How I Built This with Guy Raz - EO Products: Susan Griffin-Black & Brad Black

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

In the early 1990s, Susan Griffin-Black was working for Esprit in San Francisco. On a business trip to London, she walked into a Covent Garden apothecary shop, picked up a bottle of lavender oil and took a whiff. The aroma — "like being in a beautiful garden" — literally changed her life. That was the inspiration to develop her own line of essential oil products. For 15 years, she and her husband and co-founder Brad Black barely scraped by, but the business eventually thrived. And though their marriage ultimately ended, their partnership continues. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," Lia Heifetz of Barnacle Foods describes how she and her partners turned Alaskan bull kelp into pickles and salsa. 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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And I hope to see you there. So the meeting that we went to with the new buyer. The first meeting. Right, with the first meeting. I think I was nursing. I remember being in that room, having a baby and just presenting. This woman was, I don't know, in her late 20s, and she was not responding to anything that we were saying in a positive manner.

So it was a hard meeting. And without them, we were sunk. 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 the show today, how a chance whiff of lavender inspired Susan Griffin Black to launch a line of essential oils

and then grow that idea into EO products, one of the most successful independently owned natural body care companies. So there's a word that gets thrown out a lot by venture capitalists and rich folks who invest in startups. And that word is scale. If you've ever tried to raise money for a business, you probably found yourself seated across a table from someone who asked, how are you going to scale this thing? And what that investor was really asking was, how you're going to grow your company into a billion-dollar venture,

so I can get a hundred-x return on my money. Scale means big profits for investors, but it can also mean growth as the only goal that really matters. But some entrepreneurs are more interested in a slow, sustainable growth model, which is why they avoid venture capital. Think Yvonne Chonard of Patagonia, or Seth Tibbid of Toferky or Kim Jordan of New Belgium Brewery. All of those companies are independently owned,

beholden to neither shareholders nor venture capitalists. Same thing with a company whose story you are about to hear, because EO Products is, in a way, the opposite of scale. Brad and Susan Griffin Black have never taken any venture money, and they never had much money of their own. So the story of EO products is a story of a slow burn, nearly 30 years of building up a brand one product at a time, fighting for every store and eventually.

and sustainably growing into one of the most recognized natural body care brands in the U.S. Today the company does about $50 million in revenue a year. But 30 years ago, when she started the company, Susan Griffin Black was a single mom raising her son in San Francisco. But that's not the most amazing thing about this story. The company itself was barely scraping by for its first 15 years. And once it actually started to take off, it can. could have unraveled because the co-founders split up. Their marriage collapsed, but we'll get there.

For now, let's start in the years before Brad and Susan met. In the late 1980s, they were both living in San Francisco. Brad had just moved there from the East Coast after leaving a job in computer sales. My initial motivation was to move to Australia yet this was pre-internet, and I didn't know anyone in Australia. So I had a couple of friends in San Francisco. And, you know, I sold everything. I guess I had like $2 or $3,000 in the bank account and moved in with one of them who was on H Street. And what did you do?

We started a clothing company called Maniac. And Maniac is spelled as in the state of Maine. Right. M-A-N-E-I-A-C. And, you know, we held the space of kind of like rock climbing. and mountain biking. This was the time, late 80s, where the whole active wear thing came alive, Stusi, Massimo. And so it's active wear, and then that tied into our lifestyle.

So then we would mountain bike and we would rock climb during the day and run the business. And then we would go out and party at night all the time wearing our clothes, which, like, who doesn't want to show off what they do? And if you make your own clothes and we made our own clothes and we would sew our own clothes, I mean, you know, much of it via ignorance. And like, how was the business doing? Well, business was kind of secondary to lifestyle. We were living at large, you know, entrepreneurs in San Francisco. And this is before the dot-com internet thing hit. And it was very vibrant, a little gritty.

yet artistic and we could really own it. And, you know, we would peddle our wares. And we sold to Nordstrom and we sold to the hardcore rock climbing shops. Yet we didn't really ever make money. And when we had the opportunity to make money, we just never, I don't know, if we were mature enough or that we saw the opportunity that was in front of us yet we didn't make money. And Susan, around this time, I guess, you also had like a clothing store in San Francisco? Yeah. It was a great little store. And we got written up in the Chronicle probably within the first couple of weeks. And so that gave us a great start. And, you know, we're part of a local design community. And it was a really vibrant time.

And at that time, you were married to someone else, right? to a lawyer named Bill? Yeah. You know, we were, I think we were in an apartment by that time in the marina. He passes the bar and goes to work for a big law firm. And things were much cushier eventually. We went from the marina to a very nice building in Pacific Heights. He was working really hard.

