Take a moment and think about all of the places your phone has been with you today. When you woke up this morning, you may have had your device beside you in bed, brought it into the bathroom, kept it by your side at the gym and had it out with you as you were eating. Now, think about the last time you cleaned your phone? Well, the gross reality is we touch our mobile devices, on average, over 150 times each day and the average phone is 18x dirtier than a toilet seat!
Starting Spruce & Co
Feeling frustrated by the lack of products on the market, Jill Applebaum and Jillian Ressler came together to co-found Spruce & Co, a consumer goods startup aimed at creating simple solutions to enable everyday healthy routines. Jill and Jillian were 1st year section-mates at Harvard Business School when they realized their shared passion for this problem. Jill had tried using everything from clorox wipes to hand sanitizer on her device and after a ruined speaker on her iPhone decided that there must be a better way. A former school teacher with Teach For America, Jillian had first hand experience teaching in a tech-enabled classroom and knew just how dirty the shared devices can get across from her students.
Product & Vision
Jill and Jillian launched their first product line of disposable screen cleaning wipes earlier this year to provide a plant-based cleaning wipe that is safe for mobile devices and safe for your skin. They plan to expand their Sprucies product lines this coming year beyond phone wipes to introduce a variety of simple solutions for millennials to maintain healthy lifestyles while they are at home, traveling, or working. They want to help their customers keep her tray tables clean and their keyboards shiny and bright.
Progress
Spruce & Co has their first product available for sale at www.spruceandco.com and also at local retailers in Boston, with plans to have an expanded retail presence later this year. Soon, you can hopefully find these wipes in schools, offices, gyms and airports. Jill and Jillian have been working with the Harvard i-lab as well as the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship to develop their business and will be pursuing Spruce & Co full time upon graduating from HBS in May 2015.
