The founder and CEO of The
Caldrea Company--named after daughters Calla and Aundrea--acknowledges she's
been keeping house for most of her 51 years. "As the eldest daughter among nine
siblings, I was expected to help my mother with all the household chores."
After nursing school and a short stint as an admitting nurse in Des Moines,
Iowa, Nassif moved to Minneapolis, got a degree in English and began her career
in marketing and branding. Eighteen years of working at the Target Corporation,
building a marketing design business and consulting with clients, such as 3M,
Walt Disney and IBM, sharpened her sensitivity to consumer tastes and trends.
"We knew, from the beginning, we wanted to create a high-end product, then
reinvent it for the mass market, have fun and make money," says Nassif.
And while running her new business venture, Nassif never forgot the early
lessons she learned from her mother. "My mother saved everything," says Nassif.
"She always said, 'You throw out more in a teaspoon than your husband can bring
home in a bushel basket.'" Her mother's thrift inspired her to reinvent the
luxury Caldrea products into a new line of moderately priced cleaning items and
tools under her mother's name--Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day.
She also incorporated her mother's lessons into her marketing. "One day a man
called, said he was impressed with the Mrs. Meyer brand and asked who my
copywriter was," says Nassif. "I burst out laughing because everything about
Mrs. Meyer is true. She's a real person."
With the Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day line available in more than 2,700 stores
nationwide, Nassif is now working to get it into the big box stores like
Wal-Mart and Target. Caldrea products are on the shelves of more than 2,200
stores, and Nassif's creative team is designing a private collection for more
than 10 million units in 2006. Her joy is the passion she feels for the products
and the discovery involved in building the business over the past seven years.
Nassif has faced some tough challenges along the way, such as getting
retailer acceptance for her innovative line of products, and training and
educating a sales team who didn't "get it" for some time. She admits she didn't
understand how the R&D and manufacturing side of business worked, either, but
she believed in the success of the product line, hired creative people and
persevered. Determining a price point for the products also proved challenging,
since she was pioneering a line of cleaning products as a fashion or gift item.
Not content to settle for The Caldrea Company's success, Nassif is also
focused on teaching the lost art of cleaning house. "People don't know how to do
this anymore," she says. Her books, Laundry and Spring Cleaning, respond to
questions raised by her products' consumers and reflect her new passion for a
positive cleaning experience. Her hallmark advice: "First, you organize; then
you turn up the music real loud."
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