From an Ugly Kitchen Sponge to a Growing Australian Brand: My Interview With Barkly Basics Founder Natasha Malkov

Some business ideas begin with a detailed business plan, a spreadsheet and months of market research.

Others begin when you’re standing at the kitchen sink wondering why the bloody sponge has to be bright yellow.

That’s pretty much where the story of Barkly Basics began.

I recently sat down with founder Natasha Malkov, and what struck me about her story wasn’t just the growth of the business. It was how ordinary the original problem was.

Before Barkly Basics, Natasha had a background that couldn’t have been much further removed from designer homewares. She trained as a molecular biologist, completed a PhD and worked across pharmaceuticals, universities, consulting and the Victorian Government.

Then she noticed a sponge.

Today, Barkly Basics has grown well beyond that original black-and-white kitchen sponge into a range of household, cleaning, personal care and other everyday products.

Natasha and I spoke about spotting opportunities, manufacturing in China, expensive mistakes, pricing, wholesale, working ridiculous hours and why a tiny inconvenience in your own life can sometimes be the beginning of a genuine business.

Here’s our conversation, condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Kim: Take me back before Barkly Basics. What were you doing professionally when the idea first appeared?

Natasha: I was actually working for the Victorian State Government. I was a project manager and was in a very secure, well-paying job.

Before that, I’d done my PhD, worked in the pharmaceutical industry and had moved through a few different professional roles. I also started a consulting company.

So I certainly didn’t come from a traditional homewares or retail background.

Kim: And the whole thing essentially started with you looking at a kitchen sponge?

Natasha: It did.

I was washing dishes and I was just over having to stash the sponge away all the time.

I thought, *Why can’t I leave it sitting on the sink and have it look good? Why does it have to be bright yellow or bright green?*

We’re a renovation nation. People spend a fortune putting beautiful stone and marble into their kitchens, and then we put these ugly accessories on the sink.

I wanted something I could use every day but didn’t feel like I needed to hide.

That’s really where it started.

Kim: At that stage, were you thinking, “I’ve got a business here,” or were you simply solving your own problem?

Natasha: It was my own problem that I wanted to solve.

It just so happened there was a market for it.

I spoke to my sisters and asked them, “Would you buy a black-and-white sponge?”

Their reaction was basically, “Absolutely. Where can we get one?”

I told them, “Well, I’m thinking of designing one.”

I searched for something similar and couldn’t find what I wanted. Eventually I realised I needed to go where the products were actually being manufactured and see what was possible.

Kim: What happened when you approached manufacturers?

Natasha: The first product I had to spray-paint because the manufacturer couldn’t understand why I wanted a black sponge.

They were looking at me thinking, *What’s wrong with yellow? What’s wrong with pink?*

I kept explaining that I was targeting a different type of customer. I wanted something designed for people who cared about how their kitchen looked.

It ended up taking around 12 months to develop that black-and-white kitchen sponge.

Kim: Twelve months to change the colour of a sponge. That’s the bit people don’t see when they look at a finished product, isn’t it?

Natasha: Absolutely.

And there were plenty of problems.

The first batch was a huge disappointment because the glue wasn’t waterproof. Once the sponge went into hot water, the scourer separated from the cellulose sponge.

I lost a lot of money.

Then we had problems with the white sponges developing brown marks around the edges. I travelled to China to work out what was happening and discovered the cutting blades were rusting.

The blades had to be changed regularly, and they weren’t cheap.

There were all these little manufacturing problems that customers would never know existed.

I had to physically go there, look at how things were being made and problem-solve it.

Kim: Did your scientific background help you deal with that?

Natasha: I think so.

Doing a PhD pushes your boundaries mentally, physically and emotionally. You develop resilience and determination.

When I started the business, I already had some of that.

You learn to keep investigating a problem until you understand what’s causing it.

Kim: Barkly Basics became known for its simple black, white and neutral appearance. Why was that consistency so important?

Natasha: I wanted the products to stand out, but I also wanted to simplify things.

Too much information, too many colours and too much happening on packaging can be overwhelming.

I wanted basic, simple products that were easy to understand.

That’s become much more important to the purpose of the business over time. It’s about “simplifying life’s choices”.

Kim: Was the bigger gamble actually convincing somebody to pay more for something as ordinary as a sponge?

Natasha: Yes. I wasn’t worried about whether people would like the design. The bigger question was price.

When I launched, a pack of two sponges was around $7.80 when supermarket sponges could be around $2.50.

That was a big difference.

But customising the product cost a lot. There was tooling, specialised manufacturing and all the development work behind it.

Customers don’t necessarily see those costs.

Kim: At some point you realised you couldn’t build an entire business around one sponge. How did you expand?

