How I Built This with Guy Raz - Burt's Bees: Roxanne Quimby

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

In the 1970s, Roxanne Quimby was trying to live a simpler life – one that rejected the pursuit of material comforts. She moved to Maine, built a cabin in the woods, and lived off the grid. By the mid-80s, she met a recluse beekeeper named Burt Shavitz and offered to help him tend to his bees. As partners, Roxanne and Burt soon began selling their "Pure Maine Honey" at local markets, which evolved into candles made out of beeswax, and eventually lip balm and skin care products. Today Burt's Bees can be found in nearly every grocery store and drugstore around the U.S. PLUS, in our postscript "How You Built That," Leigh Isaacson explains how her sister's break up inspired them to create a dating app – for dog owners. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. We had a great artist and he did a woodcut portrait of Bert and we started putting that on the package. That was a very conscious decision to use Bert's face.

He had a long gray beard and long gray curly hair. You know, and as a woman who could never measure up to this glamorous image in mainstream cosmetics and beauty products, you know, I felt like we're going to put a picture of a guy that everybody is going to feel more beautiful then. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Roxanne Quimby took a roadside honeystand in rural Maine and turned it into Bert's Bees,

one of the biggest natural personal care brands in America. Every Sunday at my local farmer's market, there are people who sell homemade hot sauce and handcrafted wallets. There's even a woman who sells mohair scarves using the mohair from her angora goats. Now, imagine going to your local farmer's market in, say, Maine back in the mid-1980s. And if you happen to be near Bangor, you might have come across Roxanne Quimby and Bert Shabbits selling jars of honey, honey from Bert's own beehives.

Charming, right? Maybe you'd buy a jar and move on. Bert and Roxanne would keep on doing what they were doing. You'd do what you were doing. Except Roxanne thought, hey, could we make and sell candles? from all the beeswax we have, or could we use the beeswax to make other stuff? Okay, so you can kind of figure out where this is headed, because that, of course, is what happened. And even though Roxanne and Bert never intended to build a billion-dollar brand, or even a million-dollar brand, it just happened.

Of course, a lot of that had to do with Roxanne's passion and drive, but the idea was never to build something massive. It was a farmer's market product. Today, walk into any drugstore in the U.S. or even overseas, and you will find an impressive display of Bert's Bees products, lip balm, lotion, soaps, shampoos, all labeled with the face of a heavily bearded man named Bert. The likelihood that Roxanne Quimby would build a massive company or any company at all was so implausible back in the early 1980s when she was a single mom waiting tables at a diner. And a decade before that, she drove across the country from Massachusetts, where she was from, to San Francisco, seeking out a simpler life, a life without lots of material needs. It was an adventure to go all the way to the West Coast from New England and New York.

It was a great unknown. And I had always wanted to be an artist from the time I was five, so it seemed like a natural place to go to art. school. I guess you got there in, what, like 1970 around then? Mm-hmm. Yeah, tell me what your impressions of San Francisco were like at the time. I think San Francisco kind of unlocked itself to me while I was there. It was a pretty little town, but the depth of experience that I had there took some time to assimilate and understand. You know, I crossed a great cultural bridge while I, I was out there. What do you mean by that? I learned to think differently and to probe more deeply.

Everything needed to be re-evaluated and looked at again. So you started to think like what? The way you thought of the world before was just wrong? Well, it was too limited. And I think that the material world was too important and really it's not as important as I was taught that it was. We were encouraged to make a good living. Both of my sisters had MBAs like my dad did and earning power and one's achievements were emphasized. And I took a turn to the extreme left when I went to art school and rejected the pursuit of material comforts. It was really quite wonderful. Yeah.

And so you're in San Francisco and you're kind of going through this transformation, this personal transformation, kind of rejecting your go out earn money kind of way you were raised, which was the way many, many, many people were raised. And what did you think? Did you think, I don't need that life? I want a different life. What did you start to think about the life you wanted to have? Well, I wanted meaning and I wanted to live deeply.

I was very influenced by Thoreau who wrote about it quite beautifully. I was looking for transcendence. My world just got bigger and I felt my relationship with it expanded. I guess you had a boyfriend in San Francisco at the time. and the two of you decided to like go off around the country to find a place to live? Yep. And this is George St. Clair, your boyfriend at the time. Mm-hmm.

And so what did you guys do? You just took off. You left San Francisco? Yep. Got a van fixed it up. We had $3,000. We went to Vermont. And the Vermont realtor that we spoke with said that you couldn't buy a.

any land in Vermont for $3,000, but try Maine. Huh. So we went to Maine. So your intention was to go somewhere in the country with $3,000 and see what kind of land, like how much land you could buy? Yes. And why did you want to do that? What were you going to do on the land?

