The story below is from our November/December 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
A new Roanoke store makes a low-waste lifestyle a touch easier.
Courtesy of Simply Refillery
Brittany Fields opened Simply Refillery in Towers Shopping Center in June. Customers have embraced the store’s nontoxic products, such as deodorant cream, bamboo toilet paper and fill-your-own container shampoos and conditioners.
In the spring of 2024, Brittany Fields stopped by Fillaree in Durham, North Carolina, on a whim. She’d never heard of a place where customers brought their own jars, pumped nontoxic soaps and cleaners into them and paid by the pound. She was intrigued by what she saw.
“It just made so much sense to me,” she says now, standing in Simply Refillery, the store she recently opened in Towers Shopping Center.
After her trip, Fields returned to her home in Fincastle and her jobs as a registered nurse at Carilion Clinic and at Nourished IV Drip Bar and Wellness Clinic on Electric Road. But when she went looking for a refillery in Roanoke, she came up empty.
Fields was planning a wedding and caring for her elementary-school-aged son. Life was busy. But she couldn’t quite let go of the refillery concept. Shopping at a refill store would mean no giant plastic jugs of laundry detergent to dispose of. No trying a new shampoo, deciding she didn’t like it and then figuring out what to do with the rest of the bottle. She knew the depressing reality that only a fraction of what is sent to recycling facilities is actually recycled (some studies put the number as low as 5-6 percent). Could she, a 29-year-old with no retail experience, fill a need in her community? Would people love the idea of making their home healthier and more sustainable as much as she did?
“I went back and forth for almost a year,” she says with a laugh. “My husband was like, ‘If you don’t do this, you’re going to think about it for the rest of your life!’”
When Towers Shopping Center let her know they had a space for her, she took it as a sign. She got a business license, asked her friends for help designing a logo and website and worked with her husband to build butcher-block-topped counters to line the store’s walls.
Courtesy of Simply Refillery
By June, she’d pulled off a soft opening. By July, she was earning enough to pay the store’s rent and utilities. By fall, she’d hired part-time staff and was scheduling appearances at events and festivals to help spread the word.
“I have been nothing but pleasantly surprised since I opened,” she says, gesturing around the sunlit store, with plants hanging between long counters of containers. “People come in with an idea that they want one thing, but the more they ask questions and look at things, they end up trying something they didn’t expect to try. And then they love it and come back for more.”
Fields researched brands, pricing and shipping methods before choosing the 15-or-so suppliers she buys from in bulk. Much of her product arrives in large containers that she returns to suppliers to sanitize and reuse, making her stock as waste-free as her offerings.
She’s part of a national refillery collective that schedules weekly calls and publishes a directory of refilleries across the country. Some 500 refill or zero-waste stores are listed, with more signing on every month, Fields says. The concept exploded after COVID, with shopping habits disrupted and people tired of the prevalence of plastic packaging.
“I feel like we were already thinking about the things that we were putting into our body,” Fields says of the popularity of organic food. After COVID, “that’s when I started thinking more about the things that I was putting on my body. Our skin is our biggest organ and we’re putting all this junk right on our skin that’s just absorbing into our body.”
Top products at the store are organic deodorant creams, bulk shampoos and conditioners, cloth “paper” towels and plastic-free dog bones and collars.
On a recent Friday, customers stopped in to browse the shop’s offerings. It was Roanoker Laurie Tibbetts’ second time there.
“I like the philosophy behind it, of not wasting,” she says. “And the knowledgeable staff. Also, I like the way it smells!”
Tibbetts did not know about refilleries before seeing on Facebook that Simply Refillery had opened. But she had previously purchased sustainable toilet paper online. She’s happy to be able to bring home just a few rolls of Who Gives A Crap, rather than having to buy in bulk.
She says with a chuckle: “A single girl does not need 48 rolls of toilet paper!”
Fields says she has lots of ideas for how to expand her business, with plans for online ordering at the top of the list.
“Once I grab a passion for something,” she explains, “I just can’t let it go.”
Find store hours and product listings at
The story above is from our November/December 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!