The floors were making the women sick. For one of them, Francesca Olivieri, it was a figurative kind of sick: "I remember watching my oldest son lick the floor when he was a toddler and thinking, That's been sprayed with some nastiness like 409. And what's in that?"

For the other, Susan Gluck-Pappajohn, it was a literal kind of sick: When she and her family returned to their apartment after a renovation, she says, she developed a burning throat and a headache: "It was like I'd been sniffing glue." Actually, she was reacting to chemicals used in the construction—including off-the-charts volatile-organic-compound (VOC) levels in the floor finish—as she found out a few weeks later, when she had a green-construction consultant assess her home. After a switch to low-VOC bamboo floors, her health improved. But her eyes had been opened.

Propelled by their experiences, the two former IBM colleagues (and mothers—Olivieri has three kids, Gluck-Pappajohn two) started clicking around the Internet in search of organic, nontoxic products for their kids. Even then, the websites Olivieri came across seemed to speak only to the concept of environmentalist as hippie in drawstring burlap pants: "It seemed like everything was hard-core in one direction," she says. "It was the hemp-clothing, cloth-diaper extreme."

Aiming at a broader clientele, the women launched SageBaby, a one-stop e-shop for eco-friendly children's clothing, furniture, and cleaning supplies, in March 2006. The site features everything from walnut rattles by Mossy Creek to hand-painted Lilipad furniture. "We have beautiful stuff that, in addition, is organic," says Gluck-Pappajohn. And yes, the founders acknowledge the irony of expressing eco-consciousness by buying heaps of brand-spanking-new things. "We live in a culture of consumption, and the green movement has become a marketing engine," Gluck-Pappajohn allows.

"We wouldn't tell someone to throw out what they have so they can buy some organic new thing," adds Olivieri. "But a baby is a sweet spot for making incremental changes. You start with organic onesies and go from there. When the sheets get holes, you switch."

Besides, they're the first to admit that, as busy mothers working from home (their BlackBerrys are in constant contact, like an updated tin-can telephone), they still have nonenviro weaknesses. This is one reason they were asked to write a column for Simplesteps.org, a new family-oriented website from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that offers doable advice for living greener. "We were asked to contribute because we don't take ourselves too seriously—we make mistakes," Olivieri says. "I have the messiest family in the world," she continues, laughing. "I'd love to give up paper towels, but I'm still searching for a viable replacement."

For now, their everyday mission is to bestow upon their kids an awareness of what's good for the planet. Growing up in the city, surrounded by excess, "my kids see all this stuff and are like, 'Let's get an Escalade!'" Gluck-Pappajohn says. "So I'm trying to train their little brains to think, Do we need an SUV? Do we need another toy? Not in a guilt-trip manner, but so they're thoughtful about what we're using."

It just might be working. When a friend of her son visited the little farmhouse where the family spends its summers and asked why the house is so small, her son explained, "It's comfy and cozy, and it's all we need."