There was a movement at the time, the back to the land movement. And those were people that had left city life and were just like us. I was doing it to kind of strip away everything that civilization had layered on me and see what was really important. So the land that we bought, we built a little cabin on it and had no running water, no electricity. And so you quickly became more aware of how those things affected your life when you didn't have them. So you had $3,000. bucks. And how much land did that buy you? Like how many acres? 30. That's a lot. Yeah. And how did you know what to do? Well, there were a few books that you could read about how to build a simple house in the woods. And we would pick people's brains who knew more than we did. They were glad to see some young people moving to Maine because we've had quite an exodus of young people. So they were very friendly.

and helpful. So, I mean, did you build a cabin? Did you build like a house on this land? Yes. How long did it take? So I'm assuming this is you get there in the summer. This is like 70, 1975 or so, something like that. Yep.

And then how long before you're actually living in a place with a roof over your heads? Oh, it was way too long. We had built a little greenhouse where we were sleeping, which was a little way away from the house we were building, and it was getting into December, and we were still sleeping outside. Basically, it was outside. It was so hard to get out of bed in the morning, kind of the sleeping bag. But, you know, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. And, you know, it took a lot longer than we thought it would to try to get undercover. But we had a roof over our heads. Yeah. Did you have heat? We had a wood stove. Yeah. Man, this is like,

this is like pre-global warming Maine in December. This is cold. Yeah, it's extreme. But there were others. Yeah. You know, we weren't the only ones. So you, you build a house and you like, still no running water, electricity or any of that stuff, but you do have to eat. So how are you making a living? Well, the good thing about not having all the amenities is that it doesn't take a lot of money to live. Yeah. We had no bills, basically, other than food. We cut our own firewood and had a source of water, which was the spring out and back. I waitressed a day or two a week, and George worked at the local radio station for a day a week.

So a couple of days a week we would go out and work for things that needed cash. I mean, you do this for a couple years, right? You guys are living like this for several years. Yeah. I think we probably lived out there like that for maybe seven years or so. Wow. And I guess around like in the first few years, you actually had children there too, right? Children who are still, they're grown now.

But they were born in this like homesteader kind of house in them out in the middle of nowhere. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. They have very fond memories of it. We never had to argue about TV shows. Yeah.

So you're living there. You're waitressing a little bit. George is working at the radio station. You've got two kids. But probably still, he didn't need a whole lot of money to just get through the day, right? No. We were living on about $4,000 a year. A year.

Wow. I'm just trying to get into your head at that time. Was that your vision for life that you were going, because it's kind of, there is something idyllic about it. I mean, you're out there, you're far away from the rough and tumble of civilization and cities. Was that your vision for the way you were going to live your life? It was simply a way of having a secure home. And I think it was a very idyllic kind of dream. Yeah. But ultimately, it didn't provide enough stimulation for my personality. Why? What was your personality need? Well, I think I'm kind of a restless person, pretty curious and interested in the way the world works, how it's all put together. So we were pretty cut off out there.

So you guys are out there and I guess your marriage or partnership with George kind of was not in great shape because you guys you did separate at a certain point, right? We did, yep. Hannah and Lucas were six years old and I moved out. And I moved into another cabin. Oh, wow. That was even further off the road. Wow. This is like 8082 or something around the road.

Right in there, maybe 83. Yeah. So you were a single mom, two kids, on your own. That's tough going. Well, although I was a single mom, their dad was a single dad. Right. And he definitely took a lot of responsibility for their care. and so every other week I had the opportunity to go out and do what I needed to do or whatever.

Sure. And were you happy at that time? Probably not. You know, I don't think about being happy that much. I think more about being fulfilled. Yeah. And were you? Did you feel fulfilled at that time?

I did. Yeah, I felt like I was making it. on my own by, you know, living by my wits, so to speak. Yeah. And I liked that. And I liked the unknown. It was an adventure. It was sort of like fishing.

You never knew what you were going to come up with. And that was always fun. And it tested your, my resourcefulness. I always thought that was a good thing to test and keep nimble. Yeah. So you are in northern, sort of northern central Maine, mid-80s. And how did you come across

Bert Chavitz? Well, he was well known in the neighborhood because he was so unusual. What do you mean? Well... I mean, you were unusual at the time, too,

right? Yes, but he was probably more unusual. Okay, yeah. So what do you mean, like, what do you mean when you say unusual? Well, he looked like an old rap. in a way. He had a long gray beard and long gray curly hair. And he was a bachelor and sold honey

on the side of the road off the back of his pickup truck. And you just knew Bert through the community? You weren't, or did you meet him on one particular day? Well, I did meet him personally when he picked me up hitchhiking because I didn't have a car at the time. So I got to meet him. But I think I was vaguely aware of him just because he was one of the fixtures in the area. And he would sell honey from bees that he raised, right, that he would keep? Mm-hmm. So you meet this guy, Bert, and he sells honey, and that's it, like, see you later, and then you go off your own separate ways?

