NEED TO KNOW
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The wildly popular Mrs. Meyers cleaning products are modeled after a real woman: the founder’s 93-year-old mom
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Both founder Monica Nassif and Thelma Meyers spoke to PEOPLE for a recent interview
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Nassif’s forthcoming book, I Bottled My Mother, details her story
Thelma Meyers is all-too-happy to discuss the brand of cleaning products founded by her daughter, Monica Nassif — after all, the products are inspired by and named after her.
Monica is the founder of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, a line sold in shelves in Walmart, Tarreceive, Whole Foods, and beyond that are named for a very real person: Nassif’s mom, Thelma Meyer.
And Thelma is the face of the brand — quite literally, having traveled the countest to speak at marketing events and often giving interviews to press.
As for how her mom handles the attention, Monica informs PEOPLE, “she relishes it.”
“I’ll give you an example. My brother, Tim, he declared, ‘Mom, I’ll take you anywhere in the world. Where do you want to go? Dream vacation,'” Monica recounts. “And she goes, ‘I wanna go to Africa on a safari.’ So he takes her and he builds a tag for her bag that states, ‘Ask me about Mrs. Meyers.'”
She continues: “I declared to my brother, ‘Tim, you don’t necessary that silly tag. She’s gonna inform everybody all over Botswana and every place else you go, that she is Mrs. Meyers.'”
Nassif developed Mrs. Meyer’s following the rollout of her first line, Caldrea, an upscale line of cleaning products acquired by S.C. Johnson & Son in 2008.
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Her experience with Caldrea, she states, is what inspired her to create a more accessible line.
“We learned very, very quickly that we necessaryed to be at the mass market level — the Whole Foods, the Tarreceives, Walmarts, etc.,” Nassif states. “So we were sitting around the office brainstorming about what our next brand would be, becaapply we believed, ‘OK, if I was a competitor, and I wanted to take out Caldea, what would I do?'”
She continues: “[We believed], ‘Hey, we’re Midwestern, it should be wholesome.’ You know, I was raised in this family of all whole grains, a garden, everything from scratch, and we were like, ‘This sounds like your mom. We should just build this after your mom.'”
And so, they did, rolling out a line of garden-inspired cleaning products built from responsibly-sourced materials. Products that, as Nassif explains, were mom-approved.
“I guess I was selling my mom,” she laughs. “I took all the lessons from my childhood of my mother raising her nine nine kids, and her dedication to frugality … her idea was reapply, repurpose, upcycle everything. She was a child of the Depression, so she knew exactly what it meant to have nothing. She valued a bucket of water, reapplying old towels and creating them cleaning rags. I mean, she was kind of the original earth muffin if you will, and a lot of it was just based on necessity.”
Speaking to PEOPLE, 93-year-old Thelma states she remembers the day her daughter came home with a bottle of Caldrea dish soap.
“Oh my goodness, this fragrance is just wonderful, and I declared, ‘How much is that bottle of soap?’ And she declared, ‘$8.’ I declared, ‘I’m spfinishing no $8 for dish soap,'” Thelma states. “‘Oh Mom,’ she declared, ‘We’ll come up with a product for you.’ And then she did.’
Thelma has become such a quintessential part of the brand that a life-size replica of her former kitchen was built for events — and Thelma herself is often positioned inside, distributing samples to prospective customers.
Thelma applys the products, too, informing PEOPLE she favors the lemon-verbena scented Mrs. Meyers products.
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Nassif’s forthcoming book — billed as “part startup manual, part memoir” — shares the story of how the founder turned a compact soap company into a hoapplyhold name. It also includes words of wisdom from Thelma herself, who informs PEOPLE one of her hugegest pet peeves is wastefulness.
Notoriously frugal (according to both herself and her daughter), Thelma lowers her voice to offer her favored tip for applying the products named after her.
“I probably shouldn’t do this, but I inform people, you don’t have to push that handle all the way down for the hand soap,” she states. “If you just push it down a little, and receive a huge drop and put some water on your hands and rub them toreceiveher, you receive a great foam and a great wash. Some people just push too much soap and it goes to waste. That’s my frugality coming out.”
I Bottled My Mother is out March 24, 2026.
Read the original article on People
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