Photo credit: Instagram user @annabelle.rose
A lawyer and a journalist walk into a grocery store. It’s not a joke, it’s the foundation for Rebel Green, a natural and mostly domestically sourced company, founded by Melina Marcus and Ali Florsheim, focused on bringing natural cleaning supplies into the homes of conventional shoppers. The duo launched its first product in 2008 and has since expanded internationally. In addition to their product line, the pair works with various outreach organizations, including Feeding America and the Hunger Task Force. We spoke with Florsheim to further discuss their company’s successes.
What is Rebel Green?
Rebel Green is a natural brand that is aimed at bringing conventional shoppers into the natural space through better pricing, amazing packaging and better ingredients, as well as great marketing. There are very few choices available to people where things are sourced closer to home and where ingredients are truly and transparently identified. Most people who shop for household cleaners will turn the product around right away to see what’s in there, and we always aim to have as much transparency as we can. We think it’s important for people who buy things to know what’s in them. We didn’t see a lot of that in the market.
What inspired you to start Rebel Green?
When we first started our brand, we started with reusable lunch bags and tote bags that were made in the U.S. and that were sustainable. One of the things we noticed was that people would use reusable bags, but they’d be made out of petroleum-based material that had been shipped from China. Transparency is really great—people deserve transparency. If you’re going to do something environmentally friendly, you should do it as best you can and make sure that people understand what they’re buying. I think the consumers that we’re targeting really care a lot about the environment and really want that kind of transparency.
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What goals do you have for Rebel Green?
The trend has been that consumers are getting more and more educated about what’s in their products and they care a lot more. If we can bring a couple of the conventional shoppers into the natural space, they’ll start to appreciate that natural products work just as well as conventional and they can slowly start to change their habits to buy other products that are natural as well. And the more people who buy natural, the more people will start making natural products. I think education is a big part of what we’re trying to do.
What impact do you hope to have on your community?
We’ve been fortunate to have not only local distribution, but national as well. The better we do as a company and the more consumers we can reach out to, the less people will be buying non-natural products. We want to highlight the availability of natural cleaning products for your home. We want people to use our products, but if our product is an introduction to natural products, we consider ourselves lucky.
To learn more or place an order, visit rebelgreen.com.
