Ginger Kuczowicz has a mission: crafting all-natural home and skin care products and providing ecological cleaning services to encourage healthier, greener living in Philadelphia.

Kuczowicz owns two different businesses, the first of which is Holistic Home LLC, an ecological cleaning service she started in 2010, and the second is a physical store called Soap Box she opened in 2013. Soap Box sells hand-made, all-natural skin care products and household cleaners. She now has ten employees, and Holistic Home LLC was named The Best of Philly 2014, and​ one of the best by Yelp and Angie’s List, while Soap Box won The Best of Philly 2015.

Kuczowicz opened Soap Box as an extension of her cleaning business to provide simple, all-natural items. All of the products are handmade in the back of the store. “If you use soap and touch your skin with it 25 times a day, it should be healthy for you,” Kuczowicz said. “Lotions, skin care, anything you put on your skin. We sell supplies we clean with at the store. We often have clients who say, ‘What can I do to make my home smell like the store?’”

Using vinegar, baking soda and essential oils as some of the foundations for her products, Kuczowicz explained that what she crafts is simple to make, and easily replicated at home. “The simplicity of it is beautiful, in my opinion,” Kuczowicz said “There’s nothing harmful about it.”

Kuczowicz developed a passion for cleaning during her upbringing in Upper Silesia, Poland, the most industrial part of Europe for the 20th century, with coal mining coating houses regularly in soot. “We had to clean from almost the moment we were born,” Kuczowicz said. “Every Saturday, everybody would just clean their houses. The windows had to be cleaned once a month or we couldn’t see through them.”

She came to the United States in 2000 to be with her partner, who had made the trip the year before to work on his doctorate degree. Having gone to accounting school after high school at age 15, she was already an experienced accountant for the Foundation of Cardiac Surgery Development. When she arrived in the United States, she continued to work in nonprofit accounting. She found a job with Your Part-Time Controller, a company that specializes in nonprofit accounting. “Every day was a different nonprofit,” Kuczowicz shared. “You become friends with them, because they care about certain causes that are close to your heart, like pets or the elderly. That was a great job too.”

She started cleaning on the side, and when considering the products she wanted to use for her cleaning work, Kuczowicz examined the number of cancer cases in the western world after World War II, and saw a correlation between health and the staggering increase in amount of chemicals that were being used. “The number of cancers has grown drastically,” Kuczowicz explained. “Obviously the chemicals in the cleaners did not help the situation. They were not even necessary. We just have a tendency to overdo cleaning. Simple vinegar can do the job just fine. It’s actually good to be exposed to bacteria, on some level.”

Three years after she started her cleaning business, Kuczowicz quit her accounting job. “It had grown to such a size that I could no longer do both,” Kuczowicz said. “It was just not fair to my employer at the time, or my own business. I couldn’t keep up with the demand on both sides. I had to make a decision. Either close the cleaning business or quit accounting world, which I enjoyed immensely.”

Her accounting experience has proven invaluable with her businesses, and she encourages anyone considering starting their own business to keep good books. “Books are the most important thing to see how healthy or unhealthy your business is,” Kuczowicz said. “You can have someone do them for you, but understand what they mean. That’s something people have a tendency to run away from because it’s not easy or pleasant to learn, but it’s so crucial I can’t stress it enough.”

She also encouraged potential business owners to have a plan on paper, be aware of the time needed to grow a business, and set time aside every day for self care. “Get ready to be finished with their social life because there’s no such a thing as weekends,” Kuczowicz shared. “There is work around the clock. At a certain point, after a few years, you build a client base and are able to get help.”

Until that point, however, Kuczowicz stressed the long hours. “The job is draining,” she said. “It is stressful either way. That will never leave you. I want to add at the same time the importance of taking a break. It is difficult to take a break because the amount of work is staggering, but I think a person should make a point to have thirty minutes or an hour to close the laptop, close your iPhone and do something for yourself.”

She’s found other challenges as well. “Even though you are driven by your mission to do good things, that mission gets pushed aside by daily necessities of filling out paperwork, on compliance, or taxes, bookkeeping, hiring people,” she shared. “Normal business stuff that you don’t think about going into business. You think that you’re just going to be focusing on the mission – why did you even open the business. There can be only 20 percent of that left when you have all of those other obligations on your back. My desk is never clear. That is a challenge. I would love to have a secretary, but I’m not big enough to have somebody just yet.”

As many challenges as she faces, Kuczowicz has found her work to be rewarding as well. “When people tell me that someone no longer suffers from asthma attacks after we’ve done the cleaning or when we come to clean on a regular basis,” she said about the encouraging things she encounters with her work. “When we clean with natural cleaners, there’s nothing that triggers asthma. I love when people ask specifically for green cleaning, because they have small children, animals. A lot of them have the tendency to spend a lot of time on the floor. Dogs lick the floor. It’s fine licking vinegar but not so much Pine Sol. That’s very rewarding when people notice the difference. Not to mention they don’t have to spend the time cleaning. They’re buying time also from us.”

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Visit Holistic Home LLC’s website, or Facebook. Follow Soap Box on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram or visit the online store.