Believe it or not, I’ve received some criticism for making this donation. The argument is that since our company is small and growing, we should have put all the profits toward TrueBody, and once we were “big enough” we could start making charitable donations.  Well, that doesn’t sit well with me.  Yes, we are a young company that has to watch every penny, but as I often tell my daughters when they feel like they’ve got the short end of the stick: there’s always someone out there in the world who’s got it worse than you.

While we’re doing something to help TrueBody grow and prosper, why shouldn’t we try to help others at the same time?  We’re all in this together after all (“this” meaning “life on this planet”).  Besides, I know for a fact that we sold more soap precisely because of the donation to NYF because I watched as many people read our True Community Poster about the donation then came up to me and said something like “I want to donate…what am I buying?” The donation aspect ended up helping us!  Now, that’s how we can all work together to do well by doing good.

So, we’re sending some True Love to all you New True Yorkers!  Thanks for helping make the Green Festival a success all around.  – Janice

Well, as we now know, “natural Dial” became TrueBody Soap but the name went through a couple iterations before it became TrueBody.  Our first choices were Every Body and True Soap.  In fact, I still have an Excel file titled “Every Body Launch Budget” dated Feb. 2, 2007.  What we liked about Every Body is that it spoke to the accessibility of the product which, after all, is what we’re all about – making natural products that are affordable and accessible to everybody.  But somehow none of us ever really fell in love with the name…not like we did with True.

I mentioned Speeder & Earl’s above because in the early months we had most of our planning meetings there and for some reason they always seem to have 70s/80s music playing in the background.  After one of those meetings when we started honing in on True, I stayed around after the meeting and, I kid you not, Alison by Elvis Costello (one of my favorites) came on with, of course, the line “my aim is true.”  I took it as a sign.  Next time we got together, Rob said he’d heard True by Spandau Ballet a few days later so now we knew it was a sign!  And thus the product became True Soap.

It launched as True Soap in Aug. 2008. (By the way, at the end of 2007 Rob and Jason moved on to other endeavors so I launched True Soap solo.)  About a year later I started the legal process to register True Soap as a trademark only to be told by my patent attorney that I’d never get the registration because it was too generic.  A bit of a dilemma!  After lots of brainstorming and extensive trademark searches, we came up with TrueBody:  a name that I liked for many reasons (for one thing, I could use it on more than just soap) and my attorney felt reasonably sure we could register.  Fortunately, she was right.

I’m so glad we chose True. There are so many fun things we can do with it.  This is my favorite.   And of course, every time I hear “my aim is true” it reminds me to stay true to my values and the TrueBody mission…and it makes me smile.  We’ve come a long way together, TrueBody and I. – Janice

by Birgitta Polson, True Community Manager

If someone had told me two years ago at this time that I would now be working for a soap company in Vermont, I would have had a lot questions about how I got here—questions framed by an overarching sense of relief that at least I was doing something productive with my time in the years following college graduation. In April 2010, I knew I was coming home to Maine at the end of May, and that was about it: for the time being, I was living in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, trying to keep myself healthy and learn as much as I could from my experience teaching English and helping out in a small clinic at a village boarding school.

My story is probably quite similar to many of those people who spend time volunteering abroad: you go and you work through the process of culture shock; you immerse yourself in local culture, eat local food and maybe relax a little bit over time about what you eat; and probably at some point, you get sick. In my case, it was dysentery…and then giardia…and dysentery again. I can’t be sure what caused each individual illness—of my own or of the kids I helped to take care of—but I can make a pretty good guess that it had something to do with the water. And I also noticed a need for more soap: clean water and clean hands can go a long way in preventing some of the most dangerous intestinal illnesses.

Enter Janice Shade and TrueBody Products. When I returned to the States, I started looking for someone who could donate some soap to the school where I had been teaching. Thanks to an introduction from a close family friend who happens to be on TrueBody’s board of directors, I sent a note off to Janice and waited to see what would happen. I was hoping for maybe fifty bars of soap: Janice had over 1500, and she was ready to give them away. The True Community Project was born, and two years later, I have job working with a really great company to expand our social mission.

We actually decided not to ship TrueBody soap all the way to Nepal for a number of reasons—not the least of which was the simple fact that the village where I had been staying was not connected to Kathmandu by road, which would mean that those 1500 bars would have to be carried up into the hills on the backs of porters (people, not animals). Instead, we realized we could sell more of our products here in the United States, explicitly raising money to support local health and education initiatives in Nepal.

We’re not solving the childhood diarrhea crisis, and we’re definitely not going to be able to meet the demand for soap in all the schools and clinics that need it. Recognizing that no amount is too small to make an impact, we are setting out with realistic, measureable goals. We’ll start by holding our first fundraiser at this spring’s Green Festival in NYC and donating all profits from our sales there to the Nepal Youth Foundation (http://www.nepalyouthfoundation.org) to fund the organization’s health and vocational training and education programs.

