Roxanne Quimby’s journey to the Maine Woods began when she fled the raucous counterculture bustle of San Francisco after earning her art degree, embarking with her boyfriend on a cross-country drive in search of a simpler life. Helen and Scott Nearing’s 1954 “back to the land” manifesto Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, had inspired her to seek out the agrarian lifestyle that they recommended and that Thoreau had sought before them: finding joy in quiet, in plainness, in work with your hands, in nature. It was 1975 and she was twenty-five, a child of the 1960s, disillusioned by Vietnam, by assassinations, and by Watergate. She was ready to drop off the grid and to see if, through getting close to nature, she might find for herself a different take on the vision that had captivated her European immigrant parents: America as a promised land. She would find it, too, though in an unexpected place and manner, as she became an even more unlikely CEO than the mountain man Doug Tompkins: astrologer, mystic, hippie, waitress, single mom, Horatio Alger character, magnate, idol of teenage girls everywhere, eco baron.
The journey started when Quimby and George St. Clair loaded up the requisite Volkswagen microbus and headed to Vermont, looking to buy a homestead. They soon discovered their $3,000 nest egg wasn’t enough to buy much of anything in the Green Mountain State, not even bare land. “Try Maine,” someone suggested.
On the edge of the Maine Woods, in rural Piscataquis County outside the mill town of Guilford, they found thirty forested acres they could afford, cool and fragrant with pine needles. They set about clearing a portion of the land and using the logs to build their own cabin, one big room with a loft for sleeping. There was no electricity, no running water, no telephone, just an old wood stove and some kerosene lamps. They hauled water from a cold spring on their land. Nothing was wasted: Water from washing the dishes would be used to wash the floor. In winter, they’d cover the spring to insulate it from the subfreezing temperatures, but eventually they’d have to fetch water with an ax. In the warm months they planted and tended a vegetable garden. When the VW died, they walked the two miles to Guilford. During the muddy spring, they wore high black rubber boots. During the snow season, they wore snowshoes. Sometimes they needed snowshoes just to get to the outhouse.
You can live a good life without much, Quimby decided, with the added benefit that a lack of resources makes you resourceful. It was idyllic in many ways, but hard work, too, especially in winter, when the cabin seemed very, very small, and the idea she had of living off the land, painting, and selling her work for what money she needed didn’t seem to be working out very well. She took jobs as a waitress instead, but because of her innate rebelliousness and her desire for independence—“I do have problems with authority,” she says mildly—her employment did not always end well. Showing up one morning to wait tables at the local diner in a conservative mill town with her head shaved was, in retrospect, probably not the best path to job security. She began buying and selling items at flea markets and yard sales instead.
Roxanne and George married, and in 1978 the twins Hannah and Lucas were born. Five years later, the couple divorced. The cabin was confining, and it turned out that their personalities were unsuited for the long haul. George, who would become a social worker, was steady and predictable; Roxanne was impulsive, whimsical, always ready for a change. As she would later explain it, her mercurial nature worried him; his constancy bored her. The combination covered all the bases in parenting, Quimby recalls, but didn’t make for a successful marriage. So they agreed to joint custody of the twins, switching every other week, and she found some acreage in the area and moved into another cabin. The twins would be thirteen before she finally installed electricity and a phone.
One day in 1984, a yellow Datsun pickup truck pulled over for Quimby as she hitchhiked to Guilford. The driver was Burt Shavitz, a former photojournalist, now a beekeeper, who had also heard the call to return to the land. He lived in a converted eight-by-eight-foot turkey coop, and he kept chickens and thirty beehives. On weekends he sold honey out of his pickup truck; the honey was packaged in old pickle and mayonnaise jars with the original labels still on them, big and unappealing. He made about as much money as Quimby did at the flea markets—which is to say, not very much. Quimby suggested they might be able to put her artistic talents to work on better packaging and labels, and in turn he could teach her about bees so she could help with the hives. And so they forged a partnership, and for a time became romantically involved as well, although the work ended up far outlasting the romance. She was thirty-four and he was forty-nine.
