Burt's Bees: Roxanne Quimby (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 thousands of grocery stores and drugstores around the U. S. 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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• 0:00Guy Raz?

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  Visit mobili fuels.com for details. Hey, everyone. Just want to let you know that our team is taking a much-needed break this month. But before we left, we put aside some really great bonus episodes for you. So later this week, be on the lookout for my conversation with Rashad Robinson, civil rights leader and president of Color of Change. Rashad and I spoke a few months ago at our virtual How I Built This summit, and he shared some really powerful insights about how to make an impact in the world right now. And we're going to be putting that episode into your feed this Thursday. For today's show, we're going to reach back into the archives to bring you my conversation with Roxanne Quimby of Burt's Bees, which first ran back in 2019. Here you go.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  We had a great artist, and he did a woodcut portrait of Burt. And we started putting that on the package. And that was a very conscious decision to use Burt's face. He had a long gray beard and long gray curly hair. And as a woman who could never measure up to this glamorous image in mainstream cosmetics and beauty products, I felt like we're going to put a picture of a guy that everybody is going to feel more beautiful than.

• 6:36Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:48Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Roxanne Quimby took a roadside honey stand in rural Maine and turned it into Burt's Bees, one of the biggest natural personal care brands in America.

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• 10:36Guy Raz?

  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 Shabitz 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?

• 11:21Guy Raz?

  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 US or even overseas, and you will find an impressive display of Bert's bees' products. The likelihood that Roxanne Quimby would build a massive company, or any company at

• 12:01Guy Raz?

  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.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  It was 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.

• 12:41Guy Raz?

  I guess you got there in, what, like 1970, around then?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. I crossed a great cultural bridge while I was out there.

• 12:50Guy Raz?

  What do you mean by that?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  I learned to think differently and to probe more deeply. 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 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.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  It was really quite wonderful.

• 13:40Guy Raz?

  And what did you think? Did you think, I don't need that life. I want a different life. What was, what did you start to think about the life you wanted to have?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  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. I just, my world just got bigger. And I felt my relationship with it expanded.

• 14:11Guy Raz?

  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?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:22Guy Raz?

  And this is George St. Clair, your boyfriend at the time?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:25Guy Raz?

  And so what'd you guys do? You just, you took off? You left San Francisco?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  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 any land in Vermont for $3,000, but try Maine. So we went to Maine.

• 14:50Guy Raz?

  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?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:58Guy Raz?

  And why did you want to do that? What were you going to do on the land?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:40Guy Raz?

  So you had 3,000 bucks. And how much land did that buy you? Like, how many acres?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  30.

• 15:45Guy Raz?

  That's a lot.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:46Guy Raz?

  And how did you know what to do?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Well, there were a few books that you could read about how to build a simple house. 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.

• 16:11Guy Raz?

  Did you build a cabin? Did you build like a house on this land?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yes.

• 16:16Guy Raz?

  How long did it take? So I'm assuming this is, you get there in the summer, this is like 1975 or so, something like that?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:23Guy Raz?

  And then how long before you're actually living in a place with a roof over your heads?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Oh, it was way too long. We had built a little screen house where we were sleeping, which was a little ways away from the house we were building. 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, out of the sleeping bag. But, you know, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

• 16:55Guy Raz?

  Did you heat?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  We had a wood stove.

• 17:00Guy Raz?

  Man, this is like, this is like pre-global warming Maine in December. This is cold.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's extreme. But there were others. You know, we weren't the only ones.

• 17:13Guy Raz?

  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?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Well, the good thing about not having all the amenities is that it doesn't take a lot of money to live.

• 17:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  We had no bills, basically, other than food. We cut our own firewood and had a source of water, which was the spring out in back. I waitressed a day or two a week, and George worked at the local radio station for a day a week. We were living on about $4,000 a year.

• 17:52Guy Raz?

  A year. Wow. You, how long, I mean, you do this for a couple of years, right? You guys are living like this for several years.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think we probably lived out there like that for maybe seven years or so.

• 18:06Guy Raz?

  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, they were born in this like homesteader kind of house, and then out in the middle of nowhere.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Yep. They have very fond memories of it. We never had to argue about TV shows.