I had a store on Sutter Street. Mark was born. My son was born. 1986 and all looked very good. It didn't feel very good to me, but it looked good. Why didn't it feel good? What was wrong? I don't know. I guess I had fallen into what was considered at the time, the yuppie life. I'm a free spirit and I really liked the whole art scene, which I wasn't really doing much of anymore. And all of a sudden it was like waking up one day and feeling like I was at the wrong party. Like I didn't really know or really relate to the people who were there. And

I had this like a doorman, a kid, a French nanny. And it all looked good and it just started to feel fragmented. My conversations, our conversations were pretty stilted and got very tense because I really felt like Bill had sold out and he was sort of on the wrong side of things. And I just felt like it just wasn't my life. And I couldn't make it my life. So when Mark was two and a half, we split. You and Bill split.

Mm-hmm. So you left behind. the nanny, the dormant in Pacific Heights, the fancy apartment, and you left that behind. Yeah, much to my mother's dismay, as you can imagine. So what about your business? I mean, did you continue to run your business? I did for a short amount of time, and then I sold that to my partner at the time for $12,000. So you're now a single mom, and what was your plan? What did you think you wanted to to do? Well, I wasn't stressed financially. I took a job because I could see that I would get stressed

financially. So I ended up doing some consulting for friends in the clothing business and helped a few friends start their companies. And in 90, I took a job at a spree working for the late Doug Tompkins. Oh, yeah. I mean, a legend. guy. I think he was one of the founders of the North Face. Yes, originally he was. Yeah. And Esprit was a huge brand, definitely in the 80s and 90s, and still around today. Yeah. All right. So this is like the early 90s. Both of you, Brad and Susan, both of you are in San Francisco.

Both of you are working in the apparel business. I guess at one point, Susan, you happened to go into maniac into Brad's store. And is that where the two of you meet? Yeah, it was their warehouse, actually, and all of the products were there. And I remember Brad and I shook hands. He was cute. He was smart. I liked him right away.

He seemed like a good guy. It was really resonance right off the bat. And after Susan left, I got her business card, and this was June of 1988. I wrote her, Dear Susan, you know, thank you for your time. and we just connected and we kind of stayed in touch. She would help us a little bit or I would help her. I think we were really struggling entrepreneurs and we were able early on to engage with each other. Like she always got me and I always got her.

And even now, you know, I mean, it's like it's been 30 years and she can start. a sentence almost and I can finish it. Wow. But it really started that way in many respects. You guys right away were attracted to each other? Yeah.

But you guys were not dating at that point. You were just hanging out. We were friends. You were friends. Yeah. We were friends. All right. So you guys start meeting up. Susan, you were working at a spree, this company that really was just like crushing it in the 80s and 90s. I remember

everyone wearing either a Benetton sweatshirt or an Esprit sweatshirt or a spree sweatshirt. Oh, yes. And also at the time, you know, during that time, Doug was very interested in transforming the company into a more sustainable environmental company and looking at all the processes that were involved in manufacturing. And at that time, there were just so many incredible people coming through, whether it was, you know, David Brower, the environmentalist, or Yvonne Chouinard or Anita Rodd from the Body Shop. I mean, it was a portal for me into really thinking about

and looking at sustainability. And so I had met Anita Roddick from the Body Shop, and she was opening franchises in Northern California, and I loved her, but I wasn't totally crazy about the products. I've always been a product person. I feel like I'm, you know, I've been ahead of it and trust my instincts, I think, eventually anyway. So when I see something that I like, even if it's like a little bit off, as soon as people learn about it and understand it, they'll like it too.

And I guess this all kind of begins to come together for you when a spree sends you to London to go buy stuff for them, like on a buying trip. Is that right? Well, yes, you know, we would go to trade shows, you know, fabric trade shows. It was the way to sort of interpret street fashion and up-and-coming trends. Yeah. And so I was in London on a buying trip, and I was sort of running through the Covent Garden area. Yeah. And I ran to this little store, and I was just taken by what it smelled like in there.

What was the store? it was called Neal's Yard Remedies. Right near the cheese shop. Yeah, right next to Neal's Yard dairy, right? Yeah, yeah. So upstairs, you could see an herbalist or an acupuncturist or a homeopath, and then you would come downstairs and get your prescriptions filled in this little apothecary. And so the reason that it smelled the way it smelled was because of the essential oils and the herbs that they stocked. So I picked up this little bottle of lavender.

essential oil, and I inhaled, and everything changed. Like, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, you know. The body shop sort of helped me pay attention to that segment of product in the market, and then this was like, oh, no, this is the product. Wow. This must have been, like, totally mind-blowing, right? Because essential oil is still kind of hippie-dippy, right? It's not, this is not mainstream.

