Gone are the days when “mental health” or “mental illness” were taboo topics to be avoided at all costs. Just like we all have a body that we want to take care of, we all have a mind that needs just as much TLC. This October 10th is World Mental Health Day, initially created by the World Health Organization.
This is a day where mental health discussions are encouraged to raise awareness about mental illness issues on a global scale in an effort to make resources more readily available. The fight against mental illness stigmatization is an ongoing one and there are many fighters in this battle. In the ecommerce world, so many brands are embracing their human emotional connections by committing to mental health through their brand values, initiatives, and products.
Celebrate World Mental Health Day this October by checking out these ten brands with some awesome mental wellness products.
Fersk Self Care
When it comes to mental wellness, what better place to start than a self-care shop? Fersk Self Care is “on a mission to create a community that is committed to taking care of themselves while protecting our home where the ingredients are sourced from.”
Fersk is a Norwegian word meaning 'fresh', which is exactly how owner Hannah wants their products to feel. With everything from artisanal soaps to natural lip scrubs, Fersk has everything you need to give yourself a little extra care.
Along with being kind to yourself, Fersk values being kind to the planet we live on. With sustainability as a core value, this self-care shop partners with various environmental organizations to minimize its corporate carbon footprint.
By partnering with One Tree Planted, Fersk ensures that one tree is planted for every product sold to help do their part for the planet. To date, they’ve been able to work with partner organizations to plant over 2100 trees in Ontario, British Columbia, Africa, and Costa Rica to help reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
Whether you’re looking for a way to care for yourself, the planet, or both–Fersk is your one-stop shop.
Soja & Co
Candles are often used in aromatherapy because of their soothing effects that help with anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, and many other mental illnesses. Soja & Co. sells candles that are handmade in Montreal, Canada. It offers unique and original fragrances while prioritizing the environment and delivering 100% natural soy wax candles.
Apart from its locally crafted candles, Soja & Co goes the extra mile to create a great customer experience. Its blog is full of educational, inspirational, and lifestyle posts to help its customers. With topics like “5 Camping Essentials You Didn’t Think Of” and “Decluttering: 4 Steps to a Minimalist Bathroom”, they deliver value beyond the typical store-customer exchange.
One blog post in particular offers a great mental health resource. In February 2022, Soja & Co released “The Wellness Wheel: 8 concrete actions towards a well-balanced life”. By giving advice on several aspects of life from spirituality to financial planning, it shows how deeply it values its customers as human beings. By showing your brand’s values and personality like this, you develop a strong brand that customers will advocate for every time.
Gabrielle Policella
Pyur Tea
When you think of self-care, it’s hard to not think of cozying up with a nice cup of tea. Not only does tea make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but certain kinds have also been scientifically proven to have calming effects, reducing anxiety and depression.
- Nature
For the Filipino tea brand, Pyur Tea ‘me time is tea time’. It specializes in loose leaf tea that encourages everyone to slow down and focus on earth to soul goodness. Its products are all-natural, eco-friendly, and health-boosting, improving both your mental and physical health.
Pyur’s three main beliefs are mindfulness, wellness, and sustainability. These values are elegantly woven into every aspect of its brand from the ingredients in the teas to the messaging it communicates to its community.
Lerizze Dizon started Pyur in 2020 during the pandemic to create a safe space for everyone to slow down, reflect, and be gentle to themselves. It’s no secret that the pandemic caused a spike in mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, insomnia, and stress for many people. Loose leaf tea helped Lerizze find stillness, achieve better sleep, and a calmer mind so she created Pyur to start the conversation on mental health with a wider group of people.
Today, Pyur is still a safe space for many customers to share their stories and learn from one another.
Teabox
Keeping tea time going, this next brand was born out of founder Kausshal Dugarr’s lifelong love of tea. Teabox is an Indian homegrown brand, situated at the foothills of the Himalayas, that aims to bring India’s best, and freshest teas to the doorsteps of its consumers.
Teabox offers a variety of product types including chai, loose leaf blends, and tea bags to cater to everyone’s needs. It even has trial packs, seasonal gift packs, and teaware making it your one-stop shop for any occasion.
After visiting tea gardens with his father every weekend as a child, Kausshal couldn’t understand as an adult why India’s best teas were reserved for exports and not available in its homeland. In 2015, Teabox was created to re-invent the industry. It cuts out the middleman and brings high-quality tea fresh from the source to the consumer within just 7 days.