Yeah, I was waitressing one night or two nights a week, and he used to stop in to use the pay phone there. He didn't have a phone. And he lived the same way, no phone, no electricity in a little tiny cabin that he had hauled over to his property. It was a turkey coop. He was quite proud of that. It was a very, very eccentric hermit type of fellow. But there must have been some kind of connection that you forged, because I guess you decided to, I don't know, work with him. Yeah. Oh, I was very attracted to him.

He was kind of a inspiration for how one could live very independently and with their own unique set of rules. I was very inspired by his lifestyle. So how did you approach the idea of working with him? I asked him if he wanted any help with the bees. Selling honey or? No, actually tending to the bees. So I followed him around for a summer as an apprentice

and did a lot of the heavy work hauling supers of honey around, extracting. I learned all about the bees and I got to work with Bert. What was he like? Was he talkative? Was he quiet? Yeah, he didn't say much. He was pretty quiet. And he was about 15 years older than you, I guess, at that point, right?

He was about 50 at the time. I was about 35, I think, when we met. And you just, this guy was just fascinating. Like he was living this life that you wanted to kind of model your own life on. Yep. He was very inspiring to me. And, you know, it was all kind of mixed up with the bees and nature as well. It was all inseparable.

But I'm trying to understand. Like when you were just really curious about bees, about his lifestyle, and him. You liked him. He was interesting. But there was no spark in your mind of, hey, maybe we can turn this into a business. Yeah. After the summer where I apprenticed with him, I suggested that we could package the honey in nicer containers and sell it at craft fairs, put little labels on them. How was he selling the honey?

Well, he was selling them in used gallon jars. Who is going to buy a gallon of honey? I know. Bert. You know, like that pickles and relish coming. in the restaurant business. Yeah. So you're saying to him, Bert, let's put it in smaller, nicer jars and see if we can sell it at like farmers markets and stuff?

Exactly. Yep. Yeah. And he liked that idea? Yeah, he was fine with it. So I ordered some little plastic honey bears, a little squeasy bears. Sure. Yeah.

And we filled those up. Those were 12 ounces of honey. instead of 12 pounds, which is how he sold it. And did you have a, like, put a label on it and stuff? Yeah. You know, we used pictures of bees and tried to make all these products giftable. Yeah. This was, I guess, in, like, around 86, 85, 86.

Yeah. And did you market, like today you can imagine going to a craft fair and saying, this is artisanal, handmade, organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, free, free rain. Fair Trade, honey from, you know, that Bert takes like with his hands. Like, were you marketing at that or was just like a bear with honey in it? It was like, honey for sale. Well, we did our best, I would say. We tried to make the packaging really cute that people would want to buy it.

And, you know, honey is a pretty pure product. You don't have to sell it too much. Most people think of it as being very pure. no additives from nature. So we didn't have to really push that too much. I think we called it pure Maine honey. Yeah. And so you would start to sell it where?

We would do Christmas craft fairs at the local high schools and junior highs and right around the area. You were just selling it at these little, and were people buying the honey? How were sales? Good. Good, like thousands, tens of things? thousands, a few hundred? No. Not that good.

I remember a really good show at the local junior high where it was $200 was the take of the day. That was a lot of money to me. How did you guys then go from selling honey to making candles? Well, when you extract the honey out of the honeycomb, it's capped over with beeswax. The bees kind of cap it so it doesn't drain out. So you have to uncap it and you're cutting off the beeswax cappings. So that's your beeswax. Can I ask you a question about beeswax? It's wax. It's like really waxy soft stuff that you can put a wick in and burn it. How do bees, I'm just curious, how do they produce it? They have glands on their abdomen.

just like we have saliva glands. Sure. So their glands produce flat disks of beeswax, which they then build into their honeycomb. So when you pull out like one of those sheets in a hive of honeycomb, how do you get the wax off? You have a hot knife and you uncap it with the hot knife. And the beeswax that was capping the honeycomb

becomes available to do whatever you want with it. So you had all this wax, and is it pretty easy to just melt it down and turn it into candles? It's simple. I don't know if it's easy. We have many disasters, but it is a simple process. You just heat it up, and the beeswax separates from the honey and floats on top. So you start making candles, and then and then doing the same thing, bringing them to craft shows and selling them? Mm-hmm, yep. And how were sales?