• 18:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So 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?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  I think it was a very idyllic kind of dream.

• 18:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  But ultimately...

• 18:55Speaker 01

  It didn't provide enough stimulation for my personality.

• 19:00Guy Raz?

  Why? What was your personality need?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:20Guy Raz?

  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?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  We did, yep. Hannah and Lucas were six years old and I moved out. And I moved into another cabin.

• 19:42Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  That was even further off the road.

• 19:45Guy Raz?

  Wow. This is like 80, 82 or something around then?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, right in there, maybe 83.

• 19:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you were a single mom, two kids, on your own. That's, that's tough going.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Well, although I was a single mom, their dad was a single dad 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.

• 20:22Guy Raz?

  Sure. And were you happy at that time?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Probably not. You know, I don't think about being happy that much. I feel, I think more about being fulfilled.

• 20:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And were you, did you feel fulfilled at that time?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  I did. Yeah, I felt like I was making it on my own by, you know, living by my wits, so to speak.

• 20:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you are in northern, sort of northern, central Maine. And how did you come across Burt Shabbat?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Well, he was, he was well-known in the neighborhood because he was so unusual.

• 21:16Guy Raz?

  What do you mean?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Um, well-

• 21:18Guy Raz?

  I mean, you were unusual at the time, too, right?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yes, but he was probably more unusual.

• 21:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So what do you mean, like, what do you mean when you say unusual?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Well, he, he looked like an old rabbi 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.

• 21:45Guy Raz?

  And you just knew Burt through the community? You weren't, or, or did, or did you meet him on one particular day?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Well, I did meet him personally when he picked me up hitchhiking because I didn't have a car at the time.

• 21:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:06Guy Raz?

  And he would sell honey from bees that he raised, right? That he would keep?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. 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.

• 22:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  He was a very, very eccentric, um, hermit-type of fellow.

• 22:36Guy Raz?

  But there must have been some kind of connection that you forged because you, I guess you decided to, I don't know, work with him?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, I was very attracted to him. He was kind of a inspiration for how one could live. Very independently. And I was very inspired by his lifestyle.

• 23:01Guy Raz?

  So how did you broach the idea of, of working with him?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I asked him if he wanted any help with the bees.

• 23:09Guy Raz?

  Selling honey, or?

• 23:11Speaker 01

  No, actually tending to the bees.

• 23:13Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:31Guy Raz?

  What was, what was he like? Was he talkative? Was he quiet?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, he didn't say much.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  He was pretty quiet.

• 23:42Guy Raz?

  And he was about 15 years older than you, I guess, at that point, right?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  He was about 50 at the time.

• 23:48Guy Raz?

  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.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:09Guy Raz?

  But I'm trying to understand, like, when, you were, 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?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:40Guy Raz?

  How was he selling the honey?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Well, he was selling them in used gallon jars.

• 24:46Guy Raz?

  Who's gonna buy a gallon of honey?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  I know.

• 24:51Guy Raz?

  Bert!

• 24:51Speaker 01

  You know, like, that pickles and relish come in, in the restaurant business?

• 24:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you're, you're saying to him, Bert, let's put, put it in smaller, nicer jars and see if we can sell it at, like, farmers' markets and stuff?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yep. Yep.

• 25:08Guy Raz?

  And, and he liked that idea?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he was fine with it. So I ordered some little plastic honey bears, little squeezy bears.

• 25:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  And we filled those up. Those were 12 ounces of honey instead of 12 pounds, which is how he sold it.

• 25:27Guy Raz?

  And did you have a, like, put a label on it and stuff?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yep. You know, we used pictures of bees and tried to make all these products giftable.

• 25:37Guy Raz?

  This was, I guess, in, like, around 86, 85, 86?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:42Guy Raz?

  And, 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 range, fair trade, honey from, you know, that Bert takes, like, with his hands." Like, were you marketing it that? Or was this like a bear with honey in it? It was like, honey for sale?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  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 that too much. I think we called it pure Maine honey.

• 26:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and so you would start to sell it where?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  We would do Christmas craft fairs at the local high schools and junior highs and, right around the area.

• 26:33Guy Raz?

  You were just selling it at these little, and were people buying the honey? How, how were sales?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Good.

