The Beginning?

It’s a question that bothers us all when we start blogging... Where DO we start? Personally, my “blogs” have usually been sorry excuses of such and it’s been easy to just ignore them altogether. But this will be different. That is my promise to you.

It’s noteworthy that this blog is closely linked to the business I share, pūr alternatives. And it would probably be just as well to start with why I got involved in the company at all. Depending on my mood when I’m asked the answer may vary but truth be told they’re all true. I will say that it started as Stephanie’s idea. She was getting increasingly aware of toxins in personal care products and so we started trying to make the responsible choices as consumers ourselves we’d go through ingredient labels of everything we found at some of local stores. But we were quickly finding that even the “natural products” weren’t much better than the drug store crap. This generally led to her expressing her disgust over the state of the industry’s regulation. Quietly, I thought to myself “Okay, so do something about it...” After a few of these “discussions” we both appeared to have the same light bulb moment: we should open a store where we’ve already taken the guesswork out of these ingredient lists. Source all the good stuff and put it all in one place. And so pūr alternatives was born.

That’s all well and good but that didn’t really answer why I got involved. Potentially it could have been just Stephanie’s business and I could have only offered a hand where needed. After all, I had (still have?) a promising career as a skilled geologist. Why would I give that up? Well, the shortest answer at the time was that I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Like a lot of others in any number of fields, the work just didn’t exist. We all found ourselves unemployed and at the time nobody really knew when it would bounce back. So it was basically either do something else or collect unemployment. But despite the possibility of some much-needed downtime the latter just wasn’t my style. And there was something mysterious and alluring about being behind a business. Plus, pūr alternatives just seemed like the right thing to do. So many parts of it just felt right and this was one of those moments when I just had to go with my gut (coincidentally, that decision has probably been responsible for numerous ulcers as well, but that stuff’s for a different story). When we thought about it, we knew that we would be making a difference with pūr alternatives – because a big list of boycotted ingredients is basically a gateway. After all, many people ask us why we would boycott those ingredients – which in turn leads to explaining what pūr alternatives stands for.

I’ve digressed a bit and I confess I didn’t want to make this blog entry this big. My first impression makes me appear long winded! But really, I edited this post numerous times and can only slash out so much. Regarding pūr alternatives’s history as a whole I’ve left out a lot. Maybe we’ll go down that memory lane trip another day. Stay tuned world. There may be more memories to share, maybe some fun tidbits I’ve picked up, maybe random thoughts. I’m a fan of mixing things up. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? (and by “tomorrow”, I may mean “tomorrow” or I may mean “next week”, or ... )