How did it go? Good. Instantly, instant success? Well, we certainly not every show. We had some real bad shows, but good enough to keep going. So this is what, about a year after you and Bert start working together, something like that? Mm-hmm. And at this point did you think, I don't know, if a friend,

asked you, so, Roxanne, what are you up to? Would you have said, yes, I'm really getting this bee thing. Like, we're selling honey and now we're selling candles. And it's, I think this is, there's something there. Yeah, I think I would say that. It was pretty exciting because I was maintaining my independence, using my sense of aesthetics, and making enough money to live on. Yeah. Roughly, you know, by like 1988 or 89, like how many candles were you selling a year? Well, I don't remember exactly how our sales went in the 80s, but we were growing every year. My original goal was $20,000 in sales. And then when that goal was achieved, then I set another goal of a million dollars in sales.

By the time my kids graduated from high school. So I read that you guys got a pretty big break in 1989. There was a boutique in New York called Zona. And they came across your candles at a trade show and then ordered hundreds of them? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. How did they find out about you guys?

The owner or one of his buying team must have come across us at a show somewhere. and he ordered our little teddy bear candle. It was a little molded candle in the shape of a teddy bear with a plaid bow tie under his chin. And he sold hundreds of them. How did you fulfill those orders? It was you and bird and like,

what'd you do? Just worked all the time. You know, I remember working long hours. Did you have to hire people? We started to hire people slowly. Some of the local ladies would, come in and give us a hand, but we were still in a building that was not really a place you'd want to have employees work.

You were not doing this in Bert's turkey coop. You actually rented out a building to make the candles. Yeah, it was an old one-room schoolhouse. Right. And what did you guys call the business? Well, he had kind of a stencil that he had painted onto every beehive that said Bert's bees, because the bees were all over the countryside. You know, you couldn't keep them too close together.

So we would have maybe 10 hives in a bee yard and maybe 5, 10 miles away. There would be another bee yard with five or 10 hives of bees. And on the hives, he would stencil his name. So eventually it became Bert's bees. By the way, how did you have so much wax? Did you have to add beehives? Or at a certain point did you have to buy?

wax. Yeah, we had to start buying it. We had 50 hives, which was fine for a few years, and then we didn't produce enough ourselves. So we ended up buying other people's beeswax. Around 1989, when you got this big order from this New York boutique, you had to hire an accountant, and it was a 14-year-old high school boy who became your accountant. Is that true? Yeah, we called the school and we told them we needed someone good in math. And so they said, oh, we have just the fellow. He's on the math team. So he came over after school. You know, he would pay the bills and he would do the payroll. And he would make the deposit.

And the day he had to make the deposit walk up to the bank, he would wear a suit. It was very important. to maintain our dignity at the bank. So he was our accountant. I would say he was more of a bookkeeper, but it's very serious and focused and responsible. Yeah, I mean, Roxanne, it sounds like you were actually pretty serious and focused about this.

That actually you and Bert didn't just stumble into this company, but as you saw it take off and as you saw people show interest in what you were selling, you were making strategic decisions to kind of lay the foundation for what would become a business. Yeah, we were learning a lot. Neither one of us had been involved in running and managing a business. So everything was trial and error, a lot of experimentation, a lot of fails. We went to the school of hard knocks. Yeah.

What was the biggest disaster that you could remember early on? Well, I remember five gallons of a product we called boot food, which was a liquid combination of melted beeswax, Needsfoot oil, and bear grease. Wait, what's bear grease? Just the fat, the rendered fat of a bear. Wow. What do you do with that product that you just described?

You rub it into your leather boots to waterproof them. Wow. Keep the leather supple. Okay. And you were selling this? Not very well. Okay, yeah. It smelled horrible.

Oh, my God. I know. It was just so bad. Yeah. And what happened to this? It spilled all over the floor, five gallons of the greasiest, the most horrible stuff all over the floor. That was a pretty big, plus the waste.

I mean, we were selling it. it and couldn't then. Given your characterization of Bert as this kind of really independent back-to-the-land kind of guy, what did he think about this growing enterprise? I mean, all of a sudden, it's starting to look like a business. I mean, and not just Bert and Roxanne selling jars of honey and wax candles, but like New York boutiques ordering this stuff. I think that he probably wasn't as happy about it as I was.

He had no use for any changes to his lifestyle. He didn't have children for one thing. Right. And I'm far more ambitious than he was. Yeah. But he went along with it because he could see how important it was to me. Was Bert fairly easy to work with or was he like, you know, stubborn and difficult? He was a prickly kind of guy, you know.

