If ever there was a pure Houston brand, Branch Basics is it. These natural home cleaning products were born in H-Town, and their Texas roots run deep.

Branch Basics co-founder Allison Evans is a Houston native who was raised two streets from her current house. Her parents live two blocks south. Her in-laws are five streets over. Evans married her high school sweetheart, and the two have been together since she was 16. Branch Basics’ investors, friends and family are all based in Houston too.

It’s no surprise, then, that Houston is the largest and most important market for Branch Basics – and a new partnership is in the works with Texas’s biggest and best-loved grocery chain. With a recent expansion into Target and other national stores, Branch Basics is now a national brand with a team in every time zone in the United States.

But before Branch Basics became a fairytale success story, Evans lived through a nightmare of health crises – a revolving door of doctors and chronic, serious pain that ultimately became her entrepreneurial inspiration.

“I had my first period in sixth grade,” Evans says. “And never had another one.”

An endocrinologist told her she had the worst case of PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) he’d ever seen, and that she would never have children.

Evans pushed ahead to attend the University of Texas, where she developed debilitating neck, shoulder and back pain. Pain that became so severe that she was registered as a disability student and put on a regimen of painkillers, antidepressants, sleeping pills and muscle relaxers. At one point, Evans was told she had early-onset multiple sclerosis.

That’s when Evans turned to her “hippie aunt,” Marilee Nelson, who started talking about toxins. Nelson, an environmental health consultant, had suffered from severe allergies, asthma and hormonal disruption as a kid. Her son had a serious chemical sensitivity that was cured through her clean living, food as medicine approach. At her wit’s end, Evans moved to the Texas Hill Country to live with Nelson and try to get a handle on her health.

“She wanted to know what I was eating. She asked about pesticides, paints, synthetic fragrances,” Evans says.

Out of her depth but desperate to get better, Evans cut out Splenda, the microwave, synthetic candles and dryer sheets, and learned to shop the perimeter of the grocery store. Nelson put her niece on a strict macrobiotic diet.

“We ate clean food in a toxin-free home,” Evans says.

Within eight weeks, she was off her medications and her cysts were gone. The woman once told she’d never have children has since given birth to four healthy babies, all under the age of 9.

“As long as you have breath in your lungs, you can heal,” Evans says. “We’re not at the mercy of our genetics. Genetics loads the gun, but our choices pull the trigger.”

The Branch Basics Beginnings

After her health scare, Allison Evans became a woman on a mission, driven to educate others about the wellness lifestyle she’d come to embrace. Branch Basics started as a blog, where Evans wrote about healthy food and the dangers of toxic ingredients in home cleaning and personal care products. To her surprise, the blog grew to more than 600,000 followers.

“I didn’t know how to monetize my passion,” she says. “But eventually we figured it out.”

Evans co-founded Branch Basics with her college roommate Kelly Love and her aunt Nelson. In the early days, she filled bottles on weekends in the back of her dad’s law office, selling mostly to friends and family – “real grassroots stuff,” she notes.

Eventually, “people got wind of how I’d healed by removing toxins and wanted to try our products,” she says. “Not only because they’re clean, but because they work really well.”

Branch Basics products are fragrance free, plant based, hypoallergenic and non-irritating.

“You can clean a fish tank with our products and not harm the fish,” Evans says. “Our products are safe enough to clean a baby’s bottom and remove eye makeup. But they’re strong enough to remove the toughest stains.”

The brand’s flagship Concentrate is formulated so consumers add their own water, making it more sustainable, longer lasting and cheaper to ship. (Ready-to-use versions are also available.) The Concentrate is 100 percent bio-based and biodegradable, and it’s Certified Made Safe, EWG-Verified, Cruelty-Free Verified and independently tested as a skin and eye non-irritant.

Despite Branch Basics’ growing national success, Evans remains dedicated to educating consumers in her hometown, with community wellness events planned to kick off at Houston’s Memorial Park later this year. She wants to share her wellness lifestyle — grass-fed meat, organic vegetables, natural fiber — with as many people as possible.

“Our brand began in order to educate and build community,” Evans says. “And we want to expand and double down on that original mission.”