Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Mrs. Meyer’s: How Reinventing a Boring Category Became a Premium Brand | Monica Nassif

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Ryan Alford talks with Monica Nassif, founder of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, about the founder story behind one of the most recognizable brands in household cleaning. Monica explains how her mother’s Midwestern practicality, frugality, and grit became the foundation for a brand that felt different from anything else on the shelf. The conversation moves through the early days of Caldrea, the decision to create Mrs. Meyer’s, the challenge of selling into Whole Foods one store at a time, and the failed Target test Monica chose to walk away from before the buyer kicked her out. Ryan brings the marketing and operator lens, while Monica brings the hard-earned retail wisdom of someone who built a brand by understanding the consumer, the shelf, and the category. They also talk about creativity, packaging, fragrance, social media, product development, and Monica’s book I Bottled My Mother. This episode is especially useful for founders, marketers, and CPG operators who want to understand what it really takes to build a brand that can move from niche to mainstream. Topics Covered The origin story of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day How Thelma Meyer became the soul of the brand Building Caldrea before launching Mrs. Meyer’s Selling into Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, and Amazon Why Monica pulled the brand from Target and came back stronger How fragrance made cleaning products feel giftable and premium What founders need to understand about shelf space Ryan Alford and Monica Nassif on consumer behavior, creativity, disruption, and founder perseverance Links Right About Now https://www.ryanisright.com/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/right-about-now-legendary-business-advice/id1346054199 https://www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford Ryan Alford https://www.ryanalford.com/ https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford/ Monica Nassif / I Bottled My Mother https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/I-Bottled-My-Mother/Monica-Nassif/9781646872336 https://www.amazon.com/Bottled-My-Mother-Growing-Business/dp/1646872339 https://www.target.com/p/i-bottled-my-mother-by-monica-nassif-paperback/-/A-1007820287 https://www.walmart.com/ip/I-Bottled-My-Mother-Grit-Grime-amp-Growing-a-Business-the-Mrs-Meyer-apos-s-Story-Paperback-9781646872336/18837654974

It would be harder because the competition and social media, oh my God, there's a new lip liner every other second. And now you've got AI models hype on all this stuff. The media is so fractured. The choices are endless and you've got to work really hard to really disrupt a category. That's why I tell a lot of entrepreneurs, don't come to me with some little tiny item with some imperceptible change. No one will even notice. No one cares. You have to disrupt something. And I also tell them, hey, go to Target and you tell me who you're going to kick out because you're not getting a wing of target or four extra feet of shelf space you got to take somebody out who you're going to take out why just start thinking like a merchant you don't win by following the playbook you win by rewriting it 700 episodes deep

with the people who actually built something real no theory no fluff no shortcuts this is right about now with Ryan Alford What's up guys? We've got Monica here. She is the founder of Ms. Myers. She put her mother in a bottle. That's what we're going to talk about today. Mrs. Myers, the trailblazing cleaner brand you've been seeing for 25 years. Monica, Nassif saw something most people missed. Household clean did not have to be boring, harsh, or forgettable. She turned her real mother's grit, common sense, and Midwestern practicality into a brand that changed the cleaning aisle. Right here, right now, today. What's up, Monica? Everything's up, Ryan. I just been cleaning all morning. That's what I sort of visualize with the founder of Ms. Myers. Constant in the laboratory, cleaning, finding dirty things and spraying them down. It's never done, never done. How many years are we now with Ms. Myers?

About 25. 25 years. I mean, are we throwing a 25-year party? We probably should, shouldn't we? Here we are, and right about now we're announcing the Mrs. Myers' 25th anniversary party. It's going to be clean as hell. Exactly. I'm old enough and young enough to remember seeing these products at mass general stores,

and then suddenly it was in the grocery store, and then it was in everywhere. What's it been like growing this brand? It's been an interesting challenge. It looks easy because you can see it on the shelves just like you've described everywhere. But when we started, the only places that would take us were the whole food stoves on the coast, Columbus Circle in New York, Atlanta, Texas, San Francisco. Those big cities embrace the brand early on. on and we had a very difficult time landing in the Midwest where I grew up and now where I live.

Back then, we sold one by one into all the Whole Food Stores. Now it doesn't happen. You have to go to Austin at corporate headquarters, but they wouldn't see us. That's how we got started was one by one in upscale grocery stores with Mrs. Myers. Probably could be a movie, I bet. I wrote this book and I was talking to an editor in L.A. She goes, I don't really want to edit your book. I want to make a screenplay.

I said, well, I got to get a book first. It could be. It could be. It could go one of two ways. It could be one of like those marketing and business movies or stories that feel almost big screen-esque or it could just be big screen-esque. I could see it probably going either way, knowing what I know just from what I've read and followed and that you're going to tell us about. It's fascinating because you guys have kind of come up as a brand through all these technology and different things that have happened and how distribution with Amazon and with stores, I've kind of grown up in my marketing career in the those same things. And then when I put the lens of like a brand like Ms. Myers and I think about like what you've decisions made and brand direction and all that is fascinating to me. When we started selling to Amazon, they were six years old. They didn't even know what a case pack was. I go out to Seattle and I call on these guys and it's a bunch of techies running around. They got a big chalkboard out here. There's math problems on it. No one really understands consumer products.

They just understand they've got this big system set up to sell everything to the world. They're experimenting, and we sold our first products on Amazon in case packs of six because they didn't know how to do onesies yet. You know, one bottle of dish soap with something else. It was fascinating calling on them. It was a Wild West out there when we got started with Amazon. Talk to me about the origin of this brand and your mother. When did we know that would be the foundation? My mom is mother of nine.

She had nine babies at age 31, and she ran our house like a drill sergeant. She was the child of the Depression, and she was frugal. She was a great cook. And she raises to be adults, not children. She kicked us out of the house really early to get a job. I had a first brand when I started. And it was called Caldria, named after my two daughters, Cal and Andrea. And that grew really quickly over two years to about three to five thousand specialty stores, upscale gift stores, if you will.

Even we were even in Nordstrom for a while. I thought really quickly someone's going to knock off our concept. And I'm just highly competitive. I grew up in a family of nine with five brothers. Just a terrible loser. I thought someone's going to knock us off. I know it. I thought, let's knock ourselves off.

We start talking about, if we brought in somebody else, a whole other marketing team to obliterate Calderia, just take him out, what would we do? Then we were brainstorming and thought, oh, we should name this after your mom. We're Midwestern. We're frugal. We're earnest.

We're hardworking. I call my mom and said, hey, do you want to be a brand? And she goes, well, what's a brand? I said, I'll explain it later. We got a lot of work to do. That was the genesis. Something really brilliant about that and also scary as hell and crazy as hell, knocking yourself out.

I don't know.