Triangle Green Cleaning’s Joe McCutcheon Launches Carolina Castile Soap
With the launch of his new company, Carolina Castile Soap, founder Joe McCutcheon has turned what was once a sound business decision in support of his thriving residential cleaning business, Triangle Green Cleaning, into another entrepreneurial passion.
Six years ago, McCutcheon, along with his wife, Amy, started Triangle Green Cleaning as a residential service company with a mission. Committed to using environmentally-friendly products, the McCutcheons have built a successful enterprise that now serves more than six hundred homeowners from Knightdale in eastern Wake county all the way to Carrboro in southern Orange County.
Through the years, Joe McCutcheon has made it a personal quest to make his company more sustainable with regard to its environmental soundness with each passing year. This quest has seen the company invest in high-MPG automobiles for its fleet of vehicles utilized by cleaning teams on their routes across the Triangle to a non-stop evolution of the cleaning products used at the core of its residential cleaning services.
In the beginning, McCutcheon used retail and wholesale outlets to buy the best green products available at the time. Many of these products, available to consumers at major retailers, left him unsatisfied with regard to their safeguarding of both the environment and his customers’ health. Many products labeled as “green” can in fact have artificial ingredients and perfumes, as they meet minimum standards set by government agencies and non-governmental organizations.
In the midst of this quest for excellence in his cleaning products, McCutcheon discovered Castile soap, an all-natural product hailing originally from the Castile region of Spain. While Castile soap originated from olive oil, the product has evolved to refer to any soap made from the saponification of vegetable oils. While McCutcheon initially committed to Castile soaps available in the market, he found the economic burden on his company, due to the higher costs of these products, burdensome to his company’s economic health.
A couple of years ago, McCutcheon decided to take his sourcing of Castile soaps in-house, perfecting multiple recipes that he began deploying to Triangle Green Cleaning’s hundreds of homes cleaned on a weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly basis. Customers were thrilled with the results, reporting through customer feedback surveys that the soaps were effective at cleaning, pleasant in smell, and non-invasive or noxious post-cleaning.
Now, with an equipment investment to manufacture his five varieties—Tea Tree, Lavender Kukui, Gentle Unscented, Orange, and Peppermint—in greater quantities, McCutcheon has launched Carolina Castile Soaps to fuel his passion for the environment in a whole new meaningful way.
“We have been uncompromising in our habits of improving our environmental performance as businesspeople at Triangle Green Cleaning, and Castile soaps have been at the heart of these sound habits,” stated McCutcheon. “What I like most about Castile soaps, in addition to the benefits you normally get from an all-natural product in terms of the environment and health, are their diverse utility.”
As a case in point, just one soap can have up to seven different household and personal uses ranging from hand-washing to cleaning the entire house. McCutcheon touts the product’s multiple uses that also include shaving cream, body wash, shampoo, dish soap, and laundry cleaner.
Each soap contains olive oil as an essential ingredient, while McCutcheon adds different oils for different effects. Coconut oil, for example, gives the soap a bubbly lather that’s especially good for cleaning purposes. Other oils offer skin conditioning features or simply add body to the mixture for tougher applications.
As for the new company’s future prospects, McCutcheon says he will be taking the business’s development slowly. “My primary focus will remain at Triangle Green Cleaning. That’s my family—my employees and my customers. Everything we do is to make our services more meaningful and effective, fulfilling our mission,” stated McCutcheon. “This business, Carolina Castile Soap, was born from Triangle Green Cleaning, and will continue to largely operate in the service of that company.”
Still, McCutcheon sees Carolina Castile Soap as a way for him and the environmental legacy built at Triangle Green Cleaning to transcend the Triangle, taking natural products to customers around the country. “I’ll be selling the Castile soap products online through various outlets,” said McCutcheon, ”and I’m thrilled to be getting multiple orders from other parts of North Carolina and other states. This is just another way for us to make a better impact on the planet through the work we do every day.”
For more information on Carolina Castile Soap, or to purchase one of the five available varieties at $7.99, visit www.carolinacastile.com. Carolina Castile Soap can be found on Facebook here and on Twitter @CarolinaCastile.
Triangle Green Cleaning is now Enovana Green Cleaning and can be found at www.enovanagreencleaning.com/raleigh/ on Facebook here and on Twitter @EnovanaGreen.