Episode 008 – The Power of Discovering Your Brand Story with North 24th Home

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Toria Edmonds-Howell of North 24th Home!

North 24th Home is a brand of safe, nontoxic household cleaning products on a mission to help families care for their homes, care for their well being, and care for one another.

Episode Highlights:

How Toria’s personal wellness journey inspired her to start North 24th Home:

“I always tell people I grew up in a household where Saturday mornings were all about having the family wake up, we would put on some really good music and everyone pitched in to help clean the house. So I have lots of very like joyous memories associated with that time.

But at that time, we were using a lot of the legacy brands that you see on the shelves when you walk into any major retailer to this day. And I can remember as a child always feeling like sick when I was cleaning. It's like you sprinkle the Comet in the tub or you spray down the surface with bleach. And it's like, you have to run out of the room because the headaches coming, the nausea is coming. And I just remember never liking that and always having kind of this thought of like, why does cleaning have to be so ill inducing?

Fast forward in high school, my mother was diagnosed with kidney disease. And I can remember there was a product that we were using and on the back label, it said, ‘Consult your doctor if you have kidney disease.’ So this was around like 10th or 11th grade for me. And I remember at that moment, I got super curious about ingredients in the products that we're using on our bodies, that we're putting in our bodies, that we're using throughout our spaces. And that was a turning point for me of being a bit more conscious and mindful about everything that I used.

I went off to college. I then was in a space where I was shopping for my own products. And I remember recognizing that a lot of the things that were marketed to us as safe, non toxic, green, eco friendly…They just weren't.

And so I started just kind of experimenting, going on Google to find out what's the recipe for a safe surface cleaner, and realized that it wasn't that complicated. Started just concocting my own things. I remember I could never use like a lot of the air fresheners and home fragrances that so many people loved. Anytime those things were used, I would have this terrible headache that I couldn't get rid of. And so the first products that I really started experimenting with were just natural air fresheners and like concocting in my kitchen these recipes and they were well received.

Folks would walk into my apartment and be like, “What's that smell? Smells really good in here.” And I'm like, “Oh, I made that!” And so I would say that was really the genesis of it. But it wasn't until the pandemic with life slowing down, where I really felt like I had time, space, and opportunity to really put some thought and effort into making it something other than just me creating products for myself.”

How to create product and brand that tells a unique story:

“I really enjoyed the storytelling aspect of the brand. I really wanted to create something that stood out from what was currently available in the market. When I think about most natural, safe, non toxic cleaning brands that are out there, there's a certain feel or vibe to them. It's always like this very minimalistic, like clean, pristine, like everything white and polished feel and vibe. And when I really considered what my own like cleaning experience was growing up and even into adulthood, it never felt that way. My kitchen isn't perfectly white. It's not polished and put together at all times. There are things on the countertops and pictures and magnets on my refrigerator. And so I really wanted to tell this story, but there was just so much in my head and I realized I needed to get organized and start to pull what was living in my mind out on paper.

And so in the early days, I spent a lot of time just documenting. And through that documentation, I started to realize that some of the pieces that I needed to have in place as it related to a business plan just started to naturally unfold as I was putting this story down on paper. And with that came just a sense of like, it's real.

I feel like when you write things down, you put it on paper, it feels a bit more real. And so that really helped me in the early days because the more I wrote, the more the vision for North 24th became clear. When I first launched, North 24th Home as the brand name was really rooted in my childhood.

I grew up on North 24th Street here in Richmond. That's home for me. But beyond that, I didn't have a documented mission or vision statement for the brand. I didn't even really have a sense of who my target customer was or could be. But through that exercise of writing, things started to come into focus.”

Tips for applying to accelerator programs:

Ask yourself if your brand is well positioned for the individual accelerator program that you're applying to. Does your target audience align with theirs? Would your product make sense being sold in their stores?
Lead with a strong story. How can you share your unique story and perspective? And can you show how that story isn’t already being told by the other brands on their shelves?