Growing up—mostly in Lexington, Massachusetts, but in other towns, too—Roxanne and her sisters received no allowance. Instead, they were encouraged by her father, who worked in sales and had to move the family from time to time, to find ways to earn spending money on their own; whatever they saved, he promised to match dollar for dollar in a college fund. The Quimby girls were always baking cookies and making lemonade to sell in the neighborhood. By age twelve, Roxanne had also learned to make soap and stuffed animals to sell. She virtually stopped being a consumer when she moved to Maine, but she had a flair for what real American consumers like. She found some small plastic jars shaped like bears and beehives, then made her own stylized pen-and-ink drawings on yellow labels, featuring an old-fashioned beehive—the familiar dome structure made of concentric rings of woven straw called a skep. Shavitz had stenciled “Burt’s Bees” on his hives. Quimby found this hilarious—she wondered, Could you really own a bee?—but she decided to put the name on the label. It was catchy and homey and people liked to read it and say it aloud. Sales of honey picked up.
Shavitz had stored up years’ worth of beeswax in his honey house, hundreds of pounds of it. “Maybe you can make candles,” he suggested. So she taught herself to work with beeswax and brought the results to the annual Christmas crafts fair at the local junior high school: candles for three dollars a pair, made from the all-natural wax of Burt’s Bees. They made $200 in a day, which was good money for them back then, and they decided to make a business on the craft fair circuit. The initial investment was $400: a supply of wicks, a dipping tank for the wax, a couple of grosses of honey jars. Roxanne found an old book of nineteenth-century recipes for using beeswax, and soon she was cooking up shoe polish and furniture polish—neither became a big seller—and cute little tins of all-natural lip balm, with her inked drawing of Burt in his railroad cap, bushy-haired and big-bearded. The balm sold, and sold well—Quimby could barely make enough of it. She could see that the packaging was what people reacted to as much as anything else, because she watched the shoppers as an anthropologist might study a local ritual. Burt, unmistakably, had become a brand. He was her own Mr. Clean, her Michelin tire man, her Pillsbury Doughboy. He was the alternative lifestyle guy, homespun, natural, and trustworthy, a safe little piece of the counterculture that also happens to make your chapped lips feel good. “We could actually make some money at this,” she told Shavitz, and even then, when the business was little more than some old buckets of wax and an idea, the woman who had thought she was “above” thinking about money, who had rejected consumer America for a log cabin in the Maine Woods, suddenly started thinking very differently about the value of things, and the power of a few bucks in the bank.
They soon realized that Shavitz’s turkey coop and Quimby’s cabin kitchen would no longer suffice as places of business. They needed something big and cheap as a base of operations. A friend owned an old, disused one-room schoolhouse in Guilford, which he offered them for the unbeatable rent of $150 a year—the amount of his annual fire insurance premium. It had no electricity and was missing glass in the windows, but the addition of a gas stove, some kerosene lamps, and a generous amount of cardboard made it a fine first headquarters for Burt’s Bees. Quimby and Shavitz began making the rounds of craft shows and fairs around New England in 1985, renting a booth for $200 and hoping their sales would cover the expense. It entailed hard work and long hours for a modest living, but Burt’s Bees was tapping into a new market—natural personal care items. There was demand, but little supply. After five years of hardscrabble work and continual experimentation with new products—hand lotion and soap were among the more successful—a lucky break came their way in 1989. A Maine company dropped out of the New York Gift Show, which is frequented by buyers from trendy New York City shops and boutiques. Burt’s Bees was offered the open spot, something that they normally would have had to wait four years to get. A respectable stream of orders began to come in afterward. Later in 1989, the historic, upscale Manhattan women’s shop Henri Bendel, famous for introducing top designers (including Coco Chanel) to American shoppers, called and asked Quimby to come by to make a presentation the next day. She appeared in her boots and down parka and delivered her spiel. Henri Bendel snapped up the whole Burt’s Bees line and displayed the products prominently at the front of the store, and almost immediately the stream of orders became a flood. The door was opened. Suddenly Martha Stewart was using the obscure natural care products from Maine with Burt’s face plastered on the label to make Mother’s Day gift baskets on Good Morning America, announcing, “I love Burt’s Bees!”
A short time later, Shavitz and Quimby hired their first employee. By the end of 1990, they had forty-four workers and had set up a factory in Guilford’s former bowling alley. Most of the employees were women, many of whom had been receiving unemployment benefits or other government aid in the difficult economy of northern Maine, but Quimby found she was pretty good at cherry-picking raw talent. She didn’t care about academic credentials, which seemed irrelevant, or technical experience, which could be learned. What mattered was how someone performed on the factory floor. What mattered were the work ethic, habits, attitude, how people followed, and how they led. “I’ve had people with no formal education beyond sixth grade outperform MBAs from Duke University,” she says with pride. She and Shavitz gradually added a variety of products, including handmade dog biscuits and baby clothes made with organically grown cotton. Every product was touted as earth-friendly with no less than 90 percent natural ingredients. Most products had a considerably higher percentage (with the exact proportion on each product’s label: Radiance Lip Shimmer, 100 percent natural; Baby Bee Skin Crème, 99.71 percent natural; Burt’s More Moisture Raspberry and Brazil Nut Shampoo, 98.12 percent natural).
