After living in Germany for seven years with her hockey-playing husband, Connor, and their first child, Oscar, Ashley James returned to Canada to find herself in a bit of conundrum: Her home country was a tad behind when it came to the ingredients used in housecleaning products. “Moving back to Canada, I quickly learned the regulations around the ingredients that were allowed in cleaning products were very different than in Europe,” says the mom of three boys. “I had to do a lot of research to find non-toxic products, and I realized people think what we have on our shelves is safe, but that isn’t always true.”
What does one do when one can’t find what they are looking for? One makes their own. The Bare Home line of cleaning products was launched in 2018 when James married her business acumen with her design aesthetic. Leveraging the movement toward sustainability, all The Bare Home products can be refilled either in-store or via home delivery and can be proudly displayed almost anywhere in your home. “People always feel like they have to hide their cleaning products, but why can’t we leave them on the counter?” she says. (Their resemblance to boxed wine is not lost on any of us and the dispensing technology is the same.)
Once she mastered the art of home-cleaning products, adding personal-care items was a natural next step for her brand. “One of our missions from the beginning was to help people remove toxins from the home,” James says. All of The Bare Home personal-care products are biodegradable, phosphate and dye-free, plus, the company doesn’t test on animals and products are scented using high-quality essential oils. They source all their ingredients locally first, and their production and packaging are done within Ontario.
(Side note: James concedes that when demand is high, they do need to look for international sources for some ingredients, like lavender, “but we are working hard to be 100 per cent Canadian-made.”) Plus, she proudly adds: “We just got our B Corp certification which I’m so thrilled about!”
To read more about James and her belief that small changes make big impacts, go to thebarehome.ca.
