Help Vesper & William after Fire at ReFillanthropy

Holly Muck is organizing this fundraiser.

Donation protected

Hi, I'm Vesper Holly Muck, co-owner and founder of ReFillanthropy LLC in Denver Colorado.

Our company was founded last year, with a mission of helping people save the planet, one container at a time. For the last year, ReFillanthropy has been providing the South Broadway, Baker, and West Washington Park neighborhoods with low-waste, natural alternatives for cleaning and personal care products.

While the business has been sustaining itself (barely) over the last year, we have not been able to take any sort of salary for our efforts yet. I have been living off of my retirement savings for the last year, and earlier in May I was urgently facing some pretty substantial personal expenses, forcing me to borrow money from my family and start looking for other full-time work.

My partner William and I had decided to start closing the business down, while still looking into other ways to provide this much needed service to our community on a smaller scale. We had originally planned to stay open until the end of June to allow our community to stock up ahead of the transition...

Unfortunately... Life -- or rather, a serial arsonist -- had other plans for us....

Early in the morning on Tuesday June 4th, a man intentionally set fire to our building, causing substantial damage to our business, as well as endangering the lives of the residents who live in the apartments upstairs. With the use of our security camera footage, we were able to identify the person responsible, and working with our neighbors and other business owners we were able to track down his whereabouts, and DPD apprehended him Tuesday afternoon.

We are thankful for the first responders who made sure everyone in the building was safely evacuated, and for mitigating the damage from the fire to the best of their ability. We are working with restoration crews and insurance to assess the damages and try to fix the damage caused from the fire itself, and also extensive smoke and water damage caused from extinguishing the fire.

Sadly, we will have to remain closed during the entire restoration process, so at this time we are not planning on re-opening to the public.

Thankfully our insurance should cover the wholesale cost of inventory, as well as damages to physical property, and costs incurred with the restoration process...

But unfortunately, our insurance will not cover "lost business", expected profit, or wages lost during the closure. This means our whole final month of clearing out inventory will be lost.. which we were really counting on using to pay off any remaining debts, fees, and contracts related to the business. Those final sales were crucial to us exiting this business gracefully, and with minimal personal expense.

I decided to start this GoFundMe to try to help cover some of our expected lost business for the next month. I've included a screenshot of the metrics for our inventory and the potential profit we could have made, (at full price). Since I was discounting my remaining inventory, I calculated what my expected profit would have been at the discounted rate, which comes out to around $14,000, plus the cost of our deductible , $1000.

Anything at all is appreciated, including contributions of meals and offers to watch our two furry mascots, Gambit & Xuko.

We are so grateful for the support of our friends, family, neighbors, and fellow business owners. The sense of community we have built up over the last year has meant the world to us, and will endure long after we are gone.