I trained as an esthetician, which meant I had access to what the industry considers its best products — and my own skin still wouldn't cooperate. Sensitive, reactive, prone to breaking out at the worst moments. I tried nearly everything on offer before I admitted the products weren't the problem I thought they were, and started mixing my own instead.
That kitchen-counter experimenting is a cute story in hindsight, but it wasn't a shortcut. I quit my job, maxed out a couple of credit cards I'm still slightly embarrassed about, and spent three years actually studying natural cosmetic chemistry — properly, not by trial and error on my own face. Om Organics launched in 2016 out of that, from a small apothecary in Invermere, BC. Every product is still handcrafted there in small batches, by the same team, a decade later.
The part I actually want to talk about
Most brand stories stop at the ingredients — vegan, cruelty-free, gluten-free, no synthetic fragrance or colour, all true of everything we make. What I'd rather talk about is price. Clean, plant-based skincare built a reputation for being expensive, and I understand why: small-batch production doesn't scale the way a factory line does. But the whole reason I started this was that I couldn't afford the "best" products and needed something that actually worked for skin like mine. Pricing our line the way the rest of the category prices itself would have meant leaving out exactly the person I used to be.
So we've kept it deliberately affordable, which sometimes means smaller margins and slower growth than the venture-backed version of this story. It also means the customer who found us because a nine-dollar lip balm was the first clean product she could actually justify buying is the customer this brand was built for.
What small-batch actually costs you
It isn't free of trade-offs. We sell out of things. Turnaround on a larger order is longer than a brand running through a contract manufacturer. What it buys back is control — I still see the whole production, which means a formula doesn't quietly drift over five years of small cost-cutting decisions the way some product lines do.
One thing I'll say plainly, because CertClean's whole approach is being specific rather than reassuring: nothing here is guaranteed safe for everyone, because that category doesn't really exist. If you're trying one of our products for the first time, patch test it properly first — the same advice I'd give for any brand, including my own.
