“I was a customer, just like everyone else,” says Holly about the Pine Eco + Refillery Boutique she has recently acquired. No longer just a customer, she is now deciding what’s next for the popular Collingwood shop.
My wife and I are visiting her temporary pop-up shop in the back of Orchard Health Food store to get us some refills of soap and a few eco-friendly products. We’re big fans of the wooden dish scrubbers, bamboo toothbrushes, and cloth food coverings. I’ve even found some tobacco-flavoured beard oil that I like.
While her current spot on Highway 26 outside of Collingwood is where she’ll reside until the right storefront comes available downtown, pop-ups aren’t anything new to Holly. She did a few in July and August last summer after she acquired the business in May from the previous owners, mother/daughter team Kendall and Paige.
Holly had frequented their spot on Pine Street and stayed connected through their newsletter when they moved online during the pandemic. When they announced that they’d be closing for good, Holly reached out interested in buying the business from them. The place she’d been pining for (pun intended) was now hers.
“In September, Tiffany, owner of Orchard Health Foods, offered me this space just to get started,” she says. “I didn’t know if I was going to stick to deliveries or if I was going to open a storefront. Being here has allowed me to get my bearings and figure out what I want to offer here in Collingwood.”
Together, we weigh the pros and cons of doing business online versus having a brick and mortar. With Rrampt, we’ve done both, but some businesses really need a physical spot. “It’s hard to refill online – you have to have the empty bottles. I can drive to your house and refill curbside, but I think people like coming and smelling and knowing what they’re getting,” says Hollly.
Her most popular items to refill: “Hand soap and dish soap. They’re the easiest ones for people to switch over.”
There are obvious challenges to getting people to adopt a more circular economy into their life. Convenience is usually the first point of contention. “People are used to going to one spot – having everything be a one-stop-shop. So, when we say ‘come refill your bottles here but you still have to go to another store,’ people are hesitant.” But Holly thinks that the more she brings safe ingredients to people, they will convert to refilling with better products. That brings up the dual benefit of refilling: no packaging and safer ingredients.
It seems I keep hearing new studies citing the effects of both microplastics from packaging and chemicals in some lotions and creams. I’m not going to start citing peer-reviewed scientific journals here, but when I’ve started to look into it myself, I’ve been happy with my choice to start using products with a shorter and simpler list of ingredients.
That’s what drew Holly to this particular business in the first place. “I’m new to being an entrepreneur,” she says. “My husband and I had always wanted to buy something. It just all worked out and really aligned with my values. My family often calls me a hippie tree-hugger.”
We laugh about how we’ve both been called tree-huggers in our life.
I grew up in a household where we cut our milk bags to reuse them for lunch bags and bought in bulk to avoid too much packaging. When I entered university and kept some of the practices from my upbringing, I remember getting called a hippie from my roommates, and it surprised me at the time – it just seemed logical to me to reuse things. There was no refiling back then that I was aware of, but I would have if I knew where to go.
I’ve always thought it was easy and practical to do little things like reuse.
Holly agrees. “Every little bit helps. More people doing little things is better than one person doing everything.”
Visit Pine Eco + Refillery Boutique in the Orchard Health Food store at 10 Keith Avenue and keep an eye out for her new storefront appearing in Collingwood this year.
Words and photos by Jesse Wilkinson
