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 Our Story
We most wanted a consultation business that would utilize our interests and combined experience of wellness, organizing and sustainability. However, we understood that the market in our area was likely not yet ready to support a green consultation firm focused on the individual. A great idea, we thought, but probably not one that would be consistently reliable for our financial needs. As a kid, my mom didn't need to instruct me much on how to clean or organize. I regularly volunteered to rescue her kitchen cupboards. She'd find her five-year-old baby girl inside the cabinets neatly stacking her Tupperware. My beloved Aunt Midge, who I regularly visited, would find her desk drawers organized and the top of her refrigerator wiped off (I loved to climb things). Didn't take her long to give me tasks to keep me occupied - wipe the baseboards, wax the tile floor. You wanna clean my car and your mom's too? Cleaning stuff is how I made extra money throughout my childhood - on into high school when I'd clean the dormitories in the summer. As an adult and single mom managing apartments in both Ann Arbor, Michigan and in Venice Beach, California, I often would do move-out cleanings to help feed my growing lad-with-a-hollow-leg. Heather can tell you her own cleaning saga - cleaning for both moms in two homes and a summer cabin as well as for college money while a bio-chem student at the University of Pittsburg. Well, we thought, cleaning was something we were very familiar with and something that would be conducive to continue making our art. This, we thought, might be a viable business and a way to introduce green living to people interested in improving their lives. It was early November 2005.
By January 2006, we were all set up with our LLC, cleaning equipment, website, bank account and a very micro micro loan. Our mission statement, we half-joked, was, "Our goal is to rid the world of toxins and bad taste without losing our shirts in the process." Of course, that's insanely ambitious for a couple of artist- neo-hippie-geeks living in New Jersey/Philadelphia. This is its own, odd little universe where people leave plastic Christmas ornaments and electric menorahs up year-round, where vinyl siding is a status symbol, where guys wear napalm for cologne, where women regularly spray their hair with embalming fluid, where 'Being Green' means you're either an Eagles fan or you're just too nice. It was a pretty tough first year. We got a lot of callers interested to know what 'Green Cleaning' even meant. At events where we set up a table, people would stop just to give their 2 cents - that natural products would never work as well as conventional or they'd matter-of-factly state that our government just wouldn't As any entrepreneur can tell you, the first couple years of a new business is tough. We've had a lot of growing pains - learning how to run the office and finding the right computer system for appointments (Argh!). Finding good people for our crews and figuring out the best way to train them, to work our scheduling system to accommodate our crews so that they can make a living at the same time as working with our clients' requests. We've had to learn more flexibility, to come up with different approaches for our business to continue. The most difficult thing for me personally has been to multi-task on a level I've never before known. I think I've sprouted extra arms. Or I wish, anyway. The last couple months we've turned a proverbial corner and things seem to be running pretty smoothly. We are all terrifically fond of our regular clients and Heather and I adore our crews. Over the last year, Organic Home has been featured in the 2007 Philadelphia Magazine Home Holiday Edition and in S. Jersey's Courier Post & even won Daily Candy's Sweetest Things Award for 2007. We're gaining more media attention these days. Heather's wellness/astrology consulting may soon be featured in Daily Candy and my recent consultation for Seventh Generation's Green Nursery Makeover Sweepstakes has been posted all over the Internet. We were even mentioned in Martha Stewart's Body + Soul magazine in their current issue. It's now the middle of August of 2008 and we're all systems GO - ready to further grow our business and help even more people improve their lives and positively impact in the world. We have Big Plans and are fortunate to be surrounded by good people with a similar Green Vision & Good Will. Well, thanks for tuning in. Be sure to check back for updates...
Peace, Love and Wooder Ice on the Hotter Days, Hassen 
  
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"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
--Anais Nin
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In the fall of 2005, I came to a career crossroads when I had to quickly figure out how to pay my bills. My part-time job had ended and the professional organizing gig wasn't steady enough to support me. I felt that I was ready to build something, to be an entrepreneur. My partner, Heather, just graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and was looking for a good way to integrate her passions and ideas with a steady income. We knew we wanted to help people improve their lives, since we both care deeply about humans and had significant experience in that arena. How to do that for a living was the puzzle. Both of us had also been active in environmental efforts and had a great devotion to nature - both philosophically and in practice. We spent many days discussing the virtues and effectiveness of Sustainable Business and started throwing around ideas as to how we could start our own company with a triple bottom line focus.
allow companies to put bad chemicals in household cleaners if they were harmful to use. Many people just didn't get what we were doing with a sustainable business model & a couple were downright incensed at our rates, one woman being spectacularly rude to me. That's weird, I thought and shrugged. Guess domestic slavery is something you're fond of, I snarkily replied in my head. It was all sometimes pretty disheartening back in 2006. Thank goodness for the media - especially The Oprah Show, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and the work of so many sustainable companies and non-profits making the news. We welcomed the help educating the public about living green and paying people a living wage. By the end of 2007, we had increased our business by almost 300%.