Alumni Spotlight: Melissa Lush (MBA'98), Co-founder of Force of Nature

Interview by Marissa Dai (B’26)

Meet Melissa Lush (MBA'98), co-founder of Force of Nature! Force of Nature was launched in 2016 to get the toxic chemicals and single-use plastic bottles out of cleaning products.

After graduating from Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, Melissa built a career in new product development and brand management at P&G, developing new products and sending them all over the world into different markets. In this interview, she shares her insights and lessons learned as an entrepreneur on a mission to clean up the cleaning industry.

How did your prior career experience influence your entrepreneurship?

I always really liked the fact-finding mission of figuring out what problems people had in terms of the products that they use every day and figuring out ways to make their lives simpler, easier, more fulfilling, etc. That was the beauty of working for a big CPG company like P&G; they have these huge resources to go figure out how to make lives better for consumers. You got to do really cool research, like in-home ethnographies, watching people go through their day, observing their frustrations, and identifying things they needed that they couldn’t even articulate yet. And then you had all these interesting resources to figure out how to creatively overcome those challenges and to make life better for people.

I also thought it was super cool to be able to see the stuff coming off your manufacturing line. When you're trying to design a product, you have to think about how you're going to manufacture this at scale and the kinds of trade offs that you have to make in terms of the product design in order to hit your cost targets and make them accessible to consumers all over the world, regardless of their income levels. So, this process was a really great way to learn about product development. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, I could take the parts I liked best, which was that discovery of what you can do better. Now, I can do it really fast because I don’t have all of the bureaucracy at a big company. Once you take off those shackles, the speed with which you can do everything when you're doing something entrepreneurially versus at a really big company is an entirely different world.

How did your experience at Georgetown influence you throughout your career journey?

I think Georgetown gave me the mindset to look at things in terms of how I can shake things up to make it better for the world. The industry that I'm in now is the cleaning industry, and it's been the same for 100 years. The ingredients that are in everything out there have been around forever and ever. People are used to making all these accepted trade offs. For example, to kill listeria or salmonella or COVID, you have to use bleach — but that’s actually not the case. There's a lot of reasons to not do what my company is doing, because of these huge entrenched competitors who really want you to go away, but I feel like the mindset you have coming out of Georgetown is, “No, you're here to shake things up and make the world better. And we're going to give you the tools and the skills to be able to do it.”

Was there an “aha” moment that inspired you to create Force of Nature?

I think for me, and for a lot of people, you really think about the products that you're using when you have children. For cleaning, you're suddenly doing it all the time–like all the time–and you're doing it around this little body that you want to keep safe and healthy from everything. It just makes you really think, “Oh my God, what am I spraying into the air? What am I leaving on the surface that he could touch and then touch his eye or put on a toy which he then puts in his mouth?” Around that same time, I was talking to some of my ex-colleagues about potential new products. We were looking for new opportunities to maybe bring something from the industrial space into the consumer space. We always thought that would be an interesting way to go, and so we found this technology that had been around for 50 years, but there were some issues with it that kept it in the industrial space, instead of going into the consumer space. And you can actually do a lot of different things with the technology, but my own experience in terms of cleaning and wanting to keep it really safe around my family guided this particular application that we have the product in right now.

So, it was kind of a convergence of different things coming together, all at the same time. And then also during that same time I was learning about this substance that's called hypochlorous acid. Hypochlorous acid is what our appliance makes, but I learned about it in a different context, which is that it's also used in wound healing products. If somebody has a burn that's healing, or somebody has surgery and they're worried about scarring, there are a number of products out there that have hypochlorous acid in them because it's very gentle on tissue, but it's also really good at killing pathogens. My son had an accident at school which required him to get stitches, and I was chatting with the nurse about how to keep him from having a bad scar on his forehead. We started talking about hypochlorous acid, and it was like, “Oh my God, we're actually looking at that right now for a potential product! That's really interesting.” Anyway, it was a number of things that converged on the personal and professional side that resulted in the product that we launched. And it's what our company's built around now.

Do you often feel pressure as a woman in a male-dominated industry? How do you maintain work-life balance in spite of this pressure?