He wasn't all warm and fuzzy. Yeah. So people, including myself, gave him kind of a wide berth. We divided up the work. He would collect all the overdue bills, you know, overdue accounts receivables. And he was a fixer. When things broke down or needed maintenance, he was always willing to do that. And I was very hands-on with the product development and getting the product made

and shipped. So we had different roles. Yeah. 1991, Bert's Bees hits a million and a half dollars in sales revenue. Do you remember that? Do you remember thinking, oh my God, we are doing a million and a half dollars of revenue? Well, I should have remembered it. But I guess it was just moving too fast? Yeah. It was moving pretty quickly. And we were, every day was another problem that just, had to be solved on the fly without enough resources or time because we were in a hurry trying to fill orders. So I didn't have a lot of time to think that I wasn't expecting this or just kind of had

a tiger by the tail. Yeah. And I was hanging on for dear life. When we come back, how Roxanne and Bert's personal relationship started to unravel just as the company started to take off. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's the early 1990s and Bert Spies has just hit a million and a half dollars in revenue.

And one thing we did not mention in part one, which you may have figured out already, but Roxanne and Bert, they were kind of a thing. They weren't just business partners, but romantic partners as well. Now, at this time, 1990, Birchbees was selling mostly candles and other things made with beeswax, and they sold those things mainly at boutiques in and around New England and New York. But in 1991, Roxanne had an idea that would take the company in a brand new direction. You introduced a product that would go on to become one of your bestselling, who's not your most famous product, your Bert's Bees lip balm. How'd you come up with that idea?

Well, we were making other products that were basically the same formula. We were making a furniture polish, which was wax and oil. And the boot food basically was wax and oil. And lip balm is basically wax and oil. And we put a couple of amenities in it like vitamin E and peppermint oil. But it was very clear that people were more interested in. buying products for their skin and their lips and their face, then they were buying products for their furniture and their shoes.

So once that became clear, we phased out of all of the other polishes that we were trying to sell and started focusing on skin. And we eventually stopped making candles as well. You stopped making candles because it wasn't. profitable or was it to make sense? I think because it wasn't scalable. And the skincare products, which were basically blending and filling, it was a very simple manufacturing process that could easily be scaled.

And we were making handmade candles, so to go to an automated system just required a lot more time, machinery, and space, and investment that I didn't feel would have the same return. So we dropped the candles. So we're now, like in 1991, Bert Spees is growing. You've hit a million and a half dollars and you're going in one direction and that's up. You were this counterculture art student. You were a homesteader living in a, you know, tents and stuff. But you were kind of starting to become this thing.

that maybe you kind of rejected. I'm not criticizing you at all. It's just interesting, right, that you kind of had rejected this whole world, but you had a knack for it. I know. It's ironic. I've thought about that. Did you ever reflect on it at that time? I think I did. Yeah. Suddenly money became so important. Not for what it would buy, but just because it was critical to the operation of the business. Yeah. Keeping track of it. And there I was keeping track of the cash flow, money in, money out, paying bills, sending bills. It was sort of a simple version of capitalism, which I had rejected years ago. Yeah, but you were not a trained MBA or business person, but obviously you have some intrinsic talent.

I mean, you understood this in a way that you could see what Bert's Bees could be and you were just doing it. Well, I had role models. I had selected out companies and kept them in my mind as an ideal. So I had examples. Like what? I had a big sign over the production floor that said, look out Elizabeth Arden. Oh, wow. And, you know, I really felt like if Elizabeth could do it, so could we. Yeah.

So you guys are growing, you're hiring. Are you overwhelmed? I mean, how many people did you have to hire in Maine to just keep the engines going? We had about 45. It's a lot of people to sort of oversee. Yeah. Was that hard? Did you, I mean, because at this point, I guess you're like a CEO or a de facto CEO, if not the official CEO.

I would say that was the most challenging part of the job, was managing people. Do you see yourself as a people person? Not that much, no. I can be if I have to be. But again, just going back to my artist true self, artists usually work alone. They're very comfortable, you know, writers and painters. And I like that myself. I mean, would you consider yourself an introvert?

I would say I was pretty introverted, yeah. Yeah. I'm very happy having a very quiver. quiet lifestyle. Yeah. In 1994, you guys made a decision to leave Maine and to relocate to North Carolina. Why? I mean, you're such a Maine person and it was such a main kind of product. What prompted the move? The location was very difficult, working in the extreme northeast corner of the country. Getting more centralized was important for bringing raw materials in and getting finished goods out.

