Pharmacy Student Cleans Up With Unique Business

When Sara Jezierski moved from Houston to Amarillo in August 2010, she rented an apartment just as many of her pharmacy school classmates did. Today, as she nears the end of her second year of classes, that same apartment has transformed into a breeding ground for some of the creepiest microorganisms, some of which can still be seen in the dead of night when all the lights are out.

It all started in January 2010 when the Amarillo campus was closed for two days due to a heavy dose of snow.

“We had just finished immunology the previous semester and so I still had all that information fresh on my mind,” Jezierski said. “I thought it would be funny to have a soap that was shaped like a Petri dish or even antibodies, which had a dual meaning since it was literally helping rid the germs from your hands. I thought, ‘Surely someone has thought of this; why can’t I find it anywhere?’ And then it hit me: if it didn’t already exist, it was just too good of an idea to ignore.”

Learning the Ropes

Within days, Jezierski was learning how to make soap and exploring the possibilities of morphing her idea into a product. In late January she came up with a name for her new companyCleaner Scienceand her unique soaps hit the market in February.

“From there it has kind of snowballed and evolved into what it is today,” Jezierski says. “My first products were the Petri dish soap and a soap that was shaped like an antibody.”

In the beginning, Jezierski regarded the making of germ-impersonating soaps to be a way to share a funny idea with the world. Any profit she turned would be a bonus to apply toward her increasingly large school tab. She soon discovered, however, that there was a niche market for her product and it was growing at a faster rate than the bacteria her sudsy designs were intended to mimic.

“When I first started, I thought making 10 soaps at a time was big business,” Jezierski says with a laugh. “Now, I have to make a hundred soaps in a single batch just to keep up sometimes. It’s interest­ing how I’ve adapted to keep up with the work and it’s amazing how it has grown and how much I’ve learned along the way.”

Growing a Business

Today Jezierski and Cleaner Science offer 20 different Petri dish soaps. The product line includes such entertaining microbes as E. coli, Salmonella, and Legionella in a variety of colors and scents. In addition, she recently added a line of breath mint-sized soaps that look like red blood cells and are available in 17 fragrances.

Most of the soaps are made from an all-natural 100 percent soap base, though a few also include aloe, olive oil and natural honey. For added effect, Jezierski makes some of the soaps glow in the dark.

What was once a typical college student’s apartment now resembles a research laboratory, also fully equipped with shipping supplies.

To cope with her schoolwork and running a business, Jezierski has learned to more effectively prioritize her responsibilities. She has also been forced to hone her multi-tasking abilities. There have been times when she’s had a wholesale order of soaps to finish and an exam to study for at the same time. However, she said the mixing and switching of responsibilities adds an interesting element to what used to be the normal day-to-day life of a pharmacy student.

“Cleaner Science gives me a good outlet to express my creativity, to switch on that right side of the brain, so to speak, when I have been maxing out my left side all day,” Jezierski said. “The nice thing about running Cleaner Science is that most of those things don’t have an exact time they need to be done, so I have a lot of flexibility and I get to make my own schedule; I can make soap at 3 a.m. if I need to. The only time constraint is to make it to the post office before they close for the day.”

Preparing for the Future

She said running Cleaner Science has aided her development as a student and as a pharmacist.

“One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned is that the more work you put into whatever you do, the more you’re going to get out,” Jezierski said. “You should also never give up on something that you believe in just because it may not be working out. The reason it’s not working is not because it will never work; it just means it may not work they way you’re doing it, and when you feel like quitting, you’re probably closer to achieving your goal than you realize.”

Jezierski isn’t sure how, or if, she’ll be able to merge her pharmacy career with her soap business. Pharmacy is her career calling, but her artistic muse reaches out to her through Cleaner Science. All she knows today is that she wants to do both for many years to come.

“It’s truly been an amazing journey thus far, and although I’ve put in countless hours of work to get to where I am, I still feel very lucky to have received the exposure I have,” Jezierski said. “There have been hundreds of positive and interesting people that I’ve had the opportunity to meet along the way, people who I wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise. And I love the fact that I get to be part of the humor when someone might be laughing while washing their hands today.”