Ellen Andrick flits from product to product in her Dover sustainable goods store Replenish Refillery.
“Two things are happening in the store. There’s the refillery and then there are the sustainable goods. So, I’ll start with the sustainable goods. There are multiple categories. I would say the first category would be anything like this.” She holds up a colorful compostable sponge for washing dishes. “The classic here is yellow and green. Or the light blue, dark blue sponges. You know, made of plastic fibers. These are cellulose. And then when the sponge reaches end of life, you throw it in the compost. Completely plant based, will turn back into dirt and won’t shed microplastics.” The compostable sponges are three-fifty a piece, compared to a Scotch-Brite Heavy duty scrub sponge three-pack you can pick up at Walmart for three thirty-two. Which I thought, by the way, had always been a natural product. Like an actual sponge from the sea.
“Same with this type of scrubber, right?” Ellen says. “The ones you get in the grocery store are nylon fiber and usually there’s a plastic ring around them.”
“So that’s one category of sustainable goods—things that are fully compostable at the end of life. Another category would be anything that is meant to offset single use plastic.”
“Instead of putting your half an onion in Saran wrap, you’re going to put these little things on, it’s like a shower cap. So you’re not using plastic. So you’re also slowing the oxidation process. The cut produce won’t produce ethylene. You can put it on top of a jar or half an apple, or pepper, eggplant, cucumber, or whatever.” She’s talking about a product called a food hugger.
She brags she’s had her same food grade silicone food huggers for twelve years.
I didn’t understand. That didn’t seem like a sustainable business model to me—selling a product that doesn’t need replaced. We talked for a minute about cell phones needing replaced every two years or so, the concept of planned obsolescence. The Swifter mop I have at home, I boiled the cap off one of the refill bottles, then took a knife to the interlocked plastic bits to be able to refill with the cleaning solution of my choice and not always be throwing away the bottles over and over again. We also try to be good recyclers at the house but sometimes it’s hard to know what you can and what you can’t recycle—even with the city’s guidelines. We’ve been thinking about living in a more sustainable way, we just haven’t been able to figure out how to live sustainable in any kind of convenient tangible way. And my wife had been saying off and on about how we probably should check out that refill store downtown. We had a lot of questions. Where would the containers come from? Would it cost more than the plastic sponges we already purchased from the grocery? How far did we have to walk from parking to the store, since Replenish is in Waldron Court? Swifter makes a killing on those refill bottles though.
“So. I mean, yeah, it’s not as maybe a stellar business model in regards to planned obsolescence. Except what we find is people come in here, and they love these products so much much and they get more.” Then, Ellen smiles.
“Another great example.” Another product meant to replace single-use items you’d buy at a regular grocer. “And these guys are actually out of Dover. They’re headquarters are here. This is a window cleaning kit, a two cloth system. This is microfiber and you wet this one with just water. You wash the glass or mirror. And then you dry with this. And, when it gets dirty, you just put them in the wash.”
I asked about Windex.
“Just water. So the kit prevents you from having to constantly purchasing another quote unquote consumable product like a paper towel. And. Arguably, in my opinion, and my customers’ opinions, these are superior.”
“And these,” she begins—
Ellen opened Replenish in 2022 at age forty-five. Her “midlife revival” she calls it. She and her family moved to New Hampshire in 2019, had spent an entire career in early childhood education. Then Covid hit, she homeschooled her kids, and she said she wasn’t sure what was going to happen. She began working in a store similar to what she runs now to figure out whether she wanted to run a sustainable goods store of her own. “I’ve lived this way [sustainably] a long time,” she says. So it was a very good move for me.”
When I thought about starting my own real estate business, the other side of fifty wasn’t even the horizon anymore. The other side of fifty was a couple years, and it seemed scary venture out into a completely different career field, let alone be an entrepreneur. When you think entrepreneur, you think early 20s or early 30s. And yes, those young tech entrepreneurs often receive a significant and even overabundance of media attention, leading to the perception that most entrepreneurs are young.
I was just too old to be starting a business, or at least that’s how I felt. But Forbes, Washington Post, Clifford-Lewis, the National Bureau of Economic Research they all say your mid to late forties, if you want to start a business, you start a business in your forties. Even more interesting is that the older you are, the more predictive your success.
“I never owned a small business. I’ve never run a small business before. Like understanding inventory management, ordering, and marketing, and payroll and all the things. Is, um, yeah, it’s been an opportunity for me to keep being a learner. And it also came at a time of rebirth out of Covid. Just resetting the energy I was putting out—not a crisis, but a revival, a refresh. I didn’t hit rock bottom, just an opportunity to start.
“It was a scary. Because it was like, what if this doesn’t work? Although I also recognize my own privilege too. I’m in a marriage and a partnership and I still had health insurance through my partner. To be able to take that leap of faith. It’s daunting. But it’s also totally amazing.”
I complain about not having purchased deoderant in a while because I never appreciated the added alumnium that was included in the deoderant ingredients. Ellen, of course, had two potential solutions–a deoderant paste, or a more bar-like product. I’m a bar guy, and the deoderant bar just looked so dang small.
“But it’s actually more,” she says. “It’s all the plastic they put around the product to make it look bigger.”
You can check out the Replenish Refillery here.
