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Bailey DePew FOUNDER, BAI-LI ESSENTIALS bailiessentials.com

In youth, our wide-eyed aspirations may not include “natural deodorant entrepreneur,” per se, but what a world it would be if every ambition included the conscience and care that Bailey DePew brings to her brand. Here’s how her journey brought her to start Bai-li Essentials, kind to the planet and your pits.

Being The Change

In 2019, DePew had been living in Los Angeles for 12 years and despite the increasing availability of natural deodorant options, didn’t think of herself as someone who could make the leap. “I was like, ‘I’ll never give up my clinical strength!’” DePew says. She wanted to escape products rife with aluminum and parabens, but the search for a plausible alternative wasn’t easy.

One reason was that the sea of crunchy brands is still so often packed in plastic and with the shady term “fragrance” on the ingredient list. If she wanted a deodorant that was worth cutting ties with big pharma, she’d have to devise the perfect formula herself.

“I never thought I’d be in this industry,” DePew says, “but when I started making my own deodorant at home and it was really working, I thought, if I’m on this journey for something more sustainable, I bet others are also seeking something like this.” She was right.

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DePew and now-husband Jack started in the kitchen of a one-bedroom apartment, but since they’ve moved their burgeoning business east, all production takes place in a woodworking shop on a property here in the Lehigh Valley. “Jack calls it my ‘she-shop’!” DePew says.

Each deodorant and lip balm is handpoured in the she-shop, which means its footprint to local buyers has a very short stride.

The Packaging Problem

DePew is highly attentive to the growing trend toward zero waste. How discouraging it is to put your money toward a product made with all the most ecological ingredients only to have to throw away a piece of immortal plastic trash at the end of it? “I had seen one or two brands at the time I started my business using the cardboard push-up tubes and just thought it was the coolest thing!” DePew says.

She was able to locate one of the only manufacturers of this type of packaging in the U.S., a company in Oregon, and source her deodorant and lip-balm tubes there, with labels made from sugarcane pulp.

This packaging is vulnerable to spills, but DePew isn’t about to let her products go to waste for mere aesthetic concerns, embracing imperfection by selling seconds at a discount.