Clean Your Body, Clean Your Conscience

Mike Talve and Jason Armon, the guys behind the company VIVO Natural Products, believe that you can improve the world one shower at a time. How are they going about doing that? By making sure that their soap products not only smell fantastic, but also have a global impact, helping to support women farmers financed by microcredit loans in Togo, West Africa.

What really inspired Mike and Jason to start VIVO was not dissatisfaction with the smell of an Irish spring. Rather, it was their interest in microfinance. Being two guys with an entrepreneurial spirit, they weren’t ignorant of the positive returns that came from providing small loans to poor farmers. So, with inspiration from Muhammed Yunis, a microfinance pioneer who won the 2006 Nobel Prize, they started purchasing shea butter from a Tongolese farmer’s cooperative. They sourced the materials for the soaps directly, skipping the part of the process where large chemical corporations usually get involved. The result was a superior product, one that’s gone from Togo to the shelves of eco-friendly stores like Whole Foods.

Micro-financing has been particularly beneficial for poor, marginalized women throughout Togo and West Africa. These women, interested educating their children and providing them with healthcare, were early adopters of the system. For centuries, they had been confined to producing food without financial freedom, forced to hand over day-to-day decisions regarding their lives to men in their rural villages. By starting their own small businesses, they found that they could single-handedly take care of the needs of their families, even if they were abandoned or widowed by their husbands. Helped by entreprenuers like Mike and Jason, these women are now empowered to live better lives by managing their finances directly.

But just having a heartwarming story isn’t enough to move a product off shelves, so Mike and Jason made sure that they were high-quality—microfinance aside. VIVO’s products come in a variety of lovely, vaguely Victorian fragrances. If you’re in a British Empire mood, there’s one available in rosewater & jasmine. For the more masculine of men (although who doesn’t like a man who smells like lemongrass & verbena), there’s the innocuous-smelling Brazilian Acai & Pomengranate.

By pitching both a clean body and a clean conscience, Mike and Jason are making a real difference for the women of Togo—and joining the growing group of entrepreneurs who want to make money by doing good.