Courtesy of Better Life
It’s Saturday, and you’re cleaning the house while your kids play on the floor. You watch in horror as your 2-year-old puts a shiny red block in his mouth. You race over with your disinfectant and speedily wipe down all of his toys. As you watch the block return to your son’s mouth, you think, “At least the toys are clean now because they have that lemony chemical scent.” Perhaps the toys are clean, but that doesn’t make them safe. Consider which is worse: a few germs or harsh, unidentified chemicals? What if your home could be clean and safe?
Kevin Tibbs, a formulation chemist and cofounder of St. Louis-based company Better Life says, “One scary thing is that you’ve got these chemical products around your house that you have no idea what they’re made up of. As a chemist knowing the ingredients that go into these products…a lot of them are harsh chemicals that cause skin and lung irritation. Many of the ingredients have been tested and shown to cause cancer, respiratory illnesses, endocrine disrupters, the list goes on and on. And those are just the ingredients that have been tested.”
That is why Tibbs and his friend Tim Barklage decided to work together in 2007 to create a line of products that were both safe and effective. Their company, Better Life, was the result. Both men had young children and wanted to be able to safely clean their homes. They looked into the “green” products on the market, but when he took them to the lab, Tibbs found that those products were merely watered down versions of the chemical cleaners. So the two set to work on their own line.
Though the company has done well locally, the duo knew they had fantastic products, so they recently went on ABC’s Shark Tank. The episode aired on November 1. In the show, there is a shocking moment when Tibbs sprays their what-EVER! all-purpose cleaner into his mouth. “It doesn’t taste good," he says. "It’s like getting your mouth washed out with soap. It’s just to show that they’re safe. Kids and pets can’t read warning labels. If a cleaner is left out…kids and pets can end up in the emergency room. When my kids were infants and toddlers, we didn’t have that danger in the house and now it’s wonderful because kids love to clean, surprisingly enough. It’s nice and liberating to be able to hand them a bottle of Better Life cleaner and not have to worry.”
So the cleaners are safe, but whether or not they work is just as important. It wouldn’t do any good to wipe down a kitchen counter that has recently come into contact with raw chicken with a product that would just spread those germs around. To prove that their green cleaner does more, Barklage and Tibbs did this exact demonstration on Shark Tank: a raw chicken breast rubbed over two slabs of countertop. They swabbed the chicken-covered surface and the meter read 8,840—any surface with a reading over 200 is dirty. Barklage cleaned one surface with a leading disinfectant and the other with their what-EVER! cleaner. The leading disinfectant left the surface at a 433 rating while their all-purpose cleaner made the surface a 44 rating.
“It is common thinking to assume that you’re going to have to work harder with a green cleaner,” Tibbs says. “It takes a bit to convince people that that is not the case. Our cleaners are much more concentrated. There’s a lot more cleaning agent in every bottle, so that helps the performance. If somebody is not at all interested in green or natural or environmentally friendly cleaners and is just looking for pure performance, when we hand them a bottle of our product, that’s exactly what they’re going to get. They’re not going to miss a thing from that chemical cleaner they were using because Better Life will work just as well. In fact, most of the time it works better.”
Better Life products can be found locally at Schnucks, Straub’s, and at several independent retailers such as Local Harvest and Winslow’s Home. They are also sold nationally at Whole Foods and on the Better Life website, cleanhappens.com.