No, no. It was very hippie-dippy, yeah. And you go in there, and this was like nothing. you would seem before, you hadn't known about essential oils? You know, around that time there were all those awful, you know, candle stores and all sorts of stores that you would go in and it would have a really synthetic cloying smell, as did a lot of perfume, most perfume, right? Someone would get on that elevator and be like, oh, Lord, you know. This was like being in a beautiful garden, you know. I mean, it reminded me of

great parts of my childhood, just like being at my grandma's watering tomatoes, the smell of lilacs, it was real and it was very different. So you're in that store and what? You're there and you're thinking, I kind of figure out to do something with this, like this is what I want to do? Yeah. You know, I hadn't sort of lived that lifestyle. So I think, you know, I was searching, really, for what made sense and what was real. what had heart and meaning for me. And so that just opened up a new path and something new to learn.

And I was very passionate about it. So, like, what did you do at that point? Did you, like, contact the founder and say, hey, I want to work with you or, like, be a distributor or, like, sell this in the U.S.? Is that what happened? Yes. And she wouldn't talk to me until I worked in the store. So I worked in the store for three days.

And what was her name? Romy Frazier. And she said, you have to work in the store before we talk? She said, if you're interested, you know. I mean, the retail is the heart of what we're doing. So I was, you know, mixing herbal tinctures in the back room and doing all sorts of things. And I loved it. And then we met after.

And basically, the idea was to open retail stores like that in the U.S. And you said to Romi, I want to be your person doing this in the U.S.? Yes. And let me just add a cure. I mean, obviously you are super talented, super smart, and driven. But like, you had no money. You had no access to, like, immediate capital. You would know track record selling essential oils in the U.S.

Why would she even consider working with you? Well, you know, she also was a small company. I think at the time they had a couple of stores. She could see how sincere and interested I was. And also, you know, from being in the clothing business, I did have relationships with buyers and, you know, merchandise managers and owners of specialty stores. So I had some access to understanding distribution. So what did she say to you? She said, yeah, go back to the U.S. and let's do this or what?

Well, essentially, I tried to put a plan together for retail stores, and I could see that that would never work because you needed people who were very well-versed in all of these alternative modalities in aromatherapy and homeopathy. And I was running out of money, so I thought best to wholesale and see who's interested, who wants it, and then I could have them pay for half of the money. the order. I could import the product, which I did in my garage in Petral Hill, and then have the retailers who wanted it, pay half up front, and then I deliver it and get the rest of the money. So that's what I did. All right. So you're back in San Francisco. And by this time, like in 1992, you've got a five-year-old kid. And are you and Brad dating yet or not yet? We weren't really dating. I think we were still good friends.

I think Brad had a girlfriend. And we would spend more time together because I was in the neighborhood. And I was working out of my garage. And then he would ride his bike, open the garage door, and I had a little teeny office in there. He would help with business plans. And we would commiserate about, he was still in the clothing business then. And you were essentially trying to make this import business. of essential oils work. And Brad, do you remember, like, what did you think about this idea?

Did you think, oh, this is a no-brainer? Or were you just like, yeah, I want to help Susan because I like her? It didn't happen that quickly. You know, Susan had no money and I had less. What really, I think, sustained the relationship and made it exciting is that it was never a no-brainer, and it still isn't after 30 years. But I was full on in my clothing company, and we wanted to help out each other. And how did it work with Romi Fraser and Yel Zard? Did you have to pay her up front and then she would ship you the oils? Or was there like a partnership where she just shipped it to you and didn't charge you off the bat?

Like, how did that work? We had net 30 terms. 30 days? Yeah. I think maybe in the beginning it was 60. So she was basically selling you the oils at cost or a little bit. bit above cost, you were then marking it up a little bit and that was it. So it really was like a distributor relationship. You weren't like an equity partner with her. No. It was a separate

entity and finances were completely separate. So how are you keeping this afloat? I mean, you had to pay Neal's yard in 30 days. How are you making that work? Well, I raised a little bit of money from friends and family. So we'd have a little bit of a cushion and also be able to increase inventory and our accounts and eventually had to get a space in the same building where Brad's company was.

In San Francisco. Yes. Yeah. And so you're running it out of there. And Brad, were you helping her with this? Well, kind of what was happening on my side of things is that we decided to shut the business down. Maniac. Maniac. Right. And then that kind of opened up a pocket for me. Well, you know,

what am I going to do? And were we dating at that time? Probably. Yes. And I had two or three opportunities. One was I was going to open up a bungee jumping site in downtown San Francisco. Okay. Yes. And another opportunity was working for a sock company out of Japan. And the third, was working with Susan, and so our relationship started to develop, and there just were opportunities, and we were good together. And so that's how our relationship lost them. Yeah. We were selling Neal's Yard, and we had that. We were making a few products for Neal's yard because it was, we wanted to learn how to make stuff, right? So we would make bath salts and anything that you could cold mix and then pour. You were making it in a garage.

in San Francisco or you were outsourcing it to someone else? Well, in the warehouse that we rented, we had a small lab there and we were making a few things. You and other people or were you by yourself? I had two employees and a part-time bookkeeper because we had several accounts by then. So we were learning how to make things by hand and I knew someone introduced me to the marketing person at Birkenstock. And she said, why don't we do a little foot care kit like gift with person. of like a little foot salt and a little footsoak. And so we did a prototype and she gave us an order for $32,000.

