Sarah Paiji Yoo is a serial retail entrepreneur and C-level executive passionate about building meaningful and innovative consumer brands. Most recently a Partner at LAUNCH, she launched and operated several consumer brands including M.Gemi, Rockets of Awesome and Follain. She was previously co-founder and CEO of Snapette, which was sold to leading e-commerce platform Pricegrabber in 2013. Sarah attended Harvard College and Harvard Business school, and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Forbes, Time, InStyle and Glamour.

What inspired you all to create this company?

When Sarah became a new mom, she was horrified to learn how many microplastics were in the water she was using to make baby formula. It was then that she decided to cut back on her own plastic consumption, but realized that she just didn’t have any choice as a consumer. So many of our everyday products such as window cleaner, toothpaste and laundry detergent, all come packaged in just one way – single-use plastic. So she founded Blueland the first D2C brand that’s re-imagining a range of everyday products without any wasteful single-use plastic packaging and transforming traditional products into innovative formats that are more efficient and more effective.  Starting with cleaning products – items traditionally sold in disposable plastic bottles, we can eliminate over 100 billion single-use plastic bottles in the US alone because our cleaners live in 100% reusable bottles. And to make the biggest impact possible we’ve focused on making it easy for people to make the right choice with products that are effective, money-saving and convenient.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market? 

There is nothing on the market that checks all the boxes of being effective, non-toxic, affordable, convenient and free of single-use plastic. To date, most consumers have assumed (and rightly so) that eco-friendly products translates to an experience that means more work, more money for something that doesn’t work. We’ve flipped all these assumptions on their head.

Our cleaning sprays (multi-surface, glass / mirror, and bathroom cleaner) are sold in beautiful, reusable Forever Bottles and nickel-sized cleaning tablets in paper, compostable wrappers as part of an easy-to-use refill system. Our first-of-its-kind tablet cleaners are also:

• 300x lighter, 200x smaller, and 30x cheaper to ship than traditional cleaners while still outperforming leading comparable brands as tested by an independent third party.
• Proprietary formulations, with 12 patents pending, and developed entirely in-house in our own lab in Montana.
• The first and only cleaning spray to receive a Platinum rating across both bottle and formulation from Cradle to Cradle, the world’s most comprehensive product assessment program . We’re proud to be bringing this level of innovation to a category that has been selling conventional liquid, often toxic, cleaning products in disposable plastic packaging for almost 80 years.