The business began growing 40 to 50 percent a year and by 1993, Burt’s Bees was incorporated (a two-thirds share went to Quimby, one-third to Shavitz) and had annual revenues of $3 million. And it seemed to be outgrowing Guilford. There were several problems: The little Maine town was remote, and shipping costs were through the roof, sometimes exceeding the value of the product being shipped. Then there were Maine’s high unemployment taxes and workers’ compensation costs. Quimby embraced numerous liberal causes and environmentally friendly practices, even when they might hurt short-term profits, but she had also evolved into a hard-nosed businesswoman. She began to think there might be a better place for Burt’s Bees to grow, where the cost of doing business might be lower.
The tipping point in favor of moving finally came out of Quimby’s sense of outrage at government when an employee claimed an on-the-job injury, and Quimby subsequently learned that the same person had already received workers’ compensation settlements from two previous employers for exactly the same injury. Not only that, but the employee had been arrested for breaking into campsites and stealing people’s gear and possessions—while supposedly recovering from her injury. Quimby reported the former worker as a possible fraud, and a serial fraud at that. The Maine workers’ compensation officials, Quimby recalls, informed her that they would not consider the employee’s past actions or allegations about her off-the-job conduct—only her time at Burt’s Bees was deemed relevant. Quimby, dumbfounded, predicted that with this standard of review, the worker would soon be driving around town in a new pickup truck purchased with a nice fat settlement, and further suggested that such an outcome would send the wrong message to the rest of the community: that you could make a good living beating the system and abusing employers. A few months later, Quimby saw the former worker with a big smile and a big new pickup truck. Burt’s Bees started shopping for a new location the same day.
Quimby contacted the state economic development offices in North Carolina, Florida, and Maine—the first two because of their business-friendly reputation, and the third to be fair, to see if there might be some incentives available to relocate within the state. Both southern states overnighted full packets of material to Quimby, including a CD-ROM from North Carolina that allowed her to calculate her payroll taxes and workers’ compensation costs, which compared very favorably with what she had to pay in Maine. The office in Maine never called her back. So Quimby and Shavitz settled on Durham, North Carolina—the cost of doing business would be lower, shipping issues would be resolved because Durham lies at a confluence of east-west interstate highways, and there was a ready supply of well-educated workers. Hannah and Lucas were thirteen by then and in boarding school, so the move would not disrupt their lives.
As they were packing to leave—with the departure set for the next day—the governor of Maine called. He had read an article in Forbes magazine profiling Burt’s Bees, and it had mentioned that the company was moving because of the difficulties of doing business in Maine. The governor wanted to know if they could talk about finding a way to keep Burt’s Bees in the state. Quimby told him sorry, no. “We’ve just finished loading up,” she told him. “We’re literally leaving tomorrow.”
The move allowed the business to grow and prosper, but it was the end of the line for Burt Shavitz, and he returned to Maine and his turkey coop. Eventually, Quimby bought out his share of the company for the price of a $130,000 home in Maine, which he promptly sold in favor of the old coop, though he did add on some extra space. (Given the windfall she would later reap from selling the company, Quimby felt Shavitz’s share was an embarrassment, and she later agreed to pay him another $4 million, though he has always said that his joy in life came from living off the land, not from money.) Shavitz continued to be paid annually for the use of his image and name, and to work as a kind of goodwill ambassador for the business. Burt became an essential part of the company mythology, his true history merged with an embellished tale of backwoods wit, gumption, and devotion to a natural way of living. Shavitz would visit stores and meet customers; the teenage girls who are an important constituency for Burt’s Bees products would line up for his autograph, and the legendary Burt would hold court as if he were a retired member of the Grateful Dead.