It was $320 for each gift box, which meant I had to make $10,000. Wow. And then Brad came down the hall and I'm like, how are we going to do $10,000? It was like such the I Love Lucy show when you walked into her warehouse and, um, And, you know, of course, I saw the numbers as well. And I didn't know anything about essential oils, really. I liked how they smelled. I didn't know how to really make anything, yet I can kind of figure out most things.

You know, at Maniac, we made our own products, and so I learned how to sew. And, you know, learning these things from a mechanical aspect was pretty straightforward for me in terms of like, okay, well, this is just what you do. Let's just put them together. Let's make these 10,000 kids. Yeah. He said, we're not going to fill these by hand. We're going to, you know, jury rig this way to gravity feed, and then we'll fill the bottles that way.

And he had me at gravity feed. Can you describe, like, what did that look like? Was it like a giant funnel that you would just pour the salts in? You know, really what we did is we started from hand pouring into bottles to adding equipment. And, you know, gravity feed is one of the ways. Yeah, it's really taking it from the funnel and moving it to a machine. And then instead of one a minute, you have the ability to do eight a minute or ten a minute or 50 a minute. And that was presumably a game changer for you.

We never would have been able to fill that order. Yeah. Just like sprinkling it with a little shovel, I guess, a little scoop. That wouldn't work. Yeah, it would go slow. That wouldn't work, no. Just had curiosity. I mean, today, if you want to figure out how to make bath salts or things like that,

You can just go online, right? Yeah. In like 1993, 94, when you're doing this, how did you figure out how to make this stuff? Like, do you just buy a bunch of salt and add essential oils to it? Well, we did learn a lot from Neal's Yard because they were a small manufacturer. So we could suss out the processes. I was very interested in studied aromatherapy with a bunch of different people. So I understood the properties of essential oils and the blending of essential oils.

and the blending of essential oils, which I understood how to do that. If you go online right now, you can see where the at-home person can create sort of the easier things. And that's what we stuck to. So we made bath salts, we made lip bombs, we made massage oil. So how are you getting the oils in 1995? Where were you finding them? Well, through various distributors that we had started working with. We learned a lot about essential oils and distribution also from Neal's yard and from taking aromatherapy classes.

And then you would ask around, you know, and then, hey, I don't have a lavender, this person has a lavender, or, hey, I need an orange. Where is orange grown? All right, it's grown in Florida. So then you would, you know, go through the yellow pages. Right. And essential oils actually aren't oil. They're called essential oils because it's heavier than water. So when you talk about lavender, lavender grows many places, but the best lavender is from France.

And, you know, there's a certain taste level, just like with food and wine, about, you know, what smells best, what's the best quality. Can you source that? Can you make that a consistent part of a formulation? Because essential oils are finicky, you know, the reason that people stopped using them and went to synthetic fragrance, you know, was because it was way less expensive. Sure. And it was consistent. And was the oil like being delivered to your little, I don't know, warehouse that you guys were running like in tin drums or in like glass jars or giant bags of oil?

Like how did it come to you? Right. Glass and aluminum bottles. And there were some local distributors as well that even though they charged a lot, we had access. to it. Susan, I mean, you're basically running this little company that is trying to make a go at it with essential oils. How were you guys doing financially? Was it sustainable?

Yes and no. I mean, sustainable as in raised a little money. We could pay the rent. But you weren't making a ton of money. Oh, no, no, no. No. We were scraping. But right along with that stress,

was the question of what else would I be doing. There was always like, yes, you're stressed, and okay, what do you want to do about it? You want to get a job? No. Do you want to do something else? No. And then it would sort of just settle into this is what we're doing.

You are, because you are basically the distributor for Neal's Yard, right? Yes. And doing that alone was not going to be enough, just selling Neal's Yard, you know. It wasn't, and it was because, you know, we were importing, so we were basically schlepping glass bottles halfway around the world and then reshipping them to other stores. And we got it up to a certain level of sales. I think it was half a million in the U.S., but we could still see how we could do it ourselves and do it for less money because, you know, all of that shipping and do it our own way. Yeah. So we gave them six months to find a different distributor.

You gave Neal's Yard six months. You figured we got to do this on our own now. Yes. Well, I think one of the early on indicators for us, around that time, essential oils and higher end personal care, bath care products started to take off in the gift market. Right. And Susan had created an access point to,

a lot of retailers or folks that wanted us to make the products for them. And there was some demand because there just weren't that many companies that made essential oil-based and more natural body care products. So who, I'm just a curiosity, who was buying essential oils at the time in the early 90s and mid-90s? Because people would put it, I guess, you could rub it behind your neck or you could use it, you know, as aromathes. therapy or use it in a bath. Like, who were your customers? So, in 1995, Bloomingdale's called and said, will you make us four essential oil blends for our holiday catalog?

