Berea’s New Refill Shop, Mindful Mercantile, Is Now Open

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

Rachel Kovach runs the small business, located inside the Berea Business Incubator building at 398 W. Bagley Road. The shop, in a back corner unit, is set to host its grand opening on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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 graphic design for 29 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.”

To start, Mindful Mercantile stocks the brand Rustic Strength in its refill section, offering either scented or non-scented products from large jars and jugs for customers to fill up and purchase. Products’ prices vary, and are calculated by weight (minus their containers).

Kovach’s Mindful Mercantile joins other Greater Cleveland refilleries like Cleveland Refill and Refill Goodness, in a wave of conscious consumerism that’s focused on reducing waste. Each concept marks a mission to address 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. Root Gardening is her kitchen garden consulting company, which installed 10 different gardens last year. 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.”