Hi 👋 We're Cody, Camille, and Erin, the three people building Welpr.
Cody builds the tech and won't stop talking about how the system is rigged against your shampoo. Somewhere between data engineer and conspiracy realist.
Camille runs product and ops. Went non-toxic to heal an autoimmune condition, realized how unnecessarily hard it was, and decided to fix that. If a product is in the directory, she vetted it.
Erin runs content. Expecting a baby, so every product that touches her skin gets interrogated like a suspect.
No investors, no board, no PR department. No one to tell us what to say or what to believe. So we're just going to say what we actually think.
Welpr wouldn't need to exist in a perfect world.
In a perfect world, your home would be a sanctuary where the air you breathe, the surfaces you touch, and the products you use all actively support your health. You wouldn't have to think about it. You'd just live in a space designed for the humans living inside it.
But that's not the world we live in.
Hidden in plain sight
We spend 90% of our time indoors, where pollutant concentrations are often 2 to 5 times higher than outdoors.
Researchers sampled household dust and found pesticides, flame retardants, forever chemicals, plasticizers, and known carcinogens. 258 chemicals in total, many showing up in over 50% of the homes tested.
And that's just what's in the dust.
We sleep on mattresses releasing chemicals linked to cancer and reproductive harm. We drink and shower in water contaminated with chemicals that weaken our immune systems and alter metabolism. We use personal care products that disrupt our hormones and are linked to cancer. We clean our homes with products that trigger asthma and damage our lungs.
And our kids crawl across floors, hands in their mouths, absorbing all of it faster than any adult would.
None of this is visible.
You can't see the benzene in your shampoo or taste the PFAS migrating from your pan to your scrambled eggs. Sometimes the companies making these products know exactly what's in them but don't disclose it (e.g. fragrance). Sometimes the manufacturing process itself introduces harmful byproducts the companies aren't even aware of (e.g. 1,4-dioxane). And sometimes an ingredient is so new that nobody knows the risk profile yet because the science hasn't had time to catch up.
If you knew one sunscreen contained carcinogens and another didn't, you'd buy the safer one. That's how markets are supposed to work: you vote with your wallet, rewarding good products and punishing bad ones.
But markets only work when buyers have enough information to make real choices. When you can't tell which sunscreen is safe and which isn't, you can't vote with your wallet, so overall quality drops. Brands end up competing on marketing claims and price, not safety.
Cody wrote more about this in his essay, "The Quiet Poisoning of the American Home."
Nobody has time for this
For most of the products in your home, a better option already exists. Similar price and performance, but without the harmful ingredients.
The problem is that finding these alternatives is unreasonably hard. Your home has hundreds, sometimes thousands of products. Shampoo, cookware, mattresses, candles, towels, clothing, baby bottles, diapers. Every category has its own safety considerations, its own science, its own brands making claims.
Nobody has time to sort through all of that.
The gap isn't awareness or willingness. People want healthier homes. They just don't have a realistic way to get there.
That's where Welpr comes in.
Someone should be vetting a product before you bring it into your home, enforcing a standard that actually puts your health first. Companies aren't doing it. The government isn't doing it. So we're doing it.
An ingredient label, a certification, even a lab test only tells you so much. They show you what's been disclosed and what someone thought to test for, not what's been left out or what nobody thought to check.
Slapping a safety score on a product doesn't change that. It just creates a false sense of precision. "Is this a 62 or a 68?" is not a useful question. What you really want to know is "should I use this product or not?"
That's why we built the Welpr Standard:Â the line we draw between what's acceptable and what's not. A product either meets our standard or it doesn't, and we show you exactly how we got there. Every source, every decision, all of it open. The standard evolves as the science evolves, and when we get something wrong, we'll say so.
When a product meets the Welpr Standard, we say it's Welpr Approved. Then we give it a Welpr Rating, which is how we help you compare approved products against each other. The rating reflects everything else: how well it performs, how much independent verification backs it up, and what real people think of it.
We've already hand-curated 3,000+ Welpr Approved products from 1,500+ brands across 400+ categories, all free to browse on our website and mobile app.
We're also building tools to make swapping to cleaner products easier. Our ingredient analyzer reads the actual ingredient label, not outdated barcode data, and checks the ingredients against our standard in seconds.
And we know how overwhelming it is to keep track of what's toxic in your home and what isn't, so we built the Swap Tracker to handle that for you.
But we're not done. Not even close.
Beyond products
Today Welpr helps you evaluate products. But a healthy home is more than just the products inside it. Our vision is that Welpr makes your entire home environment healthier, so you don't have to think about it.
Imagine sitting on your couch and knowing, actually knowing, that your home is working for you. That the air you're breathing, the water you're drinking, the surfaces your kids are crawling on are all actively supporting your health. A place that heals you and gives you energy instead of quietly taking it away.
That's what everyone deserves when they walk through their front door. That's what we're building toward.