Wow, that's a big deal. I know. We said, sure. And we had to think of a name for the company then. And these were very small bottles. So, you know, we didn't have a lot of room on the label. And aromatherapy just seemed like way too long of a word. So he just came up with the initials EO, and then we did four blends for Bloomingdale's, and that started the company.

Okay, so in 1995, you guys decide to launch your own company, and you called it EO products, which stands for essential oils. Yes. Pretty simple, right? Yes, okay. And how significant was that order? Was it like hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars? What do you remember about it? It was, I think, $15,000.

Okay, so it was pretty small. Yeah. But we still had to fill a lot of bottles in a relatively short amount of time and come up with the formulations. And then it was sort of like, okay, now what? Yeah. And again, 1995. So many things are so easy now. You can just get Shopify to put your web store online.

You can easily find a company online that will make a little. labels for you that will even do fulfillment and shipping. How, for example, did you, like, because you had to slap labels on these little bottles and it had to look nice because it's Bloomingdale. You cannot mess around. How did you do that, for example? You know, we're very good at doing. We would just figure it out, and our taste levels have always been high.

And when you looked at products and more natural products and natural food stores, everything had a leaf or a flower or, you know, really bad type and not very nice colors. So we just went very minimal and chose a beautiful typeface, which was Dido, which is a similar typeface to Vogue, actually, as it turns out. And the products had to smell exceptional, and then they also had to perform, which was a little bit of a hurdle. And our idea was that if we're using these expensive, very beautiful essential oils, we're not going to ruin it with harsh chemicals. And so there was a high bar that we set right off the bat.

And I guess, so at this point, Brad, you are working with Susan. You are two feet in after a couple years of dating and working closely. You really are in love. And you guys get married in 1995 in the middle, in sort of the midst of. all this, right? Oh, yeah. We were gravity feeding and walking down the aisle, yeah. And getting married. By the way, how did this like line of essential oil sell at Bloomingdale? How did it do? Did it crush it? Did they sell out? It crushed it, but crushing it from the other side. I think they ordered once. And that was it. Yeah. However, it was a springboard.

It was a springboard. Okay. And just, just to add something here, 1996, Susan, you had a 10-year-old. You guys were married and you just had another baby. You guys had your first child together, Lucy. So you're a, you got a 10-year-old, a newborn baby, you're launching a business to get together. Was that crazy? Was it just like insane? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it was. And the financial pressure was, there was a lot of financial pressure. Because just you weren't selling as much as you wanted to sell? You know, we didn't have money really for the first 15 to 18 years. Wow. It's come up a lot in this conversation yet.

It didn't really come up much other than, you know, I want to swear a little bit here, so I won't. It was a struggle. And so we loved what we were doing. Yeah. And we're very scrappy. Yeah. And we just made it work.

And that was really the reality of it all. Were you guys interested in becoming rich? I mean, was that important to you to make a lot of money? Was that not even top of my – be honest with me. Was part of you thinking, I've got to make this work. I'm going to make a lot of money. Here's something that I kind of learned from my early 30s when I lived in Pacific Heights is that money is not the thing, right?

Yeah. And I knew a lot of really rich, unhappy. people. And I know that money in and of itself for me wasn't the key motivator, and I already knew that that was not like my path to happiness. However, paying our rent was important and our bills and surviving a little bit past survival was important because otherwise it was a lot of pressure. So the question wasn't, when are we going to get rich? The question was, when are we going to make pay? When we come back in just a moment, Susan and Brad navigate the stress of growing a business and how that stress took a toll on their marriage. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Oh, and one more thing. If you love how I built this, check out my new podcast, Wisdom from the Top. It's a show about how some of the greatest leaders in business and politics managed

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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. Guy Raz. So it's 1996, and EO Products is, to say the least, having some money problems. But around that time, they get a lucky break. A big order from a West Coast apartment store called Mervyn's. And that order is enough to help them keep the lights on and also take on a new challenge to try and get their products into Whole Foods. We went to our local Whole Foods in Mill Valley, and they turned us down. And then we did some guerrilla marketing. We would, like, call Whole Foods and say, hi, do you have EO?

They'd be like, no. We're like, oh, you should carry it. It's such a good product. Wait, you would just call up and just the two of you would do this? Or our local friends would go into the Whole Foods and say, hey, do you have EO? Yeah, it was total grew up. You would just troll the local Whole Foods asking for, but that just sounds like a totally, like, transparently obvious campaign. Like, didn't they know that you guys were doing this?