So North Carolina was much better situated in terms of being halfway between Maine and Florida. And a direct shot out to the West Coast on I-40. The geography was excellent. There were other cosmetic companies in the area. Revlon was about 15 miles away. The body shop was about 30 or 40 miles away, and there were a lot of pharmaceutical companies

that use a lot of the same glass jars and caps and that sort of thing. So our expenses went way down. We were able to hire people who were trained in the industry and who had experience in that industry to come in and help ramp up production and computerize our office billings. There were just a lot more people down there that were trained to do those kinds of things. Yeah. And so you have this new location and then presumably you have to buy equipment and supplies and you're like running a factory. Yeah. You know, it certainly wasn't a very sophisticated operation and it wasn't a state-of-the-art factory. Right. But it was doable. We used a lot of used equipment. We were making one of our products in a big mixer that Duke had in its cafeteria for mashed potatoes.

And we had a bath salt that we were making in a cement mixer. So, you know, we had hobbled it together. So in the mid-90s, because I don't remember Bert's Bees in the mid-90s, right? Where would you have seen a Bert's bees, you know, lip balm or lotion or soap? You would have found it in a independent gift shop. Little small gift shops dotted all over the country. And it was just organic growth. It's just based on these small gift.

shops all over the country. Yeah. And were you marketing? We were doing a kind of a grassroots marketing. We would make little sample products, and we were giving those away to people. We also had catalogs that were almost like a current-day blog. It would be our products, but it would also talk a little bit about the company, and I told stories about Bert and his dog and some.

ingredient story, so people would follow the story. So that was kind of a thread that they would follow. When did you design the now iconic logo of Bert's face on the packaging? Was that there from the beginning? We had a great artist. He lives up here in Maine, and he did a woodcut portrait of Bert. And we started putting that on the package a few years into the program. And that was a very conscious decision to use Bert's face because I was, I guess, a little resentful of the way women were used to market products. And I saw some of the big cosmetics lines really exploiting the image of women and defining them through the, advertising and packaging in a way that did not respect their full depth. Yeah.

So it was important for me not to follow that weed. It's so interesting because I would have thought that you would have put Bert's face on there because, you know, of the authenticity of this guy who was really the real deal. He was a beekeeper and a hermit and, you know, the consumer was connecting with this authenticity. Like, that's why I would have thought you put his face on it. But it was about sexism. Yeah, I think that it had to do with authenticity and Burt, but it also had to do with gender exploitation that the beauty products were, I think they were known for. Yeah.

You know, and as a woman who could never measure up to this glamorous image that one found in mainstream cosmetics and beauty products, that, you know, I felt like I'm not, I don't want to do that to work. women. So we're going to put a picture of a guy that everybody is going to feel more beautiful then. So, all right. So you guys are in North Carolina. You're running this company. It's the late 90s. Were you able to pay yourself a decent salary by that point? Well, at one point, before we left Maine, we decided to pay ourselves $36,000 a year. I didn't spend a lot of money. I didn't need a lot of money. And 1999 bird exits, you buy him out. When you incorporated, you had two-thirds, he had a third. You buy him out and he kind of retires.

Yeah. Although he, I think, enjoyed going out on the road and being burnt. Yeah. And signing T-shirts and- Kind of being the mascot. Yeah. Yeah. When he sort of was out of the picture, what was your personal relationship

with him damaged, were you not getting along from your perspective? Yeah, that was pretty much what it was. Our relationship had gone south. What happened, if you don't mind? Well, it was sort of a personal transgression that was very hurtful to me. And it kind of popped the bubble in a way. I took a lot of inspiration from Bert and his lifestyle and his authenticity. and his independence, and I found him to be quite admirable.

Yeah. So after the breakup, I lost a lot of inspiration. He had disappointed you, basically. Yeah. All right. So if this were a movie, Roxanne, this would be the point in the movie where, like, you would just go through the year, it would be 99, 13.8 million, 20, 30 million, 20, 60 million. And you'd have the music and you'd have these guys counting big stacks of cash and, you know, smoking cigars. But it is phenomenal.

Like, how do you go from $30 million to $60 million in one year? Was it just phenomenal salespeople? Was it luck? What was going on? Well, it was scalable. Every part of it was scalable. Once we automated filling, it just... You could just make more product.

Yeah. Just turn it to 11. Yeah. It was fabulous. And just more and more stores were asking for these products? Mm-hmm. We spent a lot of time focused on the consumer. So they would try the product, and they would want to go to the store and get a full-sized product, and they would ask for it.