Aside from giving its customers the best tea-drinking experience, Teabox is bringing value back to the source with transparent and ethical supply chain practices. The 3.5 million tea pluckers it works with are given due credit and recognition in an effort to make the industry more ethical at every point. When you know you’re supporting a brand that considers the well-being of everyone involved, you can feel good about your purchase.
b, halfmoon
Taking care of your physical health is a big part of your mental health and well-being. Yoga and meditation are great ways to deal with anxiety and connect with your breath to ground you in the present moment. The best part is even if you’re a total beginner there are thousands of brands out there that can equip you with the resources you need to start finding your zen.
One of our favorite yoga and fitness brands is b, halfmoon. It offers meditation, yoga, and even aromatherapy products and crystals. These tools aim to make it easier for customers to feel connected—with themselves, one another, and nature.
The brand itself is a product of true connection. b, halfmoon is the “organic convergence of Halfmoon and B Yoga, two sister brands, deeply rooted in values and intertwined with one another.” Each of these brands was individually committed to bringing yoga staples to a wider community and they came together to make an even larger impact.
The only posing b, halfmoon does are yoga poses. This is a brand that truly lives, eats, and breathes its values of making yoga accessible for everyone. In addition to its physical products, b, halfmoon has a blog filled with advice on different topics like yoga, meditation, community, and more.
b, halfmoon ensures that it is delivering customers with the tools that they need to succeed in all aspects of their lives from the mat to the street.
Jonathan Roque
Wera Plants
The indoor plant industry has been booming in the past couple of years, and for good reason. With Americans spending $8.5 billion more on gardening-related products in 2020 compared to 2019, it’s clear that the plant industry is growing, literally.
While houseplants are a great way to breathe life into your space, they also have been proven to improve both physical and mental health. Studies have shown that plants reduce anxiety and stress, sharpen attention, improve productivity, help people heal faster from injuries, and increase overall happiness and life satisfaction!
- Time.com
Whether you’ve got a total green thumb or you struggle to keep succulents alive, this next brand is on a mission to make plant parent life as easy as possible. Wera Plants is an Australian indoor plant brand with a wide range of houseplants, succulents, cacti, plant essentials, and more.
Growing up in India on a tea estate, Ramya was always surrounded by plants and forests. After moving to Australia, she quickly began decorating her house with plants to fulfill her lifelong love and curiosity of plants. Quickly after, Wera Plants was born as a way to find her “plant babies” a nice home to spend the remainder of their precious lives.
Wera Plants believes in the power of plants in supporting mental health, evident through its brand slogan, “therapy through plants”. “We have heard many customers talk about how plants for them out of depression, reduced their stress levels, and in general just made them happy,” it shares in an Instagram post. Wera Plants is the perfect brand to shop at for World Mental Health Day, whether you want to bring some positivity into your life or a loved one’s.
Blissy
Getting enough sleep has been a concern for most of us ever since we were little. From the infamous bedtime, every child fought to the sleep alerts we get on our smartwatches, sleep has always been prioritized. And that’s because sleep is a crucial part of mental and physical health.
Unfortunately, for many of us falling asleep isn’t a simple matter of counting sheep. It’s estimated that 70 million Americans are affected by a sleeping disorder, including insomnia, sleep deprivation, and sleep apnea. Insomnia specifically is a struggle many people deal with and it is often caused by various other mental health concerns including anxiety, PTSD, depression, and more.
- National Alliance on Mental Alliance
For those of us who struggle to sleep at night, it’s no secret that we’re willing to try almost anything to catch some Zs. The good news is that brands like Blissy are here to help when it matters most. This sleep-focused brand offers a range of products including its famous silk pillowcases, sleep masks, bonnets, and more to help its customers achieve a good night’s sleep.
Blissy is committed to helping its customers get a good night's sleep again. Its range of silk sleep accessories is designed to improve skin, hair, and allergies by reducing the amount of dust that collects on a standard pillowcase. Its iconic 100% Pure Mulberry Silk Pillowcase is made from the highest quality 22-Momme silk materials and is loved by thousands of customers.
Blissy leverages the power of user-generated content to build trust within its community. Its social media profiles are flooded with customer photos and collaborations with wellness micro-influencers. Blissy also uses its Blissy VIP rewards program to incentivize reviews by offering 100 points per customer review.
We get it—life can be stressful. But with Blissy, you can let at least a few of those stresses melt away when your head hits the silky pillow.
