BROKER TAKES A SHINE TO NEW JOB
was surprise. She saw herself as a cleaner who just happened to make her own pastes and sprays.
Her second was – is that even legal? And if it is, why isn’t everyone doing it? t turns out that the law does allow the manufacture of cleaning products in a spare room in Glasgow’s southside. It’s just much easier to leave it to giant multinationals with enormous marketing budgets, international distribution systems and no qualms about using ingredients which might sound innocent in tiny print on a label but which can have all kinds of dangerous side effects.
But, after nine months of negotiations with the Trading Standards Authority, Marie began selling her products at craft fairs and online. She called the brand Humblestuff.
She said: “The ingredients are humble – kitchen-based things, trad soap, plant-based oils. It’s not the first name I thought of. Someone else is using that and in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t call it Clean Conscience. It does seem a bit preachy.”
There are just three products in the range – the paste, the liquid (which comes as a spray and an even more eco-tastic tiny bottle of concentrate that you dilute yourself ) and a toilet cleaner.
Its official title is Toilet Bowl Freshener, although Marie is threatening to rename it Cludgie Dust. She invented it by accident when she had run out at home and improvised with a chopped-up bath bomb.
Marie recalled: “I chopped a little bit down, fizz fizz fizz, scrub scrub scrub, the toilet was perfectly clean. Apart from the glitter residue.”
Unlike Joy Mangano, who dreamed up the Miracle Mop and whose story was told in the Jennifer Lawrence movie Joy, Marie is not an inventor.
She has no background in chemistry and arrives at her recipes by trial, error and accident.
She and her husband Andrew make all the products in their spare room in an end terrace in Stamperland. Sacks of white powder arrive regularly. When manufacturing is in full flow, Marie wears a surgical face mask and latex gloves.
She said: “I don’t know what couriers think when they’re humping up our ingredients. I’m sure I’m on some kind of watch list.
“I’ve been told the house does smell of all the oils, although I’ve got slightly nose blind to it. When I’m masked up, I do look full Breaking Bad – although I call it Breaking Good.”
Humblestuff is distributed by Glasgow’s Green City co-operative to health food stores and eco-shops across Scotland. There has been interest from an upmarket supermarket chain but Marie thinks they have gone with a slightly larger, glossier eco brand instead.
Undeterred, she is considering developing a laundry soap and a washing-up liquid. Or, more likely, a washing-up paste. She is keen to keep the weight and volume of her products to a minimum to save on transport and packaging. One way to do this is to remove the water.
The result will be a very humble dishwashing product, which is just the way Marie likes it.
She added: “There will be no bubbles. It’s not the Fairy Liquid dream, where those bubbles might look great but are not doing very much. It’s all smoke and mirrors and I refuse to play those games. I don’t call a spade a beautiful artisanal digging implement. I won’t do that.”
For more information about Marie’s products, see humblestuff.co.uk