Road test PART 1
I have to admit, nothing annoys me more than marketing ploys that attempt to get me to buy a product that is actually useless. Luckily, I’m not easily fooled. I’m the kind of person who would be bluntly uninvited to the home of anyone who watches A Current Affair or Today Tonight while it aired because my scoffing and outright disagreement would annoy anyone. I’m a self-confessed sceptic—through and through.
With that said, I’m finding it difficult
to give anything that is on sale through green4me.net.au the plug I think it
deserves without sounding like my worst enemy. I’ve worked in sales throughout
my whole working life and I truly believe happy customers are what makes a
business successful or otherwise, and to get happy customers I think the key ingredient is
honesty.
In my old job I was lucky enough
to have a boss who shared the same ethics. If a customer came in asking about
something and I genuinely thought it was rubbish or would be no good for them,
I’d tell them and I’d tell them why. Nine times out of 10 that lost a sale but
I really believe that the next time that person wanted something on the same
vein of what we sold they would have enough faith in our service to come back
in knowing we weren’t in it for the money.
This leads me more specifically
to the issue I’m having on green4me. So far I’ve had about 10-15 people ask me
directly, “do soap nuts actually work?” and I’m finding myself sounding like a
bit of an idiot.
To answer the question in a word,
it would have to be “yes” but it really depends on your perspective and what
your expectations and washing habits are. It’s a bit like asking ‘how long is a
piece of string?’
This is why I decided to go with
the road test idea. I realise that most of the people who read this don’t know
me from a bar of soap (pardon the pun) so unfortunately there’s no other option
but to take what I report in and mix it with a bit of your own good judgement.
For what it’s worth though I’m going to report the findings as honestly and
accurately as I possibly can. If you have any questions, issues or anything to
do with what I did please contact me.
So… the story of these garments.
I currently have a three and a
bit year old son and am currently 39 and a half weeks pregnant with number two.
When I was pregnant with my little bloke we had people giving us hand-me-downs
like it was going out of fashion. We knew he was a boy before I gave birth so
by the time he arrived we had enough baby clothes to dress an army of little
fellas.
This is the part where I
shamefully admit there were several bags of clothes that I never even opened.
They just got thrown on the storage pile in the top of his wardrobe to be
sorted through ‘someday’.
Some day finally came with the
impeding birth of number two. We decided not to find out the sex this time so
given that everyone finds out these days we found it really difficult to find
many gender neutral clothes. I though the perfect remedy for that would be to
dress the new addition in what we already had and if need be buy more clothes
when we know if it’s going to be a little pink or a little blue.
Alas, I opened the first bag and
this was literally the first thing I pulled out. Oh my.
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| This is the first photo I took when I pulled it out of the bag. It's with a different camera so I don't think they were quite this yellow but the stains were definitely this bad! |
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| Are the Oxygen Bleach and the Soap Nuts up to the CHALLENGE?! |
I’ve since opened all the bags of
clothes that were ours and I stored myself and they are all still in as-new
condition so I can only assume these outfits were somewhat grubby when they
went in the bag. I’m sure they couldn’t have been this bad (who would have given them to us if they were?!) but after
three years of festering in the bag, let’s face it… they look foul. Up close it
looks like mouldy dirt. The photos are pretty accurate, the stains are a deep
brown.
I was going to just throw these
straight in the bin but I put them in the ‘what can I do with these?’ pile
while I decided if they could be repurposed in some way since I’m trying to
take this “green” life seriously.
So there they sat for a further
few weeks until all the emails started flooding in about Soap Nuts and OxygenBleach and I thought, “what the hell, can’t hurt!”
Below is exactly what I did with the outfits and for the
record they’re original colour is white! You be the judge on the rest.
This is them in the condition in which they were pulled from
the bag a couple of weeks ago.
Step 1 – Presoak
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| Straight after adding the suits |
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| 5 minutes later--work your magic foam! |
As per instructions on the Oxygen Bleach I dissolved half a
cup of powder in about 1/3 of a bucket of hot tap water. I gave it a stir then
put the suits in, poked them under the water and walked away.
24 hours later
The foaming has gone and after a very chilly night the water
is ice cold. I must say though, I’m pretty impressed at this point! Already
MUCH whiter than I expected.
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| Foam's gone and the water is ice cold! |
Step 2 – Washing
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| Wash, baby, wash! |
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| 40'c regular wash |
I chucked them in the machine on their own with 4 x SoapNuts (on their third wash) and a tablespoon of dissolved Oxygen Bleach (as
pictured). All that entails is a tablespoon of powder and just enough hot tap
water to dissolve it. I just poured it all into this bottle, gave it a shake
and tipped it directly on the suits when they were in the machine.
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| The in-wash warriors! |
Step 3
There isn’t really a step three except the standing back in
shock. The wow moment. This is the finished product.
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| After the wash - still wet. |
Now, as I said above you can be the judge of how well they
worked but I must admit that for me personally I am very damn impressed. I know
you can still see the stains on the worse of the two suits but given it was
mouldy dirt (maybe baby food or milk???) that’s been festering in a plastic bag
for three years and was going to be tossed straight up, I don’t get much more
impressed! I would actually consider dressing my bub in these now.
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| After the wash - still wet. |
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| I think this shows pretty accurately how white they've are now |
As I’ve said I’m going to do a more realistic road test on
these two products as soon as I’ve given birth. Thanks to everyone who gave me
suggestions on what to try them out on! I’ll do it ASAP. I’m just waiting until
I’ve given birth (which is any day now) as I want to make the test as accurate
as possible (and to me having the dirty clothes potentially sit in OxygenBleach for a week while I recover isn’t accurate). So stay tuned for part two
and please let me know what you think of this one!
If you want any more info on the products I used you can
also check out my website www.green4me.net.au
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| You can still see a bit of a stain on the suit on the left... but I'm still surprised and impressed with the outcome. |
If you would like to try out soap nuts yourself, you can buy soap nuts on our website www.green4me.net.au