Well, you know, we had a lot of friends. Our kids were in school, and then we had people who wrote notes on the community bullet and board, you know. Asking, do you have EO products? Yeah, or why aren't you carrying EO products? And they finally started carrying our products. And then one Whole Foods led to the next. So I think maybe the buyer changed at Whole Foods. And, you know, it was very sort of buyer-centric if they liked you and they wanted to

carry you. That was their decision. And that's how Whole Foods ran. Yeah. All right. So 1997, you get into Whole Foods kind of a big deal. Seems like you guys are really turning a corner. But I guess later that year or around that time, like your biggest account, which was Mervyn's, they kind of were like, yeah, we think we're going to stop buying from you. Is that true? Is that what happened? What a nightmare that was. I know, but the buyer changed. So the buyer that knew us and loved us left, and there was a new buyer who didn't really like aromatherapy and didn't really like essential oils. Susan, tell Guy about that meeting that we went to with Lucy.

So the meeting that we went to with the new buyer. The first meeting. Right, with the first meeting. I think I was nursing, Lucy. I remember being in that room, presenting, having a baby. This woman was, I don't know, in her late 20s, and she was not responding to anything that we were saying in a positive manner. And without them, we were sunk.

So it was a hard meeting. I mean, when you say you were sunk, you lose Mervyn's. You lose this account. What does that mean? How close were you to the business just like crumbling? You know, that's not such a big deal because, you know, we were on the brink of crumbling for many years. Well, no, I think that this was a close one.

This was should I get a job, should one of us get a job to just smooth out whatever was coming, you know? I mean, our accountant was like, you know, he did advise us to maybe fold and get a job. Your accountant after this Mervyn's thing said maybe you guys should just like, Call it a day. I mean, when your accountant is telling you that, the person who knows your finance is better than anyone else, that's really bad. It was bad. But we didn't think about quitting. We just thought about how were we ever going to get through this to get to the other side.

So what happened? Was there anything that happened that kind of threw you a lifeline? Yes. We got a $65,000 order from T.J. Max. Bam. Just out of the blue? Well, they came to our place of business, and at that time, we had a 3,000 square foot space, and they came to visit, and they just couldn't really believe that we were manufacturing everything there because it was, you know, 3,000 square feet, right? Yeah. And they still gave us in order. All right, so you kind of get a lifeline from T.J. Max. Thank you, T.J. Max. Thank you, T.J. Max. Forever, yeah.

And you're in Whole Foods. Yeah. Like, if you were to walk into a Whole Foods in 2000 and you saw a couple of EO products available, like when people walk into grocery stores and they see like a product available, I think most people assume, oh, that's a big company or, you know, the people involved in that company must be doing really well. In 1999, 2000, were you guys able to pay yourselves really good salaries? No. No.

But we were able to buy a small private label manufacturer. Like a factory? Yeah. They had 1,000-gallon tank and a couple of other tanks and forklifts and everything, you know, was set up and ready to go. This was a private label that was making soaps and beauty supplies? Yes, for other companies. But not organic necessarily. No.

And it was pretty run down. And how much did you guys pay for it? $250,000. How did you have the money for that? We didn't. But there was a very progressive small bank. Our accountant knew those guys. And they ended up lending us the money.

Wow. So at this point, you have the factory, how many products around 2000? How many different products were you making? I'm going to say 35. Wow. So like soaps and hand soaps and shower gels and shampoos and what else? And conditioner, bubble bath, lotion, maybe lip balm. So that's a big product line.

And were you guys just working like crazy? Was it like all the time? Yeah. So the way that it was working for, I don't know, maybe it was years, is that I would get up at the crack of dawn and get to work between five and six. and Susan would take care of the kids in the home in the morning, and she would come in at 9 or 10, and then I would pick up at 3 or 4,

and Susan would stay until 6 or 7, and that's really what the routine was. And you were still pretty small, right? I mean, I don't think in like 2000, 2002, 2003, 4, like you were probably doing, what, a million dollars, 2 million dollars in gross sales? 2002, yeah, two baby, yes. And you never really raised massive amounts of money. You always kind of 100,000, two, three, four hundred thousand there, I think a million dollars at one point.

But you never went for like series A, series B, series C. No. I mean, first of all, you know, we've had companies on the show that, you know, that have gone to VC. And because they want to scale fast and they want to be first out the game. and they need the money to really grow fast. And I have to assume then and maybe even now you could pretty easily get that money. Was there a reason why you didn't want to do that? Yes, because everything I saw and that we saw of companies that took private equity money,

and especially if they sold the majority, they didn't have control anymore. And we always joked that the first thing they would do is take that rose essential oil that costs $850 a kilo that we use. very, very sparingly, but very beautifully, and they would take that out right away. And, you know, we've watched the consolidation in personal care and in natural personal care over the years, and that's been a consistent thing of changing the product slightly or not really taking care of the brand and its original intention. And there were a lot of unhappy people and not a lot of success stories. All right, so you guys have this really cool business that you started together.