Natasha:I looked at the kitchen sink and thought, “I can’t have my black-and-white sponge sitting next to a bright green bottle of dishwashing liquid.”

It wasn’t cohesive.

So I started looking for an Australian manufacturer that could produce hand wash and dish wash.

That was incredibly difficult because I only wanted about 500 units of each to test the market.

Most manufacturers basically told me I was too small and wasn’t worth their time.

Then I met a detergent manufacturer through a networking event.

He told me, “I know I’m not going to make any money off you, but I love your enthusiasm. I’ll give you a go.”

He produced 500 units of hand wash and 500 units of dish wash.

A couple of months later, I called him.

He thought he’d never hear from me again.

I told him we’d sold out and I needed to double the order.

Eventually, I became his biggest customer.

Kim: That’s a pretty good lesson for somebody starting small. You don’t necessarily need 50,000 units. You need somebody willing to let you prove the idea.

Natasha: Exactly. He gave me an opportunity and I ran with it.

Kim: How did you decide what products came next?

Natasha: I kept coming back to the same question:

What would make my life easier, and how could I make an existing product look better?*

The natural progression from the kitchen was the bathroom.

For example, I wanted a squeegee that I could leave in the shower because it actually looked good rather than something I wanted to hide.

Then you start noticing other problems customers have.

The range grows from solving those problems.

Kim: Has the purpose of Barkly Basics changed as the company has grown?

Natasha: Definitely.

Originally, I didn’t have some grand purpose behind the sponge. I simply didn’t like how existing sponges looked.

But customers started telling me they loved how easy the products made things for them.

I realised it had become bigger than a sponge.

Now, if I have an idea at two o’clock in the morning and there’s no purpose behind it — if it’s simply something that might make money — it’s generally a no.

There needs to be something more to it.

It needs to make somebody’s life easier or have some kind of positive impact.

Kim: You also started thinking about accessibility and people with vision impairment. Where did that come from?

Natasha: Partly from my own experience.

My eyesight was starting to change, my parents use reading glasses, and I thought about being in the shower without glasses and eventually not being able to read what’s written on a bottle.

My mum told me she often recognises products by their shape rather than reading the label.

My father’s sister is blind, so I’ve also seen some of the difficulties she has experienced.

People shouldn’t have to put elastic bands around bottles just to work out which one is shampoo and which is conditioner.

That led me to develop Braille and embossed products to help make everyday products easier to identify.

Kim: Let’s talk about growth. You started packing orders at home. When did you realise the business had outgrown that?

Natasha: My garage was full of stock and the front door looked like a warehouse because there were parcels everywhere.

I couldn’t put the cars in the garage.

I didn’t immediately jump into a warehouse. I started using storage cages.

Then it became ridiculous because I was constantly driving backwards and forwards, collecting stock, taking it home and packing orders.

Eventually I thought, “Something has to change.”

I moved into a smaller warehouse, and today we’re operating from around 500 square metres — and even that’s getting tight.

Kim: That’s the side of “business growth” Instagram doesn’t tend to show — more stock, more space and a lot more money going out the door.

Natasha: Absolutely. The outgoings change massively.

Inventory is also difficult to manage.

With imported products, I might be holding 10,000 sponges of each type. Then an order for several thousand units can suddenly arrive from the US and wipe out a huge amount of stock.

You constantly have to manage that.

Kim: What was one of the hardest skills to learn after leaving science and entering consumer products?

Natasha: Importing, exporting and logistics.

I was thrown into the deep end and got burnt a few times.

I remember an early shipment of paper towel where the container shipping cost me about $12,000.

I simply didn’t know what I was doing.

But you learn very quickly when mistakes cost that much money.

Kim: What came naturally?

Natasha: Product design and finding new product opportunities.

That’s the easy part for me.

The harder part is inventory and the numbers. That’s why I need good people around me, including my accountant.

Kim: What’s one thing you’d do differently if you were starting Barkly Basics again?

Natasha: I’d get my pricing strategy right from the beginning.

For probably five years, I didn’t properly include things such as the value of my own time.

When you’re starting a business, you tend to think, *Well, I’m doing the job anyway.*

But your time has a cost.

Understanding the real cost of the goods and the real cost of labour is something I’ve had to learn.

There’s also an element of self-worth involved in pricing.

Kim: That’s something I reckon plenty of Side Hustle Quest readers need to hear. Making $500 in sales doesn’t mean you’ve made $500 if you’ve worked 30 hours and spent $400 getting there.

How do you stop yourself chasing every new idea?

Natasha: I do get carried away sometimes.

Now I test things.

I’ll buy a small quantity, put the product out there and give it around four weeks. If it’s still sitting on the shelf and people aren’t buying it, it’s culled.

Kim: What would you tell someone who notices an everyday inconvenience and wonders whether it could become a business?

Natasha: Test whether people are actually interested.