And as for those 1500 bars of soap? They will go to newly arrived refugees and immigrants in the Burlington, VT area who receive basic support and acculturation services from the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (http://www.refugees.org/about-us/where-we-work/vrrp/). We feel good about supporting our local community and a community of people on the other side of the world. We also feel good about doing what we do best: selling natural, healthy soap. That’s part of the way we give.

The answer is…probably not.

Now you may be wondering why can’t I give a more definitive answer?  Because, as the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database shows right at the top of the page, there is “no information” with regard to Cancer or Developmental & Reproductive Toxicity, although if you dig deeper on the page you’ll find there are moderate concerns about organ system toxicity, and Japan and the European Union have issued restrictions and significant concerns about its usage.

So we’re left to decide for ourselves.  Are we comfortable with moderate levels of risk (because there’s not enough information to definitively call it low or high risk) or does the lack of information send up big red flags?  Are you an ignorance-is-bliss person or do you subscribe to the Precautionary Principle?  I found a great blog post on this subject appropriately titled “The Great Debate:  Phenoxyethanol.”   For me, I’ll just say no to phenoxyethanol.

That’s gotta be good karma.

Then a few hours later, I got a delivery of chocolate truffles from Lake Champlain Chocolates (holy cow are they good!) from someone with whom I’d shared two of our six passes to the Natural Products Expo back in September.  These were passes I wasn’t going to use anyway so was happy to give them to a couple fellow Vermonters who needed them.  And along those same lines, last month I got from another person to whom I’d given an Expo pass an invitation to attend – for free! – an annual finance seminar I’ve heard about for a couple years but could never afford .  Wow!  Feels like I’m swimming in good karma lately.

So the moral of the story is:  share what you’ve got and give thanks for what you receive and it’ll be a much nicer world.  We’ll all shine on….

So for the past three years, I’ve gone the traditional route with angels and VCs to get TrueBody off the ground.  But I’m still looking for a better way – and I think I have it!   Inspired by one of my favorite quotes by Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” I’m testing out a new model.   We’re calling it Community Supported Enterprise (CSE).  It’s like a CSA (community supported agriculture) but with products instead of produce.  Turns out a few restaurants up here in Vermont have done something similar in the past with great success.  Must be something in the water up here that gets us all thinking about how to change the way the world does business….

I am deeply committed to TrueBody Products, and am grateful to my early investors – family, friends, and the angels and VC’s who have all shown they believe in what we are doing.  But that early funding can only take us so far; to get to the next level, in which we can make a bigger contribution to our local economy by hiring more people and begin making a difference to the health of people for whom cleaning with soap is still not an option (more on our True Community Project next time…) we need to fund our growth by expanding our community in an important and different way.  This is where you come in – by joining our True CSE.

The principle is simple – you (our community) support the enterprise by “pre-purchasing” our products.  You register and pay online then we’ll send you coupons that you can take to stores for “free” bars of richly lathering, scent-free, all natural TrueBody soap.  Or you can buy a gift card to redeem at our online store on Alice.com.  Your membership will enable us to ramp up production, expand our product line, and put our products on more and more store shelves!  And will make it even easier for you, your friends, and people everywhere to transform the way they wash – a way that’s better for your skin and better for the planet.

True CSE coupons/gift cards are available in $15 and $30 levels – and we’re hoping to reach 1000 memberships within two weeks.  You can be part of a new business model – and prove that there really is a different way to do business.  Click here to “invest” in the future of a small company that’s trying to do things differently – and welcome to the True family!

In the meantime, we want to send some TrueLove to our Phish fans out there! We have one 3-day ticket to the Phish Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco, CA next weekend, August 12-14, and we’re giving it away to one of our fans. Click here to enter via our Facebook page or leave us a comment below with your name, email address and favorite Phish song. We promise never to use your email for any purpose other than to contact you if you’re the winner. Rock on!

Just over one year ago, The Story of Cosmetics– a short animated video about toxic chemicals in personal care products — was launched. If you missed it the first time around, I strongly recommend taking a few minutes to watch. It’s well done, informative, and gets even those of us who consider ourselves savvy to this stuff thinking. Did you know that the average woman uses 12 personal care products every day? I double dare you to count for youself…I consider myself pretty low maintenance and was surprised to get to 8…and that was before I got to the additional products used by my husband and girls.

Here’s one point from the video I want to drive home: your power as a consumer is strong. Every time you choose a product that is made with natural and organic ingredients, you’re supporting companies that are trying to make a dent in the prowess of large, corporate companies that are far more concerned with the bottom line than the safety of the ingredients in their products.