Jonathan Roque
TERRA
We’d be completely remiss to not mention the mental wellness implications shopping can have in general. From the environmental impacts of consumerism, to supply chain sustainability, consumers are more cautious than ever.
That’s why supporting brands that are socially responsible is more important than ever. One of the brands that considers its impact on the earth and people at every stage is TERRA. With its name literally being Latin for “earth”, TERRA’s products are inspired by nature and designed by stories. The St. Louis-based candle brand works with a global network of artisans to bring clean everyday essentials into its customers’ homes.
Each purchase at TERRA creates an impact by supporting the home and family of the artisan who made it. The brand works with the Pak Saba artisans in Bali who work in a safe and supportive environment, earning fair wages while creating eco-consciously handwoven products.
TERRA is also extremely transparent about the materials used in its candles. In a recent Instagram post, the founder shared how the candles and fragrances are crafted to ensure they are free from harmful toxins. Candles, wax melts, and fragrances are a tried and true way to help you de-stress and relax. The last thing you want to be worried about is what you’re actually inhaling.
Colorful Black
It’s important to do things to take care of your mind, body, and spirit every single day. Taking care of yourself can include everything from doing your skincare routine to taking a shower. So to us, self-care = self-love.
The beauty industry is flooded with hundreds of brands offering everything from niche products like biodegradable nail polish to giants like Sephora with every product you can think of under the sun. However, these brands often cater to ethnic majorities with a small product range available for visible minorities. This is why brands like Colorful Black, a French-based black-owned company, that offers hair, skin, and makeup products geared towards black and mixed-race customers are so important.
Colorful Black exists to make everyone feel valued and able to find a solution for their specific hair and beauty needs. Its Magazine offers a variety of different articles ranging from Advice pieces to product-specific posts to help new customers find their perfect product.
Often, majorities don’t consider the struggles that minorities face on a daily basis. Even things that may seem “simple” like buying shampoo or conditioner at a drugstore can be an anxiety trigger for people of other races who face struggles on a daily basis. For example, Black women often experience microaggressions related to their hair.
Black hair care is extremely important from a cultural perspective and it’s important to have brands like Colorful Black that can make these things slightly less stressful, one amazing product at a time.
The Bare Home
Everybody copes with their stress in different ways. For some people, R&R and doing absolutely nothing is the key to recharging their battery. For other people, keeping busy is the best option. Well if you’re looking for a brand to help you check a few things off your Sunday cleaning list, look no further than The Bare Home.
- Very Well Mind
You might be thinking, what on earth does cleaning have to do with mental wellness? Well for a lot of people, having a clean environment can make you feel safe and reduce anxiety. What makes The Bare Home even better? You can feel good about the impact you’re leaving on the planet with these sustainable, less-waste cleaning products.
The Bare Home even makes cleaning fun (well as fun as it can be) by gamifying its shopping experience with a loyalty program, The Nest Rewards. With a product range that has such a high purchase frequency, customers can rack up Nest points to redeem for dollars off their next cleaning product haul.
Even if cleaning isn’t your thing, The Bare Home offers curated bundles filled with themed products. This helps cleaning rookies know exactly what products to buy to use together. On the other end of the spectrum, it also offers a wider range of products including candles, soaps, shampoos, and more to help its customers unwind after a long day.
Its Self Care bundle for example includes a biodegradable shampoo and conditioner bar, hand soap, a hand and body bar, a soap tray, and an essential oils candle. These products are perfect for helping someone unplug after a busy day and spend some time focusing on themselves. With all of its products being scented with premium essential oils, The Bare Home is truly focused on delivering a calming customer experience.
Whether you love or hate cleaning, The Bare Home freshens up the entire process one small step at a time.
Choose the right mental health support for you
No matter what stage you are at on your mental health journey, just know that you’re not alone. It can be hard to confide in people close to you at times, but there are thousands of resources out there that really care about you. If you need mental health resources, you may be surprised by what you can find even on your favorite ecommerce store.
Take some time this October 10th, and every day for that matter, to take care of your mind, body, and spirit. Whether that looks like shopping for a mental wellness product or taking the first step in getting support for your mental health, do something for you.
We are not mental health experts by any means, but if you find yourself in need of professional, expert support, here are a few global mental health resources:
If you find yourself or someone you know in crisis at this time, please seek immediate medical emergency services.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on September 14, 2021 and was updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness on October 10, 2023.
