When we launched Bum Boosa™ in July 2009 with our natural, biodegradable, chlorine-free, alcohol-free wipes made with a natural solution – Sonja and I high-fived each other across the kitchen table (where Bum Boosa™ was hatched) and thought we’d reached a major milestone. Well… we had. But we didn’t know what lay ahead.

Only a few short months later (after adding our bamboo diaper rash ointment to the product list and feeling pretty darned swell about it) we started reading about toilet paper – specifically toilet paper made with recycled content. We always knew that toilet paper was made from trees so it was on our radar to eventually create a bamboo bathroom tissue. But when we learned that toilet paper made with recycled content is leaching BPAs into the groundwater, we stared at each other across our tiny office (we had progressed to an office from the kitchen table) as we roughly calculated how much recycled content toilet paper we had each purchased and used over the years (thinking that we were doing the right thing!) and multiplied that by millions of TP users… we quickly agreed that we had to do something. Now!

Sonja, researcher extraordinaire, dove back into research mode and we developed the world’s first bamboo toilet paper (or bathroom tissue as we like to call it). Since we were already going down the road of developing this new eco-friendly product, we wanted to take it a step further. Instead of wrapping our environmentally-conscious bathroom tissue in what has become the norm – plastic – we decided to eliminate that unnecessary evil and package our tree-free paper in cardboard boxes made from 100% recycled content that can be recycled again and again. And of course it had to be BPA-free, chlorine-free, fragrance-free (do you know what lurks in “fragrance”? That’s another blog post…) etc so we had our samples tested by an independent lab. And before we knew it, we had a new product headed into manufacturing!

Educating people about the choices that they are making is really important to us. (We’re moms [and both have some teaching under our belts]… it’s what we do.) The additional benefit of the cardboard box is that it gave us plenty of prime real estate to highlight some key issues about the renewability, sustainability, and benefits of bamboo. It would have been irresponsible to ignore that opportunity!

So now we’ve moved into a larger office (though we still meet over the kitchen table fairly often) and while we still congratulate each other from time to time on how far we’ve come, we know we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us! There are no laurels to rest on when you want to change the world one bum at a time! If you want to help us spread the word about our products, the benefits of bamboo, or other relevant issues, please feel free to contact us – 1-866-996-BUMS (2867) or info@bumboosa.com.

Post note: After mass production of our bathroom tissue boxes, we found a spelling error (which horrified our inner perfectionists but how environmentally irresponsible would we be if we tossed them and started again?). To the first 25 people that send us the word that is spelled incorrectly, we will send a 30% discount for use on our website!