspiration. My Aunt Marilee has over 30 years of experience researching and studying environmental chemicals and nutrition.
After her son was diagnosed with a pesticide exposure, she hit the books and found that removing toxins from their environment was able to heal her son better than any medications.
After spending time with my Aunt Marilee and best friend, Kelly Love, we discovered the power of pure and quickly realized how important it is to share our journey.
What is your magic sauce?
Our magic sauce is our hero Concentrate! With just one product, you are able to replace all cleaning supplies in your home to simplify your routine.
Our Concentrate has over 3,500 5-Star reviews from people who have been able to demystify what is in their products and discover the power of living cleanly.
Our multi-purpose formula is made using plant and mineral-based ingredients that meet the highest standards of safety. Branch Basics is MADE SAFE certified – the most stringent third party certification label for product safety.
The MADE SAFE certification ensures that products are made without the 5,000+ toxic chemicals known to harm human and environmental health.
As of today, only 4 brands of cleaning products hold this certification. In addition to the MADE SAFE certification, Branch Basics has won countless awards for our clean formula such as House Beautiful Family-Approved Awards, CleanEating Clean Choice Awards, Inc 5000 Awards, and more.
Not only are the ingredients used in Branch Basics Concentrate safe but the end-product formula is as well.
End-product testing of consumer products is not regulated by the FDA but basic chemistry will tell you that mixing two (or ten) safe and natural ingredients can alter their properties to become dangerous.
To ensure total confidence in our formula, Branch Basics solicited third party testing of our products to validate our claims.
Third party testing results concluded that the Concentrate formula is not a skin or eye irritant. In fact, it is, just as safe for the skin as a saline solution – an amazing validation for a product that cleans as well as conventional chemical products.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our goal has and always will be to propel our mission of helping people identify, remove, and replace toxic products in their home.
We are achieving this through an amazing online course in the works, to be released in Spring 2023!
We are also always working on new products, however that is a slower pace because our ingredient standards are very high, thus in many ways we are in unknown territory!
But it’s always the challenging, more narrow road that pays off the most, right? 😉
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Branch Basics’ signature Concentrate required exactly 100 iterations to get right – a lengthy product development process that nearly bankrupted our business. In the end, not compromising true ingredient safety or efficacy proved to be well worth it!
Our customers are an integral part of our product creation.
Because of our trusted community and loyal following of more than 260k+ on Instagram, we’re confident in releasing products and learning from customer interaction to constantly integrate new formulations to bring the best product updates to market.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Branch Basics was one of the first and only cleaning product brands to really connect with customers via Instagram – we currently have 262K followers in contrast to 130 year-old household cleaning brand names who have only 10k followers.
Oversharing on our platform always performs well – we’re always looking for direct feedback from our audience on what they want to hear more of and are often surprised – some of our best performing posts are about cleaning diaper explosions or how we’re combatting cold + flu symptoms.
Online, customers can buy our products at branchbasics.com through a one time purchase or subscription based model.
We have more than 35k subscribers and see roughly 200 new customers per day!
Our website is also full of free blogs with everything from cleaning how-tos, to recipes, and even comprehensive guides on removing toxins for your home.
Follow Branch Basics on Instagram and LinkedIn