• 26:39Guy Raz?

  Good, like, thousands, tens of thousands, a few hundred?

• 26:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:01Guy Raz?

  How, how did you guys then go from selling honey to, to making candles?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:24Guy Raz?

  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, how do they produce it?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  They have glands on their abdomen.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Just like we have saliva glands.

• 27:43Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  So their glands produce flat discs of beeswax, which they then build into their honeycomb.

• 27:51Guy Raz?

  So when you pull out like one of those sheets of a, in a hive of honeycomb, how do you get the wax off?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  You have a hot knife and you uncap it with the hot knife.

• 28:03Guy Raz?

  Oh.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  And the beeswax that was capping the honeycomb becomes available to do whatever you want with it.

• 28:14Guy Raz?

  So you had all this wax and is it pretty easy to just melt it down and turn it into candles?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  It's simple. I don't know if it's easy. We had many disasters, but it is a simple process. You just heat it up and the beeswax separates from the honey and floats on top.

• 28:34Guy Raz?

  So you, so you start making candles and then, and then doing the same thing, bringing them to craft shows and selling them?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:41Guy Raz?

  And at this point, did you think, I don't know, if, if a friend asked you, so Roxanne, what are you up to? Would you have said, yes, I'm really getting into this bee thing? Like we're selling honey and now we're selling candles. And it's, it's, I think this is, there's something there.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Roughly, you know, by like 1988 or 89, like how many candles were you selling a year?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Well, I, I don't remember exactly how our sales went in the eighties, 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.

• 29:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  By the time my kids graduated from high school.

• 29:49Guy Raz?

  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?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah, how did they find out about you guys?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:23Guy Raz?

  How did you fulfill those orders? It was you and Bert, and like, how did you, what'd you do?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Just worked all the time. And 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.

• 30:49Guy Raz?

  You were not doing this in Bert's turkey coop. You were actually, you actually rented out a building to make the candles?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was an old one-room schoolhouse.

• 30:57Guy Raz?

  Right. And what'd you guys call the business?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  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 10, 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.

• 31:30Guy Raz?

  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?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:51Guy Raz?

  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, is that true?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  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 that 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.

• 32:46Guy Raz?

  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.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, 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.

• 33:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah. What was, what was the biggest disaster that you can remember early on?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Well, I remember five gallons of a product we called Boot Food, which was a liquid combination of melted beeswax, Neat's foot oil and bear grease.

• 33:49Guy Raz?

  Wait, what's bear grease?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Just the fat, the rendered fat of a bear.

• 33:54Guy Raz?

  Wow. What do you do with that, that product that you just described?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  You rub it into your leather boots to waterproof them. Keep the leather supple.

• 34:03Guy Raz?

  Okay. And you were selling this?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Not very well.

• 34:07Guy Raz?

  Okay, yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  It smelled horrible.

• 34:10Guy Raz?

  Oh, my god.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  I know, it was just so bad.

• 34:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and what happened to this?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  It spilled all over the floor, five gallons of the greasiest, smelliest, most horrible stuff, all over the floor. That was a pretty big-- plus the waste. I mean, we were selling it and couldn't fend.

• 34:32Guy Raz?

  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 started looking 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.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:05Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  And I'm far more ambitious than he was.

• 35:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  But he went along with it because he could see how important it was to me.

• 35:16Guy Raz?

  Was Bert fairly easy to work with, or was he like, you know, stubborn and difficult?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  He was a prickly kind of guy, you know? He wasn't all warm and fuzzy.

• 35:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Guy Raz?

  1991, Burt's Bees hits $1.5 million in sales revenue. Do you remember that? Do you remember thinking, oh, my God, we are doing $1.5 million of revenue?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Well, I should have remembered it, but...

• 36:17Guy Raz?

  But I guess it was just moving too fast?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  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 I just kind of had a tiger by the tail.

• 36:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  And I was hanging on for dear life.

• 36:48Guy Raz?

  When we come back, how Roxanne and Burt'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.

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• 38:48Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's the early 1990s, and Burt's Bees has just hit $1.5 million in revenue. And one thing we did not mention in part one, which you may have figured out already, but Roxanne and Burt, they were kind of a thing. They weren't just business partners, but romantic partners as well. Now, at this time, 1990, Burt's Bees 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.