And if a customer asks for a product, that's a great sign. Yeah. And if your store ran out, the customer came back for more, it wasn't there. They would ask, hey, where's the bird's bees? So that kind of a pulling strategy from the consumer really helped a lot with growth. And there was a tipping point where it seemed that everybody knew about it. Yeah. You know, it went from nobody knowing about it to everybody knowing about it.

And I'm not exactly sure what that tipping point was, but it took on a life of its own. Yeah. You sell 80% of your shares of the company. in 2003 to an investment firm. Not clear how much money, but a lot of money in the tens of millions of dollars. Was there something unsettling about all of a sudden coming into, you know, more money than you could ever have imagined? Not really. No, I wasn't unsettled by it. I was thinking about the exit strategy very early on. Is that because you just didn't want to deal with the hassle of running a company anymore? Yeah. It was something that became.

somewhat routine after a while, going to Big Box and drugstore chains. Didn't seem very exciting or creative to me, but it was clearly the next step. So I felt like it was time to turn it over to the professionals. And I just felt very constrained. I felt very disconnected from what originally was an inspiration for me. I imagine. So you go, you're gone. at this point, 2003, you really leave the company.

Mm-hmm. You became very wealthy from this tiny little bee company that you just, like, started accidentally. I mean, it's pretty remarkable, right? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don't live too differently. I have more freedom now than I did when I had no money. But in a certain sense, I had a lot of freedom then also because I had nothing to lose. Yeah.

That whole theme of freedom is important to me always has been. Meantime, you were really starting to become passionate about conserving and preserving land starting in Maine. Mm-hmm. And you have given away a huge amount of your money by buying land in Maine and all over the country and giving it to the federal government to Maine and other state agencies to develop parks. Yep. how did that sort of start to become your passion? Well, I had been living on the land up there for years, so I knew it. And with most beauty care companies, a lot of money that they generate goes into advertising.

Yeah. I've heard even that 25 cents of every dollar goes into advertising. So we didn't have that expense because, you know, guerrilla marketing and grassroots marketing, is not very expensive. No. And we had put all the money we needed to into growing the business. It still had excess cash. And I felt like we needed to find a very solid investment.

And so land seemed to be rock solid to me. Yeah. And President Obama named a new national monument in Maine largely around that land that you donated to the National Park Service. Kataten Woods and Waters. Kataden is our mountain in Maine. In 2015, Bert Shavitz passed away. He was 80. A remarkable guy, a really fascinating person. There was a film about him, which was really interesting.

And that was a point where he said something that probably was a little bit hurtful. He said, I'd never want to see her again. But have you kind of made peace with him and his memory and your relationship? Oh, yeah, I have. I was in love with Bert. Yeah. And we went through a lot of changes together. Had this child, Bert's bees together, raised it up.

Off it went. I still feel very, very close to Bert. I think about him a lot. He was quite an inspiration to me, a muse. Yeah. Did you have a chance to talk to Bert before he died? In a certain way, yes. I was about to visit him, and my girlfriend went up to visit him the afternoon before I was planning to go.

And she called me to let me know that she didn't think he was going to last much longer. So we sort of had a phone correspondence, and he did actually pass away later that day, so I did miss seeing him in person. But I just remember him, you know, at his prime. Yeah. Some people have criticized you because they say, well, you got most of the money out of the company and Bert, you know, he didn't get as much. What's your feeling about that criticism? I feel that I was the more responsible party for managing wealth. I could do the right thing with it. And I don't know whether Bert would have really used it very productively. He came from a family that had some wealth, and he chose not to use it. He didn't do anything to help the community with the wealth that he did have, and I felt like that was something that I could do and have been doing.

Do you plan to give away most of your wealth before you die? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's hard. That's a lot of work, isn't it? figuring out where we should go and dealing with all the incoming pitches and all the people who want some of your money. I mean, does it ever get tiresome? Well, I have both of my children each are working, so they have responsibility for distributing funds every year to grantees,

according to the mission that makes sense to them. So I do have help. And I'm pretty spontaneous about the way I distribute grantees. grants. I don't have a real formal system. I just, you know, either it rings true to me or it doesn't. Yeah. When you see Burt's bees today, it's owned by Clorox, eventually purchased by Clorax for almost a billion dollars in 2007, which is unbelievable. You see it everywhere. It's a CVS. It's at Walmart. It's 7-Eleven. Is it, do you beam with pride? Is it wonderful to see that? I don't pay that much attention to it, I guess. You know, I mean, I certainly notice it when I'm at Whole Foods and I walk by the Bert's Bees display. It's huge.

