Sarah Paiji Yoo, the co-founder of Blueland, spends her Sunday hunting for ice cream, avoiding single-use plastic and getting a foot massage with her husband.
Sarah Paiji Yoo started her career in finance and then founded several start-ups, mostly in the fashion and beauty worlds. But during parental leave after the birth of her first child, she realized how many microplastics her family was inadvertently consuming.
“I started to have mixed feelings around pushing people to buy more things, when I didn’t feel like they needed it,” Ms. Yoo, 40, said. “On the other side of becoming a mother, I realized I still loved working, and I still loved early-stage company building, but I just needed more meaning in the work that I was doing.”
So in 2019 she co-founded Blueland, reimagining household cleaning products to eliminate single-use plastic packaging. She appeared on “Shark Tank” (and scored a deal) that same year.
Her company sells tablets that can be mixed with water in reusable bottles to make things like hand soap and cleaning sprays, or dropped directly into a dishwasher, washing machine or toilet. The tablets come in compostable paper packaging.
Ms. Yoo is originally from Cerritos, Calif., and moved to New York City 19 years ago. She met her husband, Kenneth Yoo, at a bar; nine months after their first date, the two were engaged. They had their son Noah in 2017. Colin followed in 2020. The foursome moved into a five-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side the next year.
MORNING SNUGGLES I don’t need an alarm clock on the weekends — I can definitely rely on my kids to wake me up. These days it’s around 6:30, maybe 6:40 if we’re lucky. They run into our room and we usually bring them into bed, not only because it’s a nice moment, but Ken and I are trying to squeeze in an extra few minutes in bed.