Keep It Cleaner: How Steph Claire Smith and Laura Henshaw built a business with community at its core

Steph Claire Smith and Laura Henshaw apologise profusely as they approach the table I’m sitting at. They are a mere few minutes late to our interview, and yet it’s clear they both feel genuinely terrible for keeping me waiting at all.

We move into a meeting room within the complex that their business operates out of — one of many The Commons venues across Melbourne — and the pair joke about how deep in work mode they’d already become at only 9am in the morning.

The best friends and business partners had been caught up in emails and lost track of time, Henshaw explains; it happens a lot these days, time getting away from the two of them.

It’s understandable how busy they both must be. As the co-founders of Keep It Cleaner (KIC), they oversee a growing health and wellness empire, encompassing an app with workouts, recipes, meal plans and more, in addition to a podcast and an exclusive Facebook community group.