It always catches my eye. But I think I've let it go, you know, in many ways. I just, it's something apart from me now. So a question I ask everybody who's been on the show, Roxanne, I'm going to ask you, which is how much of your story and the success of this do you think is because of your skill and your intelligence? and your hard work and how much of it because of just luck? Well, I was born on July 11th, which is 7-Eleven. So I have felt lucky for a long time.

I mean, you certainly have to work hard, but when I look back at some of the critical events that were part of the destiny of this adventure, I certainly couldn't have pulled those off. That had to be luck or, divine intervention, and there's been so many of those. And the right people came to me at the right time. So that has got to be luck.

That's Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of Bert's Bees. After he passed away in 2015, Roxanne made a donation in Berg-Shavitz's name to open a brand-new Jewish community center in Portland, Maine. Roxanne has also been named to Forbes list of America's top 50 givers. Do you use any of the products? Well, the one product that I was using has been discontinued. I just got some lip-balm.

And I use the lip-bomb. Yeah, lip-bom's great. I like that mint. Oh, thank you. Yeah, that's your recipe, right? I hope so. Yeah, it's pretty good. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that.

And today, we're talking about a dating app, but not just any dating app. This is Carlos and his dog, Hugo. And Carlos says, I'm a single dad of a sweet, Wheaton Terrier who loves to play and make new friends. This is a dating app with profiles of people and their dogs. Very friendly and well-educated, never bites, always wagging his tail. Let's go to the park and let's get our dogs to play. So the voice you just heard is Lee Isaacson. And her story starts in 2016 when her younger sister Casey had just gone through a breakup.

She was dating a guy who tried to be a dog person for her. But by the end of the relationship, he didn't want the dog in his apartment. He would put towels down on the couch so the dog didn't touch anything. And she came to me and said, I wish I just knew from the start that this wasn't going to work because of my dog. And so the sisters thought, could there be a dating app that might solve this problem? an app that goes beyond Tinder and Bumble, an app where someone like Casey could say up front, me and my dog, we are a package deal.

She has a cavapoo. I mean, there's truly nothing that looks more like a teddy bear than her dog. And so we said, you know, if someone can't like this, then clearly, you know, you need to find someone with at least a little bit more dog person in them. So they started to kick around this idea, and they realized the way people take care of their dogs can say a lot of, about their personalities. How much money do you spend on your pets

or other things in the house? You know, how clean do you keep your house? Things like that might predict whether two dog owners are really compatible. Does your dog sleep in the bed or out of the bed? Do you let your dogs on furniture? Do you always pick up dog poop on the walk? That's a big one.

That's a big one. And by the way, if you are listening and you have a dog, please do pick up the dog poop off the sidewalk. Just a favor I'm asking. Anyway, in July of 2017, the sisters, began developing their app. Now, Lee has a background in journalism, and Casey works in advertising design.

They had never done anything like this before. So at first, they pulled their money together and their dad put in a little bit too, and then they got into an accelerator program. They found a chief tech officer and a team of developers to help them build the app. We actually went through four development teams.

Because Lee and Casey had a hard time finding just the right match. It can be very scary when you have a limited amount of money to build this product and you see it either taking forever or, you know, not looking the way you want it to and watching your money drain at the same time. But after seven months, their dating app was ready, and they launched it on Valentine's Day. We weren't the first dating app out there, so we were able to learn from a lot of other people's mistakes. There have been interesting dating apps that have tried to launch nationally. And they get a lot of attention really quickly, but because you need a lot of people in one place in order for a dating app to work, they just fell apart. So Lee and Casey decided to get the word out city by city, starting in New York.

They thought this would be the best way to build their user base. Lee even hosted events in each city, these big dog-friendly parties. Pet companies paid to set up booths that meant revenue. And dog owners, well, they're always looking for places to bring their dogs. so they would come and stay and mingle. And after each launch, Lee and Casey saw a spike in new users. We knew there was nothing more valuable than getting a lot of people in the app so our users could find more people to match with.

The sisters have now launched in seven more cities, L.A., Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, New Orleans, Austin, and Chicago. And they're bringing in more revenue by charging pet companies to put ads on the app. This means after a year they've been able to keep the app free. Lee Isaacson's app is called Dig. It has more than 20,000 users and growing. And yes, she knows what some of you single people with cats are thinking, where's my app? Oh, yeah.

We get the cat question all the time. You know, surprisingly, we actually get the horse question all the time. Horse people definitely need to have their own conversations, too. But for now, Dig is all about the dogs. and the people who love them. If you want to find out more about Lee or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, How I Built This.NPR.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org.

And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This. Our show is produced this week by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Erebleu. Thanks also to Mia Venkat, Nurkudsi, Niba Grant, Melissa Gray, Sanaz-Meshkampur, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Candice Lim.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.