Let me tell you, as a small business owner, every single sale counts. Every time one of you chooses to buy a bar of TrueBody soap, or sends us a little love over Facebook, I am encouraged and energized. In the big picture, I believe that the scales are tipping in favor of natural foods and products that don’t pollute our bodies and our planets. But we’re not there yet. The next time you run out of soap or lotion, try to find an all natural alternative. Maybe you’ll love it. Maybe you won’t. But there are some incredible natural products out there that don’t cost an arm and a leg. And, more and more, they are available in major supermarket chains and online (drugstore.com has a large and growing selection). Find the ones you love, make the switch, and help tip the scales.

It was pretty darn muddy in all the expected spots and as I finally got around the pond, I came to a fork in the path – or what should’ve been a fork in the path but sure didn’t look like it. It’s been awhile since I was here last, so I couldn’t remember which way the LL trail went. There was a sign with an arrow pointing to the right but all I could see was pretty dense undergrowth of ferns fading into trees. To the left, however, was a very wide, clear path that headed uphill. I knew I needed to go uphill and the left trail looked the clearest way to go, so left I went.

Almost immediately I second guessed my decision. The trail was steep, deeply rutted (looked like ATV tracks) and really muddy. The mosquitoes were relentless. I kept following it though and when I came out to a flat spot, realized I’d stumbled upon somebody’s sugaring shack (lots of blue plastic tubes and taps still in the trees) and there was a rusty old school bus further down the path. How the heck they got a school bus all the way in here I’ll never know but it was kind of creepy and certainly not the right way, so down the muddy, rutty path I went. Did I mention the mosquitoes? When I got back down to the “fork” I looked over past the arrow sign and saw just beyond the 8 foot stretch of ferns, the faint signs of a singletrack trail. Ah-ha, all I needed was a different perspective…. I felt a metaphor coming on as I bushwhacked through the ferns.

I knew it was the right trail as soon as I stepped foot on it. Although it was narrow, it was much drier and definitely familiar. So what’s the metaphor? As I made my way up to the Look, I started thinking about how/from whom I’d been raising money to launch and grow this company. When I first started out, it was all friends and family but seeing as my friends and family aren’t exactly ga-jillionaires, I realized I’d have to look elsewhere when I started needing bigger amounts. I had this vision of what I came to call the “Million Moms” campaign. The idea behind Million Moms was, instead of going the traditional route of getting big chunks of money from a few wealthy individuals, I could get a little bit of money from a whole lot of people, e.g. a Million Moms each put in a $1 and voila, there’s a million bucks from a bunch of people who believe in what I’m doing and want to spread the love. Of course, when I ran this by my financial advisor and attorney, they both said “can’t do it, violates SEC regulations, yada yada yada…” So I put the idea on the back burner (never gave it up), and started up the traditional path of presenting to angel investor groups and VCs.

Exactly this time last year, I closed my first major round of financing, of which 72% came from angels and VCs (the rest from friends/family). It took me 12 months to raise this money – twice as long as I thought it would, and definitely felt like a steep muddy slog to get there. Now as I’m trying to raise another small round and going back to angels/VCs it feels just as muddy and I wonder if I’m going in the right direction. In other words, am I talking to people who will be as invested in the company’s mission as they are to the possibility of making money?

About a month ago, I discovered a company called ProFounder that helps entrepreneurs raise money from their communities in increments as small as $100. I thought I’d finally found the “Million Moms” solution. Turned out it wasn’t the perfect solution but certainly a good one (was even invested in by one of the VCs who invested in TrueBody) and I was all ready to put them to work when they got a cease and desist order from the State of California. Rats! Turns out I can probably still raise money using the ProFounder format but all the logistical/legal stuff that they would’ve taken care of, now has to be done by me. So, back to my metaphor, just as the Libby’s Look trail was going in the right direction, it was still muddy in spots and definitely a steep climb. But the view from the Look was sure worth it. I believe the same can be said for the financing path I’m trying to follow to gain support in small increments from lots of people who believe in my mission. It’ll be hard work, but worth it in the end. Reminds me of the last line of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost “I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”

What a good move! I keep forgetting that when I take myself out for these hikes, it doesn’t take me away from my work. Quite the contrary. Unlike exercising to those workout videos where my mind is engrossed with following the manic drill-sergeant/instructor, a hike in the woods gets my creative brainwaves pumping along with my heart and lungs and muscles. It’s where I come up with some of my best ideas or solutions to problems. This morning, I was thinking about email – and the mind-numbing, time-sucking, black-hole-of-death that it often is for me. My day usually starts with logging into email while writing out my list of daily priorities, and inevitably I get sucked into email only to emerge hours later feeling like I’ve accomplished nothing. So I thought: what if I start my day with something other than email…like all the projects that I enjoy doing and that are directly related to building the business. What a concept! I felt so free. Why didn’t I think of it before?! When I got into the office today, I didn’t even open email until after lunch and literally cranked on some things I’ve been trying to finish for days. Sometimes we just have to take ourselves out of the routine and mix things up a little bit. Helps keep things in perspective. I’ve gotta take a walk in the woods more often….