A cleaning company that reads labels for a living.
Verdant Home has cleaned Portland houses since 2016 on one rule: if we cannot publish what is in it, it does not come into your home.
- Founded 2016
- Nine cleaners
- Portland, Beaverton, Lake Oswego
There is a version of this business that would be much easier to run. Buy the products with the leaf on the label, say the words natural and gentle a lot, and never write down what is actually in the bottle.
It would also be the version that made our founder lose her sense of smell. That happened in a bathroom in Irvington in 2013, using a product a supervisor had described as safe, in a room with the door shut and no working extractor fan. Nobody had lied exactly. Nobody had read the label either.
So the whole company is arranged around the reading. We publish the ingredient lists. We publish the one product that is not plant-derived. We publish the situations where a gentler product is the wrong answer. It makes the marketing harder and the sales conversations shorter, and the clients who stay tend to stay for years.
Four things that do not change.
We publish what is in the bottle
Every product we carry has its full ingredient list on this site, including the one that is not plant-derived. If we cannot publish it, we do not use it.
We are paid by the visit, not by the upsell
Cleaners here are on an hourly wage with no commission on add-ons. Nobody has a financial reason to tell you that you need an oven clean.
We say when the job is not ours
Mould over roughly ten square feet, carpet extraction, post-construction dust and pest contamination all go to somebody else. We keep a list of who.
The same people come back
Recurring clients get the same two cleaners. It is better for the house and it is better for the person walking into it.
How the practice changed.
Four moments where we found out we had been doing something slightly wrong, and changed it.
2016
One person, one van, a list of ingredients
Rosalind Okereke had spent nine years cleaning for two larger Portland companies and had lost most of her sense of smell to a bathroom product she was told was safe. She started Verdant Home with a rule: nothing goes in the van whose full ingredient list cannot be published.
2018
Colour-coded cloths, then everything else
The cloth system came from hospital cleaning rather than domestic cleaning, and it turned out to be the single biggest improvement we ever made. It cost nothing. It just required never bending it.
2021
Sealed vacuums, not just HEPA filters
We had been buying HEPA-rated machines for years before realising the filter is only half the story. An unsealed body lets fine dust bypass the filter entirely. We replaced the fleet.
2024
The products page went up
Publishing every ingredient list, including the disinfectant that is not plant-derived, lost us two clients and won us considerably more. It is the page people read before they call.
The machine nobody photographs.
A true HEPA filter captures at least 99.97 percent of particles at 0.3 microns, the size that is hardest to catch. That number only means anything if the body of the vacuum is sealed, because otherwise air takes the easier path around the filter and the fine dust goes straight back into the room. Filters here are replaced on a schedule, not when somebody notices the suction has dropped.
It is the least photogenic thing we own and it does more for the air in a house than any bottle in the caddy.
The rest of the kit
Come and check our work.
Ask us for the ingredient list, the insurance certificate or the cloth protocol before you book. Every one of them exists and every one of them is yours to read.