Aussies make $200k from cleaning product Pleasant State in one year

Two Queenslanders poured their life savings into a risky idea mid-pandemic, but it’s now paying off.

Two Queenslanders are celebrating a $200,000 windfall despite launching their risky business idea mid-pandemic.

Pleasant State co-founders Ami Bateman, 36, and Sian Murray, 28, are on track to rake in a quarter of a million dollars in revenue by the end of the month, which coincidentally marks their one-year anniversary since they launched their product.

The two women, both originally from Melbourne but now living on the Sunshine Coast, started a crowd-funding campaign on July 19 last year to get their business idea off the ground.

Ms Bateman came up with the idea for an eco-friendly “just add water” cleaning product during the climate change strikes at the end of 2019.

“No one buys plastic bottles anymore, we take tote bags with us everywhere, we have ‘keep cups’ but no one thinks about this about cleaning products,” Ms Bateman explained to news.com.au.

“Most spray cleaning products are … full of known nasties (for the environment) but it’s one area people aren’t really thinking about.”

So she created a reusable, environmentally-friendly spray cleaning bottle at the beginning of last year, and it has taken off.

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Sian Murray and Ami Bateman.

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First-time customers visiting Pleasant State receive a starter-pack, where they are sent three different bottles made of glass and silicon (to minimise its risk of breaking).

These can be washed and reused, rather than chucked in the bin and replaced with a new plastic spray bottle.

In the starter-pack are also three “bars” – small tablets that can be slotted into the bottle.

Once water is added, the bars activate with the water and it becomes a cleaning solution.

The bottles and tablets are colour-coded for glass, bathroom and multipurpose cleaning products.

Ms Bateman came up with the idea but knew she had no way to market it as she had a background in corporate tech.

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They launched the product in June last year, then went to a crowd-funding platform in August 2020.

That was when she reached out to Ms Murray, a digital marketer.

Both women were passionate about the environment: “Sian and I live on the Sunshine Coast,” Ms Bateman explained.

“We were the region hit by the unseasonal bushfires, up in Coolum in November 2019. I remember lying on my couch during these fires and feeling very despondent.”

But the two entrepreneurs are also aware that eco cleaning products often didn’t do the job quite as well as their toxic counterparts.

“Eco solutions sometimes aren’t effective,” Ms Bateman said.

She made sure the product underwent rigorous testing so that it would be a viable alternative to their competitors.

The business has made $200,000 so far, and is set to bring in another $50,000 by their one-year anniversary.

Both women qualified for JobKeeper so they were able to keeping working towards the brand launch set for June 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic raged on.

Ms Bateman had started another business that had existed for more than a year, while Ms Murray held onto her old job, which meant they were able to live off $750 a week while working on Pleasant State.

After securing a factory out of the country to produce 15,000 products, the two poured their life savings into it.

They also launched a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo to get them over the finish line.

“We wanted 10,000 customers on our email (list) by the time we (the brand) launched, “ Ms Bateman said.

“For a few days we entered the ‘valley of death’, interest just died.”

Luckily, it soon picked up again and now, a year later, their product is in 9000 Australian homes, with many of them repeat customers.

They have 5800 subscribers.

The pair also donate 20 per cent of their profits to Take 3 For The Sea, an environmental charity that aims to stop plastic pollution in the ocean.

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