How We Got Here...
Founder, Sean Busch, started his relationship with cleaning at 16 years old. He started a mobile auto detailing business when he first got his license. He listened to his entrepreneurial parents and found a way to make money doing something he loved. He loved cars since he was a toddler so this made sense. As he grew up, so did his services. He posted his work on online discussion forums and was approached by half a dozen chemical and equipment manufacturers to join their R&D team. Sean ended up putting himself through college with this business, working most of the weekends during the school year and full-time during the summer. His work ethic and attention to detail stood out to a number of his clients. One, a prominent CEO in the healthcare space, pushed him to interview for a role at his company. He started his corporate career in the healthcare sales space. This further emphasized his focus on a patient/customer first approach, given the life altering nature of the products he sold.
He had another client who relocated his company to Austin. He was so impressed with Sean’s detailing work that he flew him and his wife, Liz, down to Austin to detail his fleet of exotic cars. At the end of the trip, he asked Sean to come work for him as a Director of Business Development for an online CPG company – something he had zero experience doing. Sean and Liz relocated to Austin in 2010.
Sean spent 3 years at his former client’s company and fell in love with CPG and ecommerce. When his itch to start something began to grow, it intersected perfectly with meeting his Puracy co-founder, then his direct neighbor, Paul Tracy. They strategized over business ideas while playing ping pong in Paul’s garage late at night and talking about their favorite team, the Green Bay Packers. In the summer of 2013, they both were in the midst of family planning and doing what most soon-to-be parents do – check every cabinet and see what we they were using to clean every area (and person) in their household. They realized they had some “clean” products but needed more. The big realization, though, was that they didn’t work that well. With Sean’s e-commerce training and seeing how Amazon’s FBA program was still in its infancy for CPG, the light bulb went off. Sean and Paul founded Puracy in late 2013 and launched in January 2014, a natural cleaning and personal care products brand focused on soon to be and young moms. Their focus on pure ingredients, maximum efficacy, and a constant customer feedback loop (which fueled innovation) allowed them to get out to a fast start on Amazon vs. their much larger competitors. Puracy bootsrapped its way to profitability in just over a year and continued growing throughout the company history. Puracy was featured in dozens of articles and on the shelves of Target, Walmart, and Kroger. Sean and Paul sold the brand in 2021 and Sean remained running the brand until late 2023.
During this time, Sean started a family. It took over a year for his wife, Liz, to get pregnant with both pregnancies and, unfortunately, she lost a few pregnancies along the way. When COVID hit, they hunkered down and Sean started to work from home quite a bit more – like many dads. During this time, he started to chip in around the house more and enjoyed seeing his children grow. He liked being present and a role model for his children. Liz took notice, too. In essence, COVID helped strengthen their familial bond.
The light bulb went off again.
Sean realized that the entire household cleaning business was sexist. Mrs. Meyer’s, The Laundress, Miss Mouth’s, Nellie’s, Aunt Fannie’s, Grandma’s Secret Stain Remover. Those
were the obvious ones. But if you really dug into it, 100% of the cleaning products on the shelves were targeted at 50% of the population – women.
Did men clean? Sure they did.
And many more did since 2020. Sean found that dads were underrepresented in the marketplace. They were often spoke down to by marketers and casted as “outdoor chore duty-only.” His research found that dad’s were very interested in a cleaning product that worked really well, had cool packaging, passed the “mom test” (read: clean ingredients), and could be purchased online. And so, DadMode was born. Designed to empower young dads to take over specific cleaning tasks while serving as a role model to their children and increasing the frequency of intimacy with their spouse, or “choreplay.” This is true and has been shown in a number of studies – men who do more chores get laid more.
Our goal is to provide enviable cleaning products that work easily, the first time, and make dads the superheroes of the household. We do all of this with quite a bit of dad humor mixed in with authentic situations. Life is messy but messes often leave memories you look back and laugh at. So, try to enjoy it. These moments are fleeting and go too fast. We want to be there as you navigate through the most memorable years of your family’s life.
