Interview With Nate

The past year has been a home run for Dazz NZ. A small business that prides itself on delivering eco-friendly cleaning products that don’t cost the earth.

This is an interview with Nathan Buchan, who introduced Dazz to New Zealand and disrupted the cleaning industry during the Covid lockdown. Partnering with his brother Jacob and mum Mary, Dazz NZ has blown up and has found its roots here in NZ. But not without its setbacks.

Here’s the problem, and the solution.

A pioneer in cleaning.

DAZZ was founded by David Shahan in 2012. David has been working in the cleaning business for over 30 years and is an expert on how to clean effectively and without harmful chemicals. David’s innovative, coin-sized tablets that activate in your tap water are the future of cleaning: safe, eco-conscious, and effective.

Nathan Buchan was introduced to DAZZ cleaners during lockdown in 2020. He fell in love with the concept and felt this is exactly what New Zealand needed to reduce the plastic waste problem in NZ.

11 YEARS AGO, WE SET OUT TO CREATE A UNIQUE CONCEPT IN HOUSEHOLD CLEANERS UNLIKE ANYTHING SEEN BEFORE.

We identified four core objectives that would become our guiding principles…

PERFORMANCE

The first objective was to create highly effective cleaners. After all, if they didn’t clean well nothing else mattered. This is where our founder’s extensive background in the chemistry of cleaning came into play. He was able to develop highly effective formulas that simply got the job done.

To support our claims of efficacy, each DAZZ product was submitted to the TURI Laboratory at the University of Mass for extensive testing. In the end, DAZZ outperformed the leading brands in each of our categories. If you’re a geek for data like we are, here’s a link to the actual test results.

SAFETY

Honestly, formulating highly effective cleaners is easy. For generations, scientists have identified (and developed) numerous chemicals that possess aggressive cleaning properties. Bleach, ammonia, solvents, strong acids, and alcohols have become commonplace in the cleaning arsenal. But as we’ve waged war on grime, the health of our families, pets, homes, and environment have become collateral damage. We knew that nature provides equally effective cleaning ingredients – the trick was to know which ones to use in the right combinations.

DAZZ’s proprietary formulations are ingenious combinations of naturally derived, plant- and mineral-based ingredients. They are created to be safe for you, your pets, your home, and our earth.

SUSTAINABILITY

To state the obvious, plastic recycling is not working. Due to varying resin content (that little triangle with a number you see on many packages) and the high cost of hand sorting, less than 8% of all plastics actually get recycled. 

This challenge is even greater for the cleaning industry. The spray bottles used by most brands go straight to the landfill due to their chemical residues, labels & wraps, and trigger sprayers. 

With over 1 billion plastic containers being discarded every year in NZ, we knew that solving this problem had to be a top priority. With recycling out of the equation, “Re-Use” became the only plausible solution. 

Dazz tablets can be used in any empty spray bottle and are activated with nothing more than plain tap water. The plastic spray bottle use and toss cycle ends with Dazz. 

VALUE

And finally, Dazz needed to be a terrific value.  Afterall, if people no longer needed to buy a new bottle and sprayer each time they run out of cleaning product, they should save money.  At only $3 per fill of cleaning spray or $4 for Foaming Hand Soap, DAZZ rewards consumers with real savings, just for doing the right thing.

New Zealand Herald Article

Lockdown-born cleaning business ‘Dazz’ aims to wipe out single-use plastic bottles …