• 39:31Guy Raz?

  You introduced a product that would go on to become one of your bestsellers, not your most famous product, your Burt's Bees lip balm.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:37Guy Raz?

  How'd you come up with that idea?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  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 than they were buying...

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Products for their furniture and their shoes.

• 40:19Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:36Guy Raz?

  You stopped making candles because it wasn't profitable or it didn't make sense?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  I think because it wasn't scalable.

• 40:44Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:12Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  So, we dropped the candles.

• 41:14Guy Raz?

  So, we're now like in 1991, Burt's Bees 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, like in 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. I'm just, it's just interesting, right, that you kind of had rejected this whole world, but you had a knack for it.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  I know, it's ironic. I've thought about that.

• 41:48Guy Raz?

  Did you ever reflect on it at that time?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:19Guy Raz?

  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 Burt's Bees could be and you were just doing it.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Well, I had role models. I had selected out companies that, you know, I kept them in my mind as an ideal. So I had examples.

• 42:46Guy Raz?

  Like what?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  I had a big sign over the production floor that said, "Look out, Elizabeth Arden."

• 42:55Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, I really felt like if Elizabeth could do it, so could we.

• 43:01Guy Raz?

  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?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  We had about 45.

• 43:15Guy Raz?

  That's a lot of people to sort of oversee.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:18Guy Raz?

  Was that hard? Did you, I mean, because you're, at this point, I guess you're like a CEO or a de facto CEO, if not the official CEO.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  I would say that was the most challenging part of the job, was managing people.

• 43:31Guy Raz?

  Are you, do you see yourself as a people person?

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Not that much, no. I can be.

• 43:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, would you consider yourself an introvert?

• 43:54Speaker 01

  I would say I was pretty introverted, yeah.

• 43:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  I'm very happy having a very quiet lifestyle.

• 44:00Guy Raz?

  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 Maine kind of product. What prompted the move?

• 44:14Speaker 01

  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. 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 used a lot of the same glass jars and caps and that sort of thing.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  So, our expenses went way down. We were able to hire people 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.

• 45:18Guy Raz?

  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.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, it certainly wasn't a very sophisticated operation and it wasn't a state-of-the-art factory.

• 45:34Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:55Guy Raz?

  So, in the mid-'90s, because I don't remember Burt's Bees in the mid-'90s, right? Where would you have seen a Burt's Bees, you know, lip balm or lotion or soap?

• 46:04Speaker 01

  You would have found it in an independent gift shop. Little, small gift shops dotted all over the country.

• 46:12Guy Raz?

  And were you marketing?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  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 Burt and his dog.

• 46:40Guy Raz?

  When did you design that now iconic logo of Bert's face on the packaging? Was that there from the beginning?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  So it was important for me not to follow that lead.

• 47:34Guy Raz?

  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 would have his face on it. But it was about sexism.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that it had to do with authenticity and Bert. But it also had to do with gender exploitation that the beauty products were, I think they were known for.

• 48:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  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 women. So we're going to put a picture of a guy that everybody is going to feel more beautiful than.

• 48:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, all right, so you guys are in North Carolina. You're running this company. It's a late 90s, 1999, Bert 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?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Although he, I think, enjoyed going out on the road and being Bert.

• 48:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  And signing T-shirts and...

• 48:56Guy Raz?

  Kind of being the mascot.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:00Guy Raz?

  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?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was pretty much what it was. Our relationship had gone south and-

• 49:15Guy Raz?

  What happened, if you don't mind?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  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 Burt and his lifestyle and his authenticity and his independence. And I found him to be quite admirable.

• 49:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  So after the breakup, I lost a lot of inspiration.

• 49:48Guy Raz?

  He had disappointed you, basically.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  You know, I think that I was starting to feel like it was time to wind this thing up.

• 49:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So he's sort of, he's kind of out of the day to day running, but really had been for a long time.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:06Guy Raz?

  Meantime, you were really, if this were a movie, Roxanne, this would be the point in the movie where like, you would just go through the year. It'd be 99, 13.8 million, 2000, 30 million, 2001, 60 million. And you'd have the music and you'd have these guys counting big stacks of cash and, you know, smoking cigars.

