Purpose Finds You When You Need It Most
Fourteen days, that’s how long we had been open when the world shut down.
Fourteen days of excitement. Fourteen days of aching feet and a racing heart. Fourteen days of thinking, Holy shit. This might actually work. And then everything stopped.
My television career disappeared almost overnight. Nobody could travel, nobody could film. Productions were halted indefinitely. Suddenly, for the first time in my adult life, I had all the time in the world.
And thankfully, I had a 200-square-foot tire shed waiting for me. The early pandemic version of refilling was... interesting.
Customers would leave their empty containers outside the shop. I would take them, wash them, dry them, bring them inside, fill them, send an email telling them what they owed, cross my fingers that the e-transfer arrived, and put everything back outside for pickup.A very sophisticated operation.
Janky little set up with buckets and all.
Did I mention our tire shed didn't have running water? I filled buckets at our neighbour's car detailing shop and carried them over to the shed. It also didn't have internet, so at one point we ran an ethernet cable from our neighbour's window to ours. And it was cold.I mean REALLY cold.
There were days when I had to break through the layer of ice that had formed on top of my washing water before I could clean people's containers.But here's the strange thing. I loved it. The world felt terrifying and uncertain, the career I had known for years was stalled and nobody knew what was coming next.
But every morning, I had somewhere to go. Something to build. Something that brought me hope and pride and kept my mind focused on what I could control instead of everything I couldn’t. That little tire shed became my refuge and I will forever be grateful for it.
People would drive past and see me outside washing containers in -20°C weather, and I like to imagine at least a few of them thought: If this woman hates plastic waste THAT much... maybe we should too.
And Then Everything Went Backwards
As the pandemic took hold, something else started happening that absolutely killed Andrew and me.
After years of watching the world slowly move toward less waste, suddenly single-use everything was back. Lysol wipes, tiny plastic hand sanitizer bottles, disposable EVERYTHING. Plastic. Plastic. Plastic.
Fear understandably changed people's priorities overnight. But watching so much progress disappear was heartbreaking. And then came another problem, the government didn't recognize refilleries (to be fair they hadn’t even heard of them and as I type this my stupid spell check still doesn’t recognize it as a word!) as essential businesses. Except... we sold hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergent, household cleaners, even hand sanitizer. Everything people needed to keep themselves and their homes clean.
How exactly were we not essential?
So we fought it, we petitioned and pushed and eventually, refilleries were recognized. And, if we're being completely honest here...I would have stayed open anyway. Come and get me.
The Little Shed Couldn't Hold Us Anymore
Something remarkable was happening through all of this. People kept coming and I couldn't keep up. About six months after opening, we moved out of the tire shed and into our first proper storefront. It had heat Hydro! A SINK! Luxury.
You should have seen us empty that little shed. My parents described it as a clown car. Product just kept coming out. We couldn't understand how we'd managed to fit it all inside 200 square feet. Our new shop was nearly three times the size, which meant more products, more brands and more opportunities to help people make changes. (The space that Chin Chin is in now)
Our new digs!
It wasn't exactly smooth sailing. Pandemic restrictions meant we were constantly rearranging the store based on what we were permitted to sell that particular week. I hope to God I never have to do that again.
Sweet friends like Tara KEPT SHOWING UP!
But we kept going and then Someone Else Saw It. Around this time, a woman named Nicole Vollebregt discovered us. Nicole had built an incredible career in marketing at adidas, and she was looking for something where she could help create change at the ground level. She saw something in The Keep. And thankfully for us, she wanted to help.
Nicole is a BIG thinker. She believes a refillery should be as normal and necessary in a community as the library, the post office or the grocery store. I loved that. Because suddenly someone else was seeing what we always knew. This wasn't just a cute little shop in Creemore, there was a model here, a mission and maybe even a movement.
But Andrew and I were still two people from the television world. How the hell were we going to take on the single-use plastic giants? How were we going to change the way people consumed? Why would people trust us to do it? And maybe the biggest question of all: How could we convince people that if they just tried, and enough of us tried together, it really could make a difference?
So we did the only thing we knew how to do. We kept going. A few months later, an opportunity came up in Meaford, Ontario. We took it, our first expansion, our first real step toward proving that The Keep didn't only belong in Creemore. And what a little gem the “Meaf’s” became. (That’s what we call Meaford because if you know me I like to abbreviate everything)
Meaford Shop when we first laid eyes on her.
Meanwhile, something almost surreal was happening behind the scenes. Andrew and I found ourselves in our own little version of Dragon's Den, sitting in Zoom meetings with people like Christine Day, former CEO of lululemon, and Paul Hollands, former CEO of A&W and one of the people responsible for its remarkable growth and franchise expansion. These were serious business people. People who build, people who know a thing or two about retail. People who understood how ideas become companies and how companies become movements. And they believed what Nicole believed. That refilling should be accessible and that communities everywhere needed an alternative to single-use consumption.
And somehow...
They believed we might be the people to build it. I think back sometimes to those freezing mornings outside the tire shed. Me, breaking ice off a bucket of water so I could wash somebody's empty soap bottle.
I certainly didn't feel like I was building a national movement. I was just trying to get through the day and keep that one container out of the landfill. But maybe that's the thing about purpose. Sometimes you don't recognize it when it arrives. Sometimes it looks like a grand calling. And sometimes...it looks like a frozen bucket of water outside a 200-square-foot tire shed.
The world had stopped. My old career had disappeared. Everything felt uncertain. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, The Keep gave me exactly what I needed. A place to put my energy, a reason to get up, a community to serve and a purpose perhaps greater than me.
And just when I thought figuring that out had been the hard part, suddenly I had a mission, I had a purpose, I had inventory, a lease, I had assets, a growing community and some pretty heavy hitters betting on me. But could I actually pull this off? Could I run and grow a business? Could I be a good leader? And maybe the biggest question of all: Could I build a brand that people truly connected with, one that stayed true to our values and our mission... and somehow managed to pay me too?