The n.a.k.e.d story by Christopher

I was looking for a new business that would have real impact and would allow me to incorporate my varied business experiences. I had been interested in cleaning products for a couple of years as I was always uncomfortable with the types of cleaning products that were available, and in particular with cleaning commercial kitchens it had always bothered me that we were cleaning with poisons on our work surfaces and then we were preparing food on the work surfaces. I come from a commercial cooking background and have been a chef, caterer & restaurateur for the majority of my professional career (with some other businesses I will explain later :-), also having a dog that was licking my home surfaces only exacerbated the feeling. So I had begun to experiment with making my own cleaning products with vinegars, lemon & baking soda, infusing them with foraged plants and using essential oil. I'd noticed the pill system that can be diluted in water to form a liquid. My gut feeling was that this is clearly more efficient as a system on many levels: there is no need to transport and distribute water in bottles, so the weight and size is far less in pill form and there is also the plastic waste issue. This system removes the need for disposable spray bottles. My ex had tattooed a smiley face on my left wrist during midsummer celebrations 2024, and one night I was thinking about this pill system when I noticed the smiley face and it clicked. I've always been content-focused from my early days skateboarding, and I started to imagine the business, a counter-cultural cleaning brand. The tagline "get clean" came to mind and I thought we could have an opportunity here to promote sobriety and clean habits, and we would donate 10% of our profits to charities that help with homelessness and addiction, a subject that is very close to my heart as I've lost a few friends this way and had struggles with other friends and family. I started to research cleaning products and ordered some ingredients. My recipe development background came in helpful and I think I also just got quite lucky with the formulation. It came surprisingly quickly. I took the powder form and we tested it in our commercial cleaning operations in Helsinki (we have a cleaning company with Mahdi called Smile Cleaning :-), where we clean bars, cinemas, art studios, etc. I flew back to the UK (I'm Welsh) and gave samples to my friends and family. My mum started to use our product in her cleaning business in Wales also. Everybody was reporting that it was an exceptional cleaning product and my mum, whose hands usually react badly to cleaning products, was not having this issue with our formulation. We had a product that worked and then started the journey to make it into a pill form and build the brand. I started to build a team from my network of friends and contacts to help and consult in their areas of expertise, some becoming shareholders of our new enterprise. We were originally supposed to be called Smileys but we had a trademark issue, so I came up with n.a.k.e.d (now aliens know earth is doomed), "naked" as in transparent and pure. Thank you for reading, Christopher Dare.