Ten Years Later (28 page)

“It was bigger than the schoolhouse, and it had electricity and running water,” she
says, “so that was a major step forward.”

Forty employees joined the effort and annual sales reached
$180,000. Production was under way in several outbuildings as well.

“We burned down a place, and fortunately, no one was hurt. But five thousand pounds
of honey were burned up. We had honey all over the bottom of a burning building, like
six inches thick, with burning timbers falling into it. It was a whole year’s worth
of honey and we stored it in five-gallon plastic buckets,” she recalls, “so, of course
they all melted in the fire and all the honey came seeping out. The fire truck finally
got there and the firemen turned on the hose and went sliding around in all the honey.
They finally put it out, but we lost all the honey.”

Despite the setback, Roxanne forged ahead, searching again for additional ways to
entice consumers. She found a treasure trove of ideas in the pages of antique farm
manuals Burt had collected.

“Many farms back in the 1800s had bees, just like they’d have chickens for eggs, a
couple of cattle, and a couple of hives of bees for honey,” she explains. “They would
have these farm journals, talking about the best way to grow rutabagas and the rest
of it. And Burt had them; he had found them. They were beautiful antiques with these
gorgeous engravings, and there was a recipe for everything in there. And one of the
recipes was for lip balm, and I tried that recipe, and I started enhancing the recipe
with medicinal herbs that I grew. I started tinkering around with the recipe and came
up with lip balm, and it was just a winner. People really loved it. It felt good on
their lips, it worked really well, and it was a home run. But, I must say, I had about
fifty ‘outs.’ ” She laughs. “I had about fifty products that didn’t sell well before
I had one that sold very well.”

Roxanne added an image of Burt’s unique face to the product labels. She had met an
artist named Tony Kulik at a craft fair in Maine
and fell in love with his etchings and art. She asked him to create a woodcut of Burt’s
face and also beehives. The process involves carving a reverse image into a block
of wood. The artist carves carefully, making sure the printable parts remain level
with the surface and the non-printable parts are chipped away.

“He would send me the actual woodblock that was carved, and he would also send an
image of the carving and send it on a piece of paper,” she explains, “and we would
send it to the printer. It retained its woodcut look, which is a very old-fashioned
technique.”

The combination of quirkiness on the outside, and wholesome beeswax and sweet almond
oil on the inside, made the lip balm a huge success. It was also a conclusive hint
from consumers about what they wanted to buy.

“Everybody who came into the booth would buy a lip balm, but very few would buy furniture
polish. It was trial and error. And I would later learn that personal-care products
sell better than candles for sure. So, creams and balms and lotions that are made
with a beeswax base outsold candles and honey enormously. Eventually, we just completely
dropped the honey and candles,” she says, chuckling, and adds, “and furniture polish.”

When sales in 1991 hit $1.5 million, Roxanne and Burt incorporated the company. Burt
owned one-third of the shares, Roxanne two-thirds. She was raising two children and
was more committed to the business and to nurturing its growth. They were producing
half a million candles a year, as well as natural soaps and perfumes cooked up on
gas stoves. Two years later, they moved yet again, to an old house, where they manufactured
seventy-five different products. Roxanne’s emphasis on using natural ingredients and
packaging responsibly was simply an offshoot of her personal philosophy about clean
eating and respecting the environment.

“I felt that one of the biggest problems with personal-care products was that they
created an enormous amount of waste with
the packaging, and they were full of chemicals that were basically not very good for
your skin. I was eating organic food, and I had a garden, and I understood, ‘Garbage
in, garbage out.’ You really want to have a good, healthy diet, and you want to have
natural products on your skin, and I wasn’t going to try to convince consumers otherwise.
I felt that it was a story that people needed to hear, that whatever you put on your
skin, basically you’re eating it. It ends up in your body and your bloodstream, and
it either nourished your body or your body had to rid it of toxins. We did that by
using ingredients that most people could find in their kitchen. Very simple ingredients,
very nourishing ingredients, like avocado and coconut. It’s all kind of cliché now,
but at the time, there weren’t that many companies doing it,” she says. “You could
read the ingredients on the back of the jar and pronounce every one of them, and the
story that was being told was that this product was really good for your body, and
I think it really resonated with consumers.”