• 50:27Guy Raz?

  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?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Well, it was scalable.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Every part of it was scalable. Once we automated filling, it just-

• 50:45Guy Raz?

  You could just make more product.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:47Guy Raz?

  Just turn it to 11.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was fabulous.

• 50:51Guy Raz?

  And just more and more stores were asking for these products?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yep. 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 asked for a product, that's a great sign.

• 51:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  And if your store ran out, the customer came back for more, it wasn't there, they would ask, hey, where's the Burt'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.

• 51:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:41Guy Raz?

  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?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Not really, no. I wasn't unsettled by it. I was thinking about the exit strategy very early on.

• 52:10Guy Raz?

  Is that because you just didn't want to deal with the hassle of running a company anymore?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was something that became somewhat routine after a while.

• 52:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Very disconnected from what originally was an inspiration for me.

• 52:42Guy Raz?

  I imagine. So you go, you're gone. At this point, 2003, you really leave the company.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:49Guy Raz?

  You became very wealthy from this tiny little B company that you just, like, started accidentally. I mean, it's pretty remarkable, right?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  That whole theme of freedom is important to me, always has been.

• 53:20Guy Raz?

  Meantime, you were really starting to become passionate about conserving and preserving land, starting in Maine.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:29Guy Raz?

  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.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Yep. 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.

• 53:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  I've heard even that 25 cents of every dollar goes into advertising. So we didn't have that expense because we weren't advertising. Gorilla marketing and grassroots marketing is not very expensive.

• 54:10Guy Raz?

  No.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And President Obama named a new national monument in Maine largely around that land that you donated to the National Park Service.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Katahdin Woods and Waters. Katahdin is our mountain in Maine.

• 54:43Guy Raz?

  In 2015, Burt Shavitz passed away. He was AD. A remarkable guy, a really fascinating person. There was a film about him, which was really interesting. And there 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?

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I have. I was in love with Burt.

• 55:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  And we went through a lot of changes together. Had this child, Burt's bees, together. Raised it up. Off it went.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  I still feel very, very close to Bert. I think about him a lot. He was quite an inspiration to me, a muse.

• 55:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Did you have a chance to talk to Bert before he died?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  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

• 55:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Some people have criticized you because they say, "Well, you've 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?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:43Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:56Guy Raz?

  Do you plan to give away most of your wealth before you die?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:01Guy Raz?

  That's hard. That's a lot of work, isn't it? Figuring out where to 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?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  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 grants. I don't have a real formal system. I just, you know, either it rings true to me or it doesn't.

• 57:42Guy Raz?

  When you see Burt's Bees today, it's owned by Clorox, eventually purchased by Clorox for almost a billion dollars in 2007, which is unbelievable. You see it everywhere. It's at CVS, it's at Walmart, it's 7-Eleven. Is it, do you beam with pride? Is it wonderful to see that?

• 57:58Speaker 01

  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 Burt's Bees display.

• 58:08Guy Raz?

  It's huge.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:18Guy Raz?

  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?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Well, I was born on July 11th, which is 7-Eleven.

• 58:36Guy Raz?

  Ha.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  And the right people came to me at the right time. So, that has got to be luck.

• 59:08Guy Raz?

  That's Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of Burt's Bees. Do you use any of the products?

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Well, the one product that I was using has been discontinued, so.

• 59:22Guy Raz?

  I just got some lip balm.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  And I use the lip balm.

• 59:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah, lip balm's great. I like that mint.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 59:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah. That's your recipe, right?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 59:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it's pretty good.

• 59:32Guy Raz?

  Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you are not yet a subscriber, please do subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to write to us, our email address is [email protected]. To find us on Twitter, it's @HowIBuiltThis or @GuyRaz. And on Instagram, it's @HowIBuiltThisNPR or @Guy.Raz. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Jeff Rogers with research help from Noor Kutsi. Our production staff includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, Rachel Faulkner, James Delahoussaye, Julia Carney, Elaine Coats, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, and Annalise Ober.

• 1:00:13Guy Raz?

  Our intern is Harrison Vijay Choy, and Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.