In North Carolina, calling the shots on her own as CEO and creative director, Quimby modernized the company. The handmade items—the less than successful dog biscuits, the baby clothes, and even the signature beeswax candles—were jettisoned and the factory was automated. All this improved the bottom line, though the workforce grew in tandem with the company’s growth. Quimby fashioned the company as a sustainable, green enterprise that used recycled materials and minimalist packaging—and that deplored waste. The lessons of her resource-starved resourcefulness in the Maine Woods informed her business practices, from assembly-line methods to the campaign she launched to have customers mail their empty tubes of balm back to the company for recycling.1 In the early 1990s, this made Burt’s Bees a trendsetter, and the green policies were both an end in themselves and a way to strengthen the brand, setting it apart from its competitors. In company literature and catalogs, Quimby explained that Burt’s Bees was “setting the Natural Standard,” that it was an “Earth Friendly” company, and that she had devised a way of doing business she called “The Greater Good Business Model.” She said this made social responsibility and environmentally friendly practices an essential part of the company’s DNA, not an afterthought, a “greenwash,” or a reluctant sop to environmentalists. Pursuing The Greater Good meant writing a business plan that included such terms as “human rights,” “animal rights,” “sustainability,” “well-being,” and “fair trade.” Burt’s Bees deplored animal testing of products, artificial ingredients, and toxic substances. It rewarded employees and vendors who suggested greener practices. The company resisted launching its signature product, lip balm, in a plastic tube for years, until it persuaded a plastics manufacturer to use recycled plastic. There was an unintended ripple effect: As a result of finally bowing to Quimby’s wishes, that manufacturer discovered a new, environmentally beneficial—and highly profitable—business model, and has become an industrywide leader in making recycled plastics.
The Greater Good model wasn’t perfect—some compromises had to be made. Gone were the days of locally grown beeswax from Burt’s thirty hives, which had been about as environmentally friendly as anything gets. A company selling millions of dollars worth of beeswax and almond oil lip balm needed a huge supply of the stuff. The essential ingredient had to be imported from Ethiopia, a world leader in beeswax production using traditional hives (only China and Mexico produce more)—so each tin or tube of balm had a carbon footprint from global shipping. The company tries to make itself “carbon neutral” by purchasing carbon offsets every year, underwriting renewable energy projects that cut enough greenhouse gas to balance out the company’s emissions.2
Quimby kept her desk in the art department rather than in an executive suite, and any employee could seek her out for a chat. She ate lunch with the other workers. She had wealth but still drove an old car and lived simply—not to promote the image but because that was what she wanted and liked. For similar reasons, Burt’s Bees never advertised or conducted focus groups, although it religiously protected its brand identity and nurtured Quimby’s counterintuitive insight that the scruffy but trusted image of old bearded Burt, the opposite of the glamorous models used to promote other beauty products, had made Burt’s Bees a leader of the natural personal care category of products. She had found a way to bottle trust. It made her a millionaire, and being a millionaire in turn gave her the opportunity to begin to conserve land in the Maine Woods—what she calls, “My mission.”
It would be easy to write off this success as the happy product of a stab of inspiration and a lucky break or two—and certainly both principles apply to Burt’s Bees. But the bulk of the success of the company, as Quimby sees it, was built on many years spent in craft show obscurity, making long hauls to fairs in an old van with a blue shag interior, spending long nights squinting over the stinging vapors from cauldrons in a schoolhouse with cardboard for windowpanes, slim customer lists, slimmer bank accounts, and much trial and error. At one point she and the twins had to live in a tent at a campground because she couldn’t make ends meet. She is rueful when she describes the hard times, but proud, too, and it is clear she enjoyed those years. She is a practical businesswoman, yet she remains a child of the 1960s, the queen bee of beauty products who eschews makeup for herself, a woman comfortable in her own skin, with a broad, infectious laugh and thick, expressive eyebrows. She is a master of artful plain talk in the classic Down East Maine tradition: “I have a very clear memory,” she says drily, “of what it took to make the millions that I spent on that land. It wasn’t fund-raising from wealthy donors. I wasn’t taxing my constituents. It was my cash on the barrelhead.”
By 2003, the barrelhead was impressive. Burt’s Bees had 250 employees and $59 million in sales. Projected growth for 2004 was 40 to 50 percent. Burt’s Bees’ prospects could not have been brighter..
Yet Quimby felt ready for a change. The old aphorism was true, she realized: “Business is just one damn thing after another.” Two decades of Burt’s Bees had begun to feel like a treadmill. Her next stage of life—the lure of conservation—beckoned. She had turned away offers for the company in the past, but now she was ready. The search for a buyer Quimby deemed suitable took a year; there were forty suitors, winnowed to a dozen, then six, and finally one: AEA Investors, a Wall Street private equity firm that had been founded by the Rockefeller, Mellon, and Harriman family interests. She stayed on as CEO one more year after the deal closed in October 2003, remained on the board of directors, and retained a 20 percent interest in the company. And she walked away with $179 million.