You're raising two kids. You're growing. You've got 35 products. Yeah, you're still small. But you can see where this is heading. And how did you guys do as a couple? How was your relationship going? Yeah, it was very tough being married, raising kids, being under financial pressure.

that takes a lot and it's we sort of we lost our way we lost our way but and we really cared about each other did you go to counseling sure yes and it was helpful at times and I think it was definitely helpful long term because we can still refer back to how to work things out and how to smooth out our differences we all We also, I think, individually did a lot of personal work and, you know, got to a place where we couldn't make it work. And so we separated and then divorced. I think people are hearing that are going to just be shocked. You guys are sitting there together talking so wonderfully and fondly about each other and you're divorced.

2007, you guys split up. You divorce. Yeah. I've never heard of a story like this is my life. Not only are you business, I guess, so you divorce and you guys decide what? You say, you know, this business is going well. Let's just keep it going. Is that, does that what happen?

I think we decided there's no reason to like, you know, take down the house. Yeah. I mean, our personal relationship wasn't thriving. Our business is. our kids are, so what is the best way, you know? And we understood our options. We could have sold. We could have bought each other out.

We could, you know, we had options. Yeah. So, I mean, this was a very conscious choice. It's just a remarkably adult and mature decision. Like, it speaks to the kind of people both of you are. I'm just wondering, like, what do the people in the office feel? Like, what was the atmosphere? Was it tense?

Were people like, this is weird? Like, how did your employees respond? Well, the first two years were tough. And certainly, you know, the first six months were the hardest. And absolutely they said that. And yet, for me, it just never got that bad. Like, there was a lot of demand on me to make it that bad, be it family or culture, you know, or what have you, oh my gosh, you got divorced.

Yeah. This is the path that you go down. Yeah. If all you're doing is you're looking to get through this day as best you can, it does shift the perspective a little bit. The other thing I think that's important is that there was no other person involved. So we didn't have to navigate that sort of betrayal. Right. Right.

So I think that because we were parents that it didn't alter life, daily life, that much. You're officially divorced, and presumably it's still not easy. But the business really starts to take off. I guess around this time Walgreens and CVS and Walmart start to express interest in carrying your products. And like, what explains that? The timing, I think that the timing really was on our side that we were kind of met because we were always ahead of the curve. Yeah. We were on sort of a parallel path with all the natural food stores, Whole Foods was growing at a really hefty clip.

That was such a natural venue for us because people were buying into the same beliefs about health and well-being. Yeah. When you started to get into places like Walgreens and Walgreens, and Walgreens. Walmart and Target. What did that mean for, I don't just like, could you meet the demand? I mean, even with your small little place? Well, that really didn't happen in a big way until we launched our second brand, everyone, and that was in 2012. And that was sort of a more of a consumer, less expensive, everyday products like shampoo and right and shower gel.

Yeah, it was a larger format product. And our son's in a band, and the band came home, and they had all these really awful products in the bathroom when I went in. And I was like, have we taught you nothing? Like, you know, what are these products? And they'd be like, EO's too expensive, and we need a big soap. And then at the same time, Brad was hearing from a lot of Whole Foods buyers that we, you know, we needed a large,

size, value sort of proposition. So we started a second line called Everyone, and that really just took off. And how are you making it less expensive? Because you're buying expensive ingredients. So how are you able to make a more budget-friendly product? We use many of the same ingredients. However, instead of using a rose, essential oils, we may keep it to citrus. Or instead of putting in a lot of extracts, which are expensive as well, we would, you know, do a much smaller amount. So we simplified formulas. In addition, our margin is less.

I mean, over the years, you've raised very little money. So most of this company you guys own, right? Yeah. Yes. I have to imagine that certainly in the last few years, you've been approached by all kinds of big, bigger companies who want to buy you. Yeah. And you've said, no, not interested right now.

Is there a reason why you wouldn't want to do that? You know, the idea wasn't to cash out. The idea was to build a company that we wanted to work for that provided opportunity for as many people as possible. You know, the other part of this is the business is part of our life. It never was separate. And so you can look at the success of the business. And you can also look at the success of our relationship, our family.

Yes, yes. So it really has enabled us the business to live to our highest potential. Right. Like life is pretty good. Do both of you, are both of you in new relationships today? I am and have been for the past five years, yes? No, Bradley's still looking. But like it sounds like you still consider yourselves to be really close,

maybe like almost best friends. We are, yes? Yeah, it almost takes things to a whole different level. You know, you have really special relationships with your siblings, brothers and sisters, and you also have some close friends. And I think that we've kind of taken some. some of those concepts and put them on steroids a little bit. I mean, imagine choosing to engage on a daily basis with the person you divorced, knowing all of the good things and all of the bad things,

and then still choosing to be together. It's a wonderful experience. Yeah. And it doesn't mean we get along all the time. So it's not that we don't get into fights, but we do tend to get out of fights pretty quickly. I'm going to ask both of you the same question. Susan, first to you, What do you think it is about Brad that enabled this to work? What is it about him that allowed you guys to stay friends and business partners and to work through the pain and stuff? What do you think? He has a brilliant capacity to be irreverent and kind and open and stubborn. And with all of these qualities, we've always come out aligned on.

