Green America: What does your business do, and what are your most popular products?

Wendy Strgar: Our mission at Good Clean Love is to awaken the healing power of love in the world and provide an education for loving relationships that can be sustained throughout future generations. 

We provide both a luxurious line of natural and organic love products as well as educational resources on the importance of applying sustainability practices to relationships. We use ingredients that are all natural, wild-crafted and organic whenever possible in all of our products, so that they not only feel good, but are good for you without synthetic fragrances, parabens or petrochemicals. 

Our organic personal lubricants are by far our most popular products. Not only are they an essential to making love sustainable, but they have helped to provide a solution to many couples experiencing sexual dysfunction. Our Almost Naked, unscented variety is by far our best seller and has received many testimonials from customers, physicians and retailers for the smooth and long-lasting pleasure it brings.

What makes your business green?

Almost Naked, Wendy's most popular unscented product. It also comes in peppermint, cinnamon vanilla, and lavender rose.

Wendy: At Good Clean Love we work hard to produce healthy and organic intimacy products with a minimal impact on our environment. We work with manufacturing partners who hold extremely high green standards for the materials and processes they use to make products.  We take the utmost care in sourcing our wild crafted and organic ingredients for the formulations used in each of our products, and we are continually working to improve the preservative formulations for healthier products. 

All of our organic products and packaging are made in the United States, and our samples are packaged in 100-percent post-consumer recycled materials. We strive to use environmentally safe materials in all of our shipping practices – including the use of cornstarch peanuts in the shipping of our products to all customers. We also implement earth-friendly office practices by operating in a paperless format as often as possible and instituting an office recycling program. 

Another important aspect of Good Clean Love is our philosophy of sustainable love. It is important that we begin to appreciate that being in a relationship, having a family and history with someone is a precious resource. If we could understand that the huge amounts of trust, time and loving intention that we invest in our early relationships are actually renewable resources — the currency of our future health and well-being — we may be motivated to create new strategies to maintain them. Sustaining a relationship with loving words and actions not only keeps intimacy vibrant, it becomes a living education of what love is for future generations.

What did you do before you started your green business?

Wendy: I was working at making the first publicly funded children’s peace academy.   Good Clean Love actually grew out of my desire to create a business to fund the work of peace education for children.  Although it wasn’t part of some great design,  I actually feel like the love business is itself an extension of the peace education work that inspired it.  Making peace at home, with our families and the people we are closest to is the foundation for any peace to be found across cultures in the world.

What motivated you to start your own business?

Wendy: This is a family business, which was created to meet the personal intimacy needs in my own marriage of 24 years. Our products saved my marriage by eliminating the pain that occurred with intimacy and helping me to realize that it was through physically loving my husband that we discovered again the power of love to heal and unite us as a couple. All of our products were developed with this goal in mind, creating healthy and natural-ingredient-based products that make love accessible in relationships.

 

What have been some of the biggest challenges of maintaining high standards of social and environmental responsibility?

Wendy:  One of the greatest challenges has come in finding the right natural formulation to work with the body while maintaining great standards of healthy and organic materials. While the formulation process took a long time to perfect, the results have been tremendous. The testimonials we receive from medical professionals, retailers, and customers has made the time spent on finding the right formulations worthwhile.

Balancing the costs for ingredients and packaging choices and their quality is another place where we try to make a difference for the world.  For example, spending a little more for post-consumer recycled packaging for our samples and giving up the convenience of a resealable plastic tube for them made sense and feels like it supports our mission of sustainable love.

 

Have you encountered any unique challenges related to your particular type of green business?

Wendy: Making a business dedicated to sustainable love and healthy intimacy is an odd place culturally.  Even with our meticulous attention to the health aspects of sexuality, we have had some press releases censored and been excluded from some communications.  Creating a language that builds a healthy and real connection to our sexual selves is key to our success, but has not been easily accomplished.

 

What's been your proudest moment as a green business owner?

This winter wellness package includes peppermint lubricant, Indian spice love oil, and a maca root extract for energy and endurance..

Wendy: The most gratifying experiences I have with the business are when I hear from customers who share their stories of renewed intimacy thanks to our products or our sustainable-love newsletters. 

I feel like the real bottom line of what we spend our lives doing is how much we really give to others.  Good Clean Love offers so many opportunities to make love a real experience for people in the world.  I am very lucky.  On the other hand,  if I knew what would be required to make a product brand successful, I probably wouldn’t have attempted it.   So I regularly have to check in with what my real bottom line is, and let go of the rest. 

 

What advice would you give to other green entrepreneurs just starting out?

Wendy: My first career was as a career counselor for people with physical and mental disabilities.  My message then was about finding real work that makes you happy to get up in the morning:  doing something that inspires the best part of who you are.  Green business owners are some of the most inspired people I have ever met,  so my best advice is to follow a dream.   Take the risk to make the life you want.

 

What's the next green step you're working on right now?

Wendy: We are continuously working to improve our product formulations to ensure that all Good Clean Love products are the most healthy love products on the market. Look for the release of our new body dessert line soon!

What green product could you not live without? 

Wendy: Method Home Products!