Mindful Mercantile Refill Shop Expands With Second Location

Bottles and glass mason jars line the shelves on one wall of Mindful Mercantile — but customers are encouraged to skip those, and bring their own containers from home. At this refillery, buyers can top up on basic home and bath goods in containers they already have.

Rachel Kovach runs the small business, which opened inside the Berea Business Incubator building at 398 W. Bagley Road in November. In early March, the business expanded with its second location inside The Common Ground market in Medina.

Large drums of laundry detergent, hand soap, cleaning solution and more await their future homes in customers’ bottles and jars. The cozy shop hosts a range of other eco-friendly options: reusable cotton rounds, wool dryer balls, recycled dish cloths and a range of locally and ethically made soaps, deodorants, face oils and accessories.

For Kovach, who worked in corporate project management for 19 years before being laid off, the business stems from her own approach to shopping for her family.

“I’ve really educated myself around what ‘low-tox’ means for me and my family,” she says. “Why do we have to buy from Unilever, SC Johnson, Seventh Generation, Method, Mrs. Meyers — not to drop names, but those are backed by large corporations, and they’re not even that clean of products.”

Mindful Mercantile stocks the Rustic Strength brand in its refill section, offering scented and non-scented products in large jars and jugs. Products’ prices vary and are calculated by weight, minus their containers.

Kovach’s Mindful Mercantile joins other area refilleries like Norwalk's Common Good Collective and Akron’s Ash House in a wave of conscious consumerism. Each concept’s mission addresses a waste problem with local ramifications: A Rochester Institute of Technology study estimates that the Great Lakes experience more than 22 million pounds of plastic pollution annually.

“Everybody has at least 700 bottles in their home right now that you can easily use, and I bet they’re a lot cuter than some of the other stuff that we get at the store,” Kovach says. “I hope there’s a shift.”

Mindfulness extends to other parts of Kovach’s work in gardening and design. Her Conscious Creator brand consultation company offers logo and website design work for local businesses like hers. Her kitchen garden consulting company, Root Gardening, installed nearly a dozen gardens in recent years. Kovach says she first fell in love with gardening after her mother died in 2016.

“It was the one thing that made me feel grounded and alone with my thoughts in all the best ways,” she says. “While I have all these different businesses, at the end of the day, the mission is very simple: It’s just mindful consumerism. It’s an awareness of what we’re putting in and around us at all times.”  

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