Meet Britt Kagan and Tonia Soteros of Recontained in Venice Beach

Today we’d like to introduce you to Britt Kagan and Tonia Soteros.

Tonia originally came up with the concept for Recontained almost 10 years ago when she was in line to checkout at a bookstore and opened up a book to a random page that said “If everyone in America stopped using body wash, it would save 2.5 million pounds of plastic going into the landfill every year”. She went home and had a sudden awareness of all of the single use plastic waste in her own home & wanted a place to be able to refill it… but couldn’t find one! Hence, the idea of Recontained was born.

Tonia and Britt met through working in the garment industry a few years ago while traveling in Peru for work. They struck up discussions about environmental issues and their views on sustainability. They quickly realized they had a similar mindset and shared similar concerns about where the world was headed! Hence, a partnership was born.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Entrepreneurship is never a smooth road. It’s really hard, and it’s full of triumphs & complete fails. We’ve been lucky enough to have plenty of both. Developing a product line that we could stand behind took a lot of time and energy. We worked with a USA based lab for over a year to nail a product range that is sulphate free, paraben-free, phthalate-free and 80% or higher organic content. All of our products are vegan except for our Dream Creme, which contains beeswax. We think that what you’re putting on your skin and washing down the drain is just as important and using packaging & containers responsibly. We also needed our products to be so amazing that customers wouldn’t think twice about coming back to refill them! We even offer custom essential oil scenting in our store in Venice beach, so you can change up the scent every time you come back if you like! We wanted to make doing the right thing for the planet not only easy but good for you. We also wanted to make sure that our customers didn’t have to give up anything to make better choices so we decided to offer all the things we love and use regularly. That was our greatest challenge so far but we are very happy with where we’ve landed. Having said that, we believe that you can always improve so we will are constantly looking for ways that we can do better.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Recontained – what should we know?
Recontained is a refill solution for the personal care & household cleaning industries. Our product range covers 30 personal care items, 6 household cleaning solutions and 2 pet formulations; all in a refillable format. And, we are constantly working to expand our offering so we can continue to fill the everyday needs of our customers. In store, we also carry numerous low-waste or zero-waste options, gifts and select vintage items! We want to make it a little easier to live an environmentally responsible lifestyle… we like to say we are EcoFabulous!

At Recontained, we don’t think you should have to sacrifice a luxurious skincare routine in order to be eco-friendly. That’s why we made sure to offer an amazing under eye creme (The Miracle Eye Creme), an incredible group of serums, including a serum for mature skin (The Resist Serum), a nourishing face + hair oil (The Eco-Rich Oil), and our Miracle Lip Salve (one of our absolute favorites).

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Ease. We try to make it as easy as possible to go low or zero waste. We’re working on a partnership right now to be able to offer home deliveries for the westside of LA, and are in the final stages of perfecting a process for zero waste refills via mail. People are busy and going zero waste is hard… we’re here to help!

Contact Info:

• Address: 1629 Abbot Kinney
  Venice, CA 90291
• Website: recontained.com
• Phone: 310- 314-6238
• Email: britt@recontained.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/recontained_la/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RecontainedLA/

Suggest a story: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.