what's most important. Brett, what is it about Susan that allowed for this to happen? Her perspective, her capacity to have compassion, and there was a guy that came into our office the other day, and there was someone sick in his family, and the way that she addressed him and engaged with him, he was met. It was beautiful. And to be able to be this close with someone and not be involved romantically, it gives me such a great opportunity to be a better person. What do you attribute your success to, the success of this business, to all the hard work you put into it and the blood, sweat, and tears, or your intelligence or just or luck?

Well, Susan, you're going to laugh. You know, we do say this. We're not such great business people. will really great not going out of business people. We haven't had the luxury to go out of business or not to make it work. There's never been a choice not to be successful, not to make it work. Susan, how about you? We've been really privileged to be able to live our lives

and meet that in our work with shared values. It's exceptional. And it's a beacon to show that it's very possible if we can do it, you know, you can do it. That's Susan Griffin Black and Brad Black, founders and CEOs of EO products. The company now employs more than 140 people at their headquarters in San Rafael, California, which, by the way, used to be a special effects studio owned by George Lucas. He even filmed a few scenes for Star Wars inside. Today, the company churns out more than 50 products, including their signature lavender oil.

Susan recommends a few drops of it in the bath before bedtime for restful sleep. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today, our story starts in the cold northern waters of Juneau, Alaska. We're surrounded by the ocean on one side, and then on the other side, we're surrounded by ice fields in huge mountains. This is Leah Hyphitz, and for years, she and her partner Matt would get into an aluminum skiff and go fishing out in the Pacific. We'd be trolling for salmon or maybe we'd be fishing for halibut, and the fish weren't biting that day. And rather than go home empty-handed, we would stop at a kelp bed. A bed of bull kelp, to be exact.

It's kind of twisty brown seaweed that sort of looks like a bullwhip. So we'd fill up a five-gallon bucket full of crows. kelp and be able to bring some bounty home. And Leah describes bull kelp as bounty because it is totally edible. Fight into it raw and it has a consistency of a bell pepper. It's salty and crunchy and has a deep umami base flavor or a savory base flavor. That makes everything in it taste more like itself. That's what umami does.

And it turns out bull kelp can also be pickled or cooked into salsa. So whenever Leah and Matt brought one of those five-gallon buckets home? We would call up some friends to grab some other ingredients, so we would sometimes make a green salsa that had tomatios. We made a variety of other salsas that had tomatoes and onions along with the kelp. And what Leah and Matt discovered a few years ago is that kelp was actually getting some attention among foodies.

So on a national scale, there's a lot of whispers in 2016 about kelp being the new kale. Like other types of seaweed, kelp is full of new. nutrition, and it can be made into all kinds of things like pasta and jerky, even butter. So anyway, up in Juneau, Leah and Matt started to sell their bull kelp, salsa, and pickles at farmers' markets, and people kind of took to it. Selling it locally wasn't a huge jump. The consumers in Alaska, a lot of them are familiar with it as a food. Belia says as they slowly tried to expand their products south of Alaska, it was a tougher sell.

It has taken some more education and a lot of demoing so people have the opportunity to try it. And it makes sense to use salsa as kind of a gateway to get more people to eat kelp. And I can report that some people on our team have tried the salsa and they say it tastes pretty good with just a slight aftertaste of the ocean. Anyway, soon after they launched, Leah and Matt won $40,000 in a startup competition and use that money to get their products into some regional grocery stores on the West Coast. But doing all of this from Juno, Alaska, it's pretty top. We're not on the road system. We are surrounded by the ocean and mountains, and that requires some real innovation when

it comes to logistics. Which means when they want to get their salsa and pickles out of Juno? It usually involves a barge, sometimes a ferry, and then trucking once it hits the road system or air freight. So that's been a pretty immense challenge. But since they went into business three years ago, Leah, Matt and their other partner have been able to steadily grow the business. They're now harvesting, canning, and cooking bull kelp full time. They sell it online and in about 150 stores. And guess what? Last year, they made $350,000 in revenue selling bull kelp. Sometimes I think I'm sick of it. But once I crack one of the

those jars open and eat it, which is almost daily. It tastes so good. So, no, I'm not sick of kelp. That's Leah Hyphids. She and her two partners, Matt and Max, are the founders of Barnacle Foods. If you want to find out more about the company 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 for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at HIVT at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, you can reach us at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. Our show is produced this week by J.C. Howard with original music composed by Rumpteen

Arablui. Our show is edited by Neva Grant. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Sanazmeshkampur, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is David Jha. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.