Dr Bronner

Dr Bronner's was founded in 1948 by Emanuel Bronner, a third-generation master soapmaker from a Jewish-German soapmaking family. The Heilbronners had been making liquid castile soap in Germany since the 1880s. Emanuel emigrated to the United States in 1929; his parents and most of his family were murdered in the Holocaust. He started over in California making pure-castile soap by hand and giving bottles away at his lectures on what he called the Moral ABC, his belief that all humanity is one. People kept taking the soap and walking off, so he printed the message directly onto the label, which is how the iconic tiny-text wrap was born.

The company is still owned and run by the Bronner family today, six generations into the trade. The 18-in-1 castile soap is the same olive-and-coconut-oil formula Emanuel made by hand, now scaled and certified to USDA Organic and Fair for Life standards. Dr Bronner's runs its own fair-trade supply chains in Sri Lanka, Ghana, and the Palestinian West Bank, caps executive salaries at five times the lowest-paid employee, pays 100 percent of employee healthcare, and donates the majority of profits to social and environmental causes. The soap is the product, but the way it gets made is the brand.