‘you don’t have to sacrifice efficacy’
Just over a decade ago, Amber Malcom was living what she thought was her best life. As a lawyer in Oklahoma City, she seemed to have everything she wanted. That included a family and a career she had built.
Then Malcom found herself on the doorstep of death. That is when it all changed for her. Malcom is now a business owner who has created her own burgeoning company, and she says she owes it all to her brush with her own demise.
“It changed my perspective on everything. It changed my perspective on life; what’s important, what’s not important,” Malcom said. “I was very career-oriented. I was your typical workaholic lawyer, worked 80 hours a week and kissed my kid on the forehead once at night. I just worked too much. I put too much value in monetary things, and that has completely changed for me. I love doing this and I love doing it with and for my family.”
Malcom is the owner and CEO of Shabby Chick Natural Products, along with her husband, Jason. Located in Duncan, the company produces cleaning products made from 100 percent natural products.
In the past five years, Malcom’s company has been featured twice on the Home Shopping Network, and she has earned prestigious awards from several different business and entrepreneurial associations as she tries to educate the public about the use of natural products.
“My goal has always been to turn us into a household name,” Malcom said. “I want to replace Tide. I’ve said that since my first news interview five years ago. I don’t know if five years is long enough to get there, but I definitely want to take a percent of the market share. I want people to start using safe cleaners. We really, really want to tell people the dangers of cleaning products and that you don’t have to sacrifice efficacy to get healthy cleaners.”
As Malcom charges toward her ultimate takeover, she knows that her story started at one of the most difficult periods in her life some 10 years ago.
“During my second pregnancy I got what was called hyperemesis, which means I just threw up all the time. I lost about 80 pounds while I was pregnant,” Malcom said.
“I had to be put on different machines, intravenous lines that went through my system. Then my immune system quit working, so I kept getting infection after infection. The last infection was actually a fungal infection, and it took part of the sight in my eye and attacked my heart. They didn’t think I was going to make it.”
At the time Malcom was told there were only two medications in the world that could help her. The first one didn’t work. However, the second one was able to save her life.
“Iwasinandoutofthe hospital for about nine months,” Malcom said. “I had over 18 different surgeries. It was a long ordeal, but I finally recovered and was able to get back to work after about five years.”
Yet, when Malcom decided to get back to work, something had changed. She wanted a different life.
Instead of the hustle and bustle of city life, Malcom and her husband decided to go an alternate route in 2014.
“We bought a place up in Marlow right after that, right after we saw I was going to live and I could start planning my life again,” Malcom said. “Then it was about two years after that, that we bought the homestead and started the goats and the chickens and the farming.”
“As soon as I started cleaning my old farmhouse and the smells would just run me out, I thought ‘Well, we’re trying to live healthier, maybe I should get greener cleaners,’” Malcolm said. “I would buy healthier cleaners and they didn’t work so I started making my own.”
Not only had Malcom discovered the off-the-shelf products didn’t work to her satisfaction, but she believed they were unhealthy – even the ones that were labeled natural.
“I did a ton of research. The reason I got into this is I found out that all the cleaning products, and even a lot of the green cleaning products, are not any safer for us,” she said.
“The most dangerous part of a lot of the cleaners in the store is the dyes and the fragrances. We know that those cause cancers. It’s been proven and we’ve known it for years, and they’re actually illegal to put in products around the world. We’re the only country, that allows such toxic chemicals to go into our cleaning products.”
This bit of knowledge fired up Malcom. “When I found out, I was really angry. I felt like I’d been lied to my whole life,” Malcom said. “I got really passionate and so I said, ‘I have to make my cleaners and they have to be a 100 percent natural and safe, and they have to work better than the store-bought brands.’ We’ve been clinically tested, and we outperform leading brands in our all-purpose cleaner and our laundry soap.”
Once Malcom began to make her own products for the family’s use around their home, it was her husband who urged her to go bigger.
“He would take it and go clean all the tools in his shop and the greasy tires, just the stuff that it’s really hard to find good cleaners to clean,” Malcom said. “I kept noticing my bottles had disappeared, I’m like, ‘I just made a bottle of cleaner. Where’d it go?’ Finally, after a couple of weeks, I figured out he’d been stealing them and using them. He’s like, ‘Amber, this stuff is amazing. You need to sell this.’”
After some convincing, Malcom decided he was right and created Shabby Chick Products and started selling her products at local farmers' markets in Oklahoma.
The company’s first big hit was Sassy Lemon Grassy All-Purpose Cleaner. Shabby Chick’s Dangerously Effective Glass Cleaner and laundry soap soon followed.
The Shabby Chick product line has expanded to include 15 additional products. They include insect repellent, stainless steel cleaner, fabric fresheners, carpet cleaner, carpet deodorizer, dish soap, stank stopper, snake oil (an antiseptic spray) and lip balm.
But Malcom soon found out becoming an entrepreneurial success wasn’t going to be an easy journey. “We found out because of the ingredients and our demand that we use quality
100 percent natural ingredients, we were never able to find anyone to make it for us. We had to not only bring the product to market, but we had to learn how to mass-produce it ourselves too.”
In order to get her products just the way she wanted, Malcom had to do something she never thought she had the capability of doing.
“We actually had to invent our own machines to make them,” Malcom said. “We’d go all over the country and meet with all these people and they were like, ‘Man, there is not a machine that does what you need to do.’ So we’d have to go find a machine shop to build what we needed. I liked that we did it because I’m able to control the quality of the product and then I can ensure that nothing toxic is going into the product. But yeah, we didn’t plan for that.”
From their shop in Duncan, Malcom manufactures and sells more than 15 products. Along with her husband, the staff includes eight other women.
“I really do try to employ mostly women because Dun- can is mostly men and manufacturing,” Malcom said. “We really take women in and help them find what they want to do. We teach them how to budget and to have goals and where do they want to be in 10 years.”
Shabby Chicks has steadily grown since Malcom first started selling at flea markets. Her online business really took off.
But when COVID-19 began to spread throughout the country, her message of natural cleaning products really began to hit home.
“We’ve ramped up production,” Malcom stated. “Our sales have, I think, quadrupled just in two months.”
Shabby Chick is listed on the Oklahoma Commerce PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) Source Directory. It provides a listing of companies that supply PPE and other supplies needed for operating according to guidelines set forth by the CDCandintheOpenUp& Recover Safely Plan.
Of the seven companies listed in Oklahoma, Shabby Chick is the only one south of Oklahoma City. They are also only one of two that sells hand sanitizers.
“We came out with a hand sanitizer about a year ago,” Malcom said. “In February, I wonder[ed] if we’re going to see an increase in hand sanitizer sales. Within two weeks, my website was just going nuts. One day it was just kind of quiet and the next thing, we’re about a hundred miles an hour, and it’s been that way ever since.”
Prior to two months ago, Malcom said they had probably sold a few hundred bottles. In the past two months, they have sold more than 5,000 bottles.
As her business continues to grow, Malcom can look back and say that from the day she got sick through today has been a period of personal growth for her. Malcom hopes people use that same mindset during the pandemic and afterwards.
“Sometimes the worst of things lead to the best of things,” she said. “I know there’s a lot of people scared, and they don’t know the future. But I really think we could use this as an opportunity to improve how we treat each other; how we live our lives. I think we could raise our standards as a society [not only] for cleaning products, but also just how we treat each other and how we engage with each other.”