Create a landing page or some way of seeing whether there’s demand before going too far.

You need to establish whether there’s genuinely a gap in the market.

Then take it from there.

Kim: You mentioned you aren’t a huge believer in rigid business plans.

Natasha: I’m not.

I had one initially because you need some sort of guiding document, but businesses evolve constantly.

For me, intuition plays a big role.

But the numbers matter too.

If the numbers don’t stack up, that’s telling you something.

Kim: How many hours are you working these days?

Natasha: I’m trying to get it down!

At one stage I was doing 15 or 16 hours a day. It killed me.

Now I’m trying to get closer to 10 hours.

I’m usually at the factory from around seven in the morning. I’m trying to leave by five instead of seven.

Although I’ll often go home and end up on the laptop anyway.

Kim: What are you most proud of when you look back?

Natasha: That I took the opportunity.

It would have been very easy to think, *I’d love somebody to create this*, and then wait for somebody else to do it.

I didn’t.

I took the opportunity.

—

The Side-Hustle Angle: Becoming a Barkly Basics Stockist

One part of my conversation with Natasha particularly caught my attention because it fits directly with what we talk about here at Side Hustle Quest.

Barkly Basics has a wholesale program that potentially allows somebody to build a small retail business without having to invent and manufacture their own products from scratch.

Kim: Could somebody realistically start selling Barkly Basics as a side project around an existing job or family commitments?

Natasha: Yes.

You need an ABN, and once you’ve got that you can purchase products through wholesale.

I’m particularly interested in making this accessible to people who may be looking for another source of income.

They could sell to real estate agencies, create gift boxes, sell to businesses or take it in another direction.

Kim: Who could the wholesale model potentially suit?

Natasha: It’s very broad.

Boutique retailers, online stores, gift-box businesses, property stylists, corporate gifting businesses, accommodation providers, restaurants, Airbnb operators, law firms, accountants and allied health businesses.

Some businesses use the products themselves and also retail them to customers.

Kim: One thing that interested me was your relatively low minimum order requirements. Why do that?

Natasha: Because I put myself in the store owner’s shoes.

If I’m trying a new brand, I don’t want thousands of dollars tied up in products that might sit on the shelf.

I don’t want my products sitting there collecting dust either.

So I want retailers to be able to test the product with relatively low risk.

If it sells, they can come back and order more.

Kim: What would you suggest somebody start with?

Natasha: Usually the three basics: hand wash, dish wash and the sponge.

Start small and see what your customers respond to.

Then expand.

Kim: Instead of simply putting the products online and hoping somebody discovers them, what would you do?

Natasha: Know who your customer is first.

If you’re a physical retailer, look at what’s around you.

There might be two or three real estate agencies nearby. Go and speak to them.

They need settlement gifts.

Don’t just put products on a shelf and hope somebody walks through the door.

Look for businesses around you that already have a reason to buy.

Kim: If somebody reading Side Hustle Quest wanted to investigate this properly, what would their first steps be?

Natasha: Start by looking at the wholesale portal and understanding which products are available.

Then work out who your customer is and what that customer actually needs.

Look at the margins you want to achieve.

And then start testing.

We’re happy to help people work through what products might suit the customers they want to target.

What I Took Away From My Conversation With Natasha

There’s a temptation when we hear about an established business to look at what exists today and assume the founder somehow knew what they were building from day one.

Natasha’s story is almost the opposite.

She didn’t wake up thinking, “I’m going to build a homewares brand.”

She looked at an ugly yellow sponge and thought there had to be a better option.

Then she tested the idea.

The first manufacturing run had problems. She lost money. She travelled to factories to figure out what had gone wrong. She found manufacturers who initially thought her orders were too small. She packed boxes at home until the garage couldn’t take any more. She made expensive logistics mistakes. And she admits that she didn’t properly price her own time into the business for years.

That’s the part of entrepreneurship I find far more useful than the polished success story.

And there are a few lessons I’d take from it:

Pay attention to small annoyances. – You don’t necessarily need to invent something revolutionary. Improving something people already use can be enough.
Test before going big. – Natasha still uses small product runs to find out whether customers actually want something.
Your first version might be rubbish. – Literally having a sponge fall apart in hot water didn’t kill the business. It exposed a problem that needed fixing.
Price your time. Revenue isn’t profit, and working for free can disguise a business that doesn’t really stack up.
Don’t wait until you’re “ready.” – Natasha had to learn manufacturing, importing, logistics, wholesale and inventory along the way.
Know who you’re selling to. – Whether you’re inventing your own product or reselling somebody else’s, “everyone” isn’t a useful target customer.
Growth creates different problems. – Moving from your garage to a warehouse sounds impressive until you realise the stock, rent, staff and cash-flow requirements grow with it.