it’s about “safety, performance, and the quality of our ingredients.” 

Kevin Tibbs, Better Life’s Co-Founder and Chief Formulation Chemist, answers this month’s question from the “Ask the Chemist” series, “Why is Better Life more expensive than some of the other brands?”

We’ve all seen the bottles with bright color liquid with heavy flowery and perfumy scents that linger which line the cleaning isles in your favorite retail store, and you’ve probably noticed something else – their price can be a bit lower. Better Life is certainly not the most expensive in the natural category, but when compared to mainstream somewhat green brands we’re asked, “Why are your products more expensive than the other brands?”

As Kevin explains in the video below, it’s about “safety, performance, and the quality of our ingredients.” It’s truly that simple.

SAFETY FIRST

If you’re at all familiar with our brand, you’ve heard the word “safe” used in everything we do. It’s why our company was founded back in 2008. Tim and Kevin had small children crawling around the house and part of baby-proofing was removing toxic chemical cleaners. Tim started buying natural products but couldn’t find one that truly performed well. So Tim challenged his life-long friend Kevin (a VP formulation chemist who had already formulated over 300 consumer products) to create a truly safe product that worked. Safety is at the very core of every single product we put out on the market. You won’t find lots of crazy warnings on our bottles. You won’t find a poison control number. You’ll never read instructions that state “for surfaces that come in contact with food rinse thoroughly with water.” Kevin even sprays the product in his mouth (did you see that on Shark Tank?) to demonstrate just how safe it is. We received countless phone calls from parents thanking us for creating safe products because their child got their hands on the bottle and they are so relived it was not a toxic chemical cleaner.

In other words, dangerous toxic chemicals products are cheap to make - completely safe requires more expensive ingredients.  

IT’S CHEAP FOR A REASON

Bright neon blue, green, and hot pink are cute and all but they’re not natural. Neither are the heavy perfumed fragrances. When you really break down the labels of some of the cheaper brands (that is if they fully disclose their ingredients, most do not because it’s not mandatory by government regulations that they do so!) you’ll see things like “essence of essential oils” which means they have a couple parts per million of essential oils and the rest of that smell is coming from synthetic fragrances and perfumes – none of which are natural. When you look deeper you’ll start to see even more scary stuff, like petroleum, solvents, SLS, SLES, VOCs, and the list of cheap, harmful ingredients goes on. These products aren’t good for you, your family, your pets, the Earth, or the surfaces in your home (and don’t even think about putting those cheap cleaning products on your new Carrara marble countertop).

Better Life uses high performance, high quality ingredient formulations. In other words we’re the Ferrari of cleaning products. You can buy a pinto but you’re not going to get the safety features and performance of a Ferrari (and you’re not gonna pay the same price for it either). Good quality materials cost more than cheap ones.

I DON’T WANT TO USE ELBOW GREASE, I WANT A POWERFUL KICK IN THE PANTS

Better Life is about the marriage of Safety + Performance. To have a product that is safe but doesn’t really work that well is a waste of everyone’s time and money. We want to clean effectively and quickly. None of us want to spend all day Saturday scrubbing toilets or crusty pans from last nights lasagna or treating Aunt Jean’s red wine “oops” on the new white farmhouse couch. We want to clean quickly and without wearing a gas mask to do so. To create high performing cleaning products that are plant-based isn’t an easy or inexpensive task. But we didn’t set out to be the cheapest. We set out to be the best.

A LITTLE GOES A LONG WAY

Because Better Life is made with high quality ingredients, Kevin was able to formulate a more concentrated formula allowing you to use less product to get the job done. Use less = more value.

SIZE MATTERS

And last but not least look at our bottle size. Better Life products are typically larger than other products on the market, so you’re getting more bang for your buck. And when you have to use less to get more done, as Kevin says, “for all of these reasons we believe you are getting a better value than anything out there.”

Please keep the questions coming. Simply message us on Facebook or leave a comment in a previous ASK THE CHEMIST post, Tweet ASK THE CHEMIST or email info@cleanhappens.com (subject: ASK THE CHEMIST). Thanks, we love hearing from you!