I think that having a supportive family around you really, really helps. My husband works for the company too. He's very supportive and takes on a lot of the company stuff, as well as the family stuff, so we divide and conquer. That's a critical piece. Then, I think it's just trying to eternally focus on determining what is the most important thing, and what do I really have to be involved in versus what are things that other people can do. When you're at a small company, there's always something to do. You could fill up 72 hours in a day easily, so you have to constantly think about what things you uniquely can add value to versus things that other people can do instead. Otherwise, you just get sucked in, and you never get out. The little stuff eats you alive because it's so endless. Somehow, I just have to create a hard line and focus on the big stuff that's really going to make a difference. It's hard. It's definitely hard.

On a more positive note, what is the most fulfilling part of your job?

It's so fun. It's amazing to do something that's serving a real need in terms of making people's lives better and making the planet healthier. There's a ton of creativity because you are starting from scratch.When I worked at P&G, I was working on brands that were over 50 years old–huge, billion dollar brands. There's a lot of good that comes from that, but you also don't have endless flexibility because you're starting with something that's working really well, and you're making small incremental changes to it. But this is really starting from a clean sheet of paper. I can try whatever I want, test whatever I want, and it's really fun to be able to do that. We have a very small group of people who work at the company, but everybody's super fun and committed, and we all collaborate well, which makes it rewarding too. It helps get you through the drudgery and the hard times and the frustrations. It's just great to be able to have the freedom to do new things whenever you want because you're a small agile company. That's what I love about it.

What is one thing you wish everyone knew about this industry?

I think the thing that people would be surprised to know, and should know, is that you do not have to use toxic chemicals and single-use plastic bottles to keep your house clean and safe from germs. People think that you have to use bleach or other harsh chemicals and those nasty single-use plastic bottles. Cleaning does not have to be the unsafe, unhealthy exercise that it is now. There's this research that came out a couple of years ago that showed over the long term, the impact of all of those cleaning chemicals is cumulative. On just your lungs, it’s the same impact as if you smoked a pack a day. That's from the top three cleaning chemicals that are in basically every cleaner on the shelf. And that's just on adults. If you think about the impact on children, it's even more worrying. Most people also don’t know that manufacturers are not doing long term health impact studies. Health studies are not required at all from the regulatory standpoint, and certainly no companies are assessing the impact over time. And people just don't realize that because they've been educated for so long by the cleaning industry that to clean, you have to use the toxic stuff to kill the really scary germs. And it's just that's just not the case.

What is your vision for Force of Nature? Where do you see the company going in the future?

At the end of the day, we're here to clean up the cleaning industry. People don't need to be using toxic chemicals and single-use plastic bottles anymore. That's the foundational thing that we're trying to do right now. However, there are lots of other problems caused by pathogens like bacteria, viruses, mold, and mildew, so there are lots of different categories and applications where our technology is relevant. So we're always looking for the next place we could apply what we’ve developed. 

And, people really want to stop using single-use plastic bottles. So our approach of making something as you need it and using it in reusable bottles — that is something that is really appealing to people in lots of different categories. Now, I can't say specifically what, but we have lots of different things in the works where we can apply what we've learned from the cleaning industry to help clean up other industries as well.

Do you have any advice for students interested in entrepreneurship? 

I think that there are so many different entrepreneurs who would love to give students a peek into the world of entrepreneurship. I was on the phone yesterday with somebody who is consulting on the side for a single-use origin spices company, simply because she loved their products and cold-called them, asking to get involved. She just reached out to them because she was a customer who loved their products and had this natural curiosity — and they loved that. This has happened to me several times. I've had a lot of current students and new grads do consulting projects for me because I need the help. I can't do it all. And it's such a fun, interesting way for them to get a peek into different types of entrepreneurship and its joys and trials and tribulations. So I think if you find a product or a company that you think is really cool, and you're interested in entrepreneurship, contact them and say, “This is what I'd love to learn about. I'd be happy to do a project for you for a month or two.” And they're probably gonna say yes, and it'll be a really amazing experience.

Learn more about Force of Nature here: https://www.forceofnatureclean.com/