About Renu'd

Arielle

Founder & CEO, Renu'd

How did we get here?

When I had my kids, everything shifted. Suddenly I was reading labels on food, checking what was in their shampoo, thinking about the air quality in our home. It sounds a bit much, I know — my husband definitely rolled his eyes a few times — but any parent will know exactly what I mean. One day I turned that same attention to the cleaning products under my sink, and honestly, I wish I hadn't opened that cupboard.

The ingredients list on a standard household cleaner is genuinely shocking when you start looking into what each thing actually does. Harsh chemicals, artificial fragrances, bleach-based compounds — all in products I was spraying on the kitchen counter my toddler was leaning on twenty minutes later. Even the ones with "natural" or "eco" splashed across the front often weren't much better. Once you know, you can't really unknow it.

I was on maternity leave, so in the rare moments my son and daughter weren't both vying for my attention, I had the time to actually sit with it and think. I kept coming back to the same question: if all these chemicals are so bad, how does nature deal with dirt and bacteria on its own? Grass isn't toxic. Forests don't get sprayed with bleach. So what's actually doing the cleaning out there? That line of thinking led me to bacteria — the good kind, the ones that exist all around us and quietly break things down the way nature intended. I started reading everything I could find during nap times (although they say you should sleep when they sleep — yeah, right!), and the more I read, the more it all clicked.

The science was already there — hospitals had been using beneficial bacteria on surfaces, food manufacturers were using them, cruise ships use them to treat wastewater so it doesn't damage the ocean. It's genuinely everywhere once you start looking. What I couldn't get my head around was: why is nobody doing this for homes? I kept waiting to find a product that had already solved this. I googled it endlessly. Nothing. Nobody seemed to be asking the question, let alone answering it.

And the more I dug into it, the more I realised it wasn't just about cleaning. Something I hadn't really thought about before is that our microbiome doesn't stop at our gut — the bacteria in our homes matter too, especially for young kids whose immune systems are still developing. Every time you spray bleach on a surface, you're not just getting rid of the bad stuff, you're wiping out all of it. I found that genuinely unsettling once I understood it.

So, slightly sleep-deprived and probably a little obsessed, I decided to do it myself. I threw myself into it — working with our lab to develop cleaning products that actually use those good bacteria, things that perform just as well as the chemical stuff but that I'd feel completely fine using around my kids. That became Renu'd. And honestly, I'd love for it to become your new normal too.

I won't pretend it was easy. This whole process has been a massive learning experience and has taken a lot longer than I ever imagined it would. But we got there, and we are so proud to finally be able to put these products into your hands. I genuinely believe in them — and I hope you will too.