During this year´s major awards ceremonies, Hollywood celebrities will be taking home gifts from a Plantation business.
Essential Safe Products, ESP, of Plantation will be a part of the festivities in the gift lounge at the Grammys and in the swag bag at the Academy Awards. The company´s website is a one-stop shopping place for nontoxic and eco-friendly household items.
“It´s out of the box, it´s not your Rolex, it´s not your typical product that you would see in a gifting suite,” said Tina Ansah, director of Entertainment Marketing at Distinctive Assets, which handles celebrity product placement and product introductions in award shows.
Launched last September, ESP is the brainchild of Susan Masimore. Years earlier, a friend had told her about the damaging effects of microwaves, a conversation she took to heart. Later, while eating at a restaurant, the friend told her about the toxins contained in the plastics used to make water bottles.
“I´d heard of it, but I can tell you generally I kind of looked away,” she said.
Masimore began conducting her own research. As she examined the items in her kitchen and the serving containers she gave to her children, she noticed that certain words kept coming up: phthalates, BPAs and polystyrene. She decided to revamp her kitchen to rid it of plastic cups, coated cookware and water bottles. But when she went looking for items that were free of toxins, she discovered how difficult it was to find them.
“I´d go to different retail stores and they´d have one thing but not another,” she said. “I had to go to a lot of different websites. It was kind of cumbersome.”
That´s where the idea for ESP was born. Masimore wanted to create a credible website where people wanting to lead a toxin-free lifestyle could shop for household items. She started the business with the friend who got her thinking of it in the first place and then built the company with her daughter Hannah when she returned from college.
Now the president of the company, Hannah works from an office in Plantation, running the website and getting the word out not only about the more than 300 products the firm carries, but also about the dangers that lurk in some of our most basic wares.
“We´re just trying to give people an option based on their own lifestyle and what they want and what they believe,” she said. “Hopefully we have the product that they can incorporate into their lifestyle.”
ESP took a leap forward one recent morning when Hannah was working out and watching Taylor Swift on TV during the Country Music Television Awards. She remembers thinking, wouldn´t it be great if Swift were holding one of the company´s water bottles? Serendipitously, Ansah from Distinctive Assets called Hannah that night to accept her pitch to feature ESP´s products during the Grammys on Feb. 12 and Academy Awards on Feb. 26.
“Their cookware, their kitchen wares are everything people use morning, noon and night,” Ansah said. “Doesn´t it make sense to actually use products that are beneficial and nontoxic? I never thought about that.”
The website has caught on nationwide with consumer hubs in Chicago and California. Floridians are catching on, too, but are still learning. While tabling at the Winter Boat Festival, Hannah had a lot of people ask her what BPAs were.
“It was very eye-opening,” she said. “There are a lot of people in this world who don´t know about chemicals and BPAs. … They don´t realize that it´s in their cookware, it´s in their water bottles that they´re drinking very day”.
Via Sun-Sentinal
