Check Out Cory Thompson’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cory Thompson.

Hi Cory, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. 
After many years of struggling with mental health issues that prevented me from working traditional jobs, I started on the journey of small business ownership. After 1 or 2 failed attempts, I was thankfully able to work 1 day a week for a good friend (and soon-to-be business mentor) that I’ve known since elementary school at her small business, MamaSuds, as she was just moving her growing natural soap company from her house into an industrial manufacturing space in Davisburg, Michigan. After working with her for several months, we saw an increase in wholesale orders from refilleries and zero-waste stores – mostly on the East and West coasts of the country. Knowing that my passion was nature and doing things as sustainably as possible to protect our precious resources, Michelle, the owner, suggested this is what I should pursue. After researching the market in Michigan and finding only 5 refilleries at the time, I decided it was something the was needed in our area, so I found a local business, Harvest Time Farm Market & Pet Supplies, willing to let me set up pop-ups on the weekends in Oxford. When Winter hit, I moved inside down the road to a local coffee shop in Lake Orion, Lava Mountain, for a couple more months of pop-ups before I developed a small customer base and some traction in the community and no more patience for shlepping all of the products and dispensers for pop-ups. I started researching retail locations for a brick-and-mortar but quickly realized that my role as a mother of 2 children in elementary school, along with my mental health, would not support the requirements of a brick-and-mortar. SO, on a week-long business retreat with my friend and business mentor, I rewrote my entire business plan so that it would fit ME – my strengths, my capabilities, and my challenges. That is where my Partnership Boutique Model was born. I had a business partnership that was willing to give my idea a try, and I have been in that location for 16 months, My New Favorite Thing in Waterford. I also have a second location in Oxford, Modern Marketplace, that has been open for over a year. I have had a total of 8 different locations over the past 1-2 years and have learned A LOT about what works and what doesn’t. The two locations I currently have are successful and fulfilling for me, as well as providing other local women business owners with more exposure and more value. And I can also provide more consumers with access to a sustainable way to shop for household cleaners and body care items that are made locally by women business owners and that are made with clean and safe ingredients for their health, their home, and the environment.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Learning about what geographical areas (customers) in Oakland County are open to changing their way of consuming, learning about what type of employees in my partner locations are necessary to make this work, learning what type of industry business to partner with, and learning what financial situations work (and having to develop my own contract), among many other challenges, has been a great experience, full of ups and downs. At one point, I had 6 locations running at the same time, and I struggled with the challenge of spreading myself too thin, too early. I had locations as far as an hour away which had its own challenges, trying to plan ahead for restocking and refilling, and always missing something. I also had the challenge of working with a few different finance people and coming to the conclusion that there is no good affordable financial system out there to track the type of business I have, and so having to build my own spreadsheet workbooks from the bottom up to support what I’m doing. But the hands-down biggest challenge has been education. The target audience is small, and the goal is actually to convert a different set of consumers in the population to become the target audience through education. Using a refillery is a whole different mindset for consumerism, and it requires breaking old habits and purposefully creating new ones. Adult human beings in the US are not easily motivated to do that, especially if it isn’t convenient.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
The Red Oak Refillery has three main values that set it apart from other refilleries and zero-waste stores:

1. All of our products include only the cleanest and safest ingredients. The more basic, the better. Real soap just needs the correct pH balance to clean. It doesn’t need tons of suds, or strong scents, or super grease-cutting power (which often leads to the use of unsafe ingredients). That doesn’t mean we don’t have scents; it just means that our scents come straight from nature in the form of pure essential oils when needed. But everything we offer is hypoallergenic and never tested on animals. Many products have organic ingredients. Everything is safe for humans, pets, homes, pipes, septic, sewer, and the planet.

2. All of our products are made locally in Michigan. This lowers the carbon footprint of items because they aren’t being shipped across the country. It also helps boost the local economy by keeping money flowing within our state.

3. All of our products and partner locations are owned by women. As of 2020, less than 10% of all US businesses were owned by minorities, women, and veterans together, according to the US Census Bureau. In order to assist in lifting this group that obviously needs help to grow, we focus on providing places for local women (and, when possible, women of color and veterans) to showcase their talents and uplift their business ventures.

As a mother of two and a wife, I realize that a zero-waste lifestyle in Michigan is darn near impossible, and the idea of this is daunting at best. These days, with technology at our fingertips to be able to increase production and consumption on a personal level to a point where finding rest time is hard enough, let alone taking the time to home cook every meal and cut out all unnecessary single-use plastic, expecting ourselves to live in a perfectly sustainable way becomes mentally unhealthy. So, my goal with the refillery is to provide an option so that many people can choose to make a change for the better by reusing containers and cleaning up the ingredients they are bringing into their homes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.redoakrefillery.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/redoakrefillery
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/redoakrefillery
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR7kqQ8E_qswS7nr9BnsQ4g