She admits her marketing plan is well defined in hindsight, but at the time, she was
simply letting consumer behavior reinforce her business decisions.

“Looking back, the world was getting very, very complicated. So, having a product
that was so simple was kind of reassuring to people. It was like an ‘Oh, whew!’ Y’know,
just like a comfort food: comfort cosmetics. The other thing that was very attractive
to people was that a lot of the other personal-care companies used incredibly gorgeous
women to sell their products, women who were flawless. And that set a very high expectation
for women,” she says, “and most of us don’t measure up in that way. But by using this
hippie, bearded, long-haired Jerry Garcia guy as our spokesperson, we eliminated that
expectation about beauty, and we always made the claim that beauty comes from within;
it’s how you feel and what you eat and how you live and how you act—that’s real beauty,
not
what you look like. And so we told that story, and since 90 percent of our customers
were women, many of them really liked hearing that. They were really ready to hear
that. Now, there were some people who would write to us like,
How could you put that filthy, dirty hippie on the jar?”
She laughs. “But other people would be like,
Thank you for letting me not have to look like America’s top model and I can still
feel okay.”

By 1993, their personal care products were sold in every state in the nation and annual
sales reached $3 million. The company had nearly fifty people working in production
facilities in Guilford and nearby Cambridge. But square footage once again reared
its squashed head; a major expansion was needed to fill all the orders. And that’s
when a queen-bee moment for Roxanne presented itself. She’d learned from beekeeping
that, ultimately, every move made by honeybees is for the good of the hive, even if
it means kicking out lazy drones in the dead of winter. Survival of the hive ruled.
Roxanne knew the company had reached a point where future growth would be hampered
by two realities in Maine: payroll taxation and Guilford’s location.

“There was not the labor pool we needed. It’s way off the beaten track. There was
no way for me to set up a shipping system and there weren’t any bookkeepers or accountants
around, the kind of professional people I needed to run a company,” she explains.
“The first bookkeeper we had, he had to drive about seventy miles in both directions
to get to Guilford. It was just against the odds. We interviewed people who would
come up from Portland, Maine, or Boston and they’d say, ‘I’d love to work for you,
but I could never convince my family to move up here.’ So, we decided the way to grow
the company was to leave Maine.”

It was a difficult decision for Roxanne. The women working for her were previously
unemployed moms. She’d be leaving behind
friends, the community, and her roots. But Roxanne knew that the company had huge
potential for growth and that she needed help to foster it. She called Burt and told
him of her plan. He said, “Okay, Roxy.”

“He’s not an artistic guy; he is not an ambitious guy,” she says of Burt. “He never
had this burning need to prove anything to anybody. He really didn’t care what anybody
thought about him. I remember one day someone came into the booth and asked if our
candles came in smaller sizes and he said, ‘Yeah, just break ’em in half.’ He didn’t
have a lot of customer service or marketing sensitivities. But on some level he gave
me an enormous amount of support without trying to; he just was kind of like a rock.
He was always there. I knew I could lean on him pretty hard and he’d never fall over.
He was sort of a north star in a way.”

Over the next ten years, the stars would align for Roxanne in a dazzling display of
accomplishment.

In April 2012, my in-person interview with Roxanne, set for her home in Florida, fell
through because she was instead in Portland, Maine, where she lives several weeks
a year and runs the Quimby Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on
the environment and the arts. We instead talked over the phone. Like bees that dart
back and forth to the same flower, certain buzzwords returned repeatedly to our conversation:
“freedom,” “restlessness,” “independence.” Similar phrases appear in Roxanne’s quotes
when you read about her: “black sheep,” “outlaw at heart,” “queen bee.” This is
not a woman you get to know by peeling back layers; Roxanne has no peel. She is self-aware,
direct, and as open as the millions of acres of Maine forest that feed her soul.

In 1994, ten years after Roxanne met Burt, the queen bee picked up the hive and headed
for business-friendly North Carolina. Taxes would be lower and the level of skilled
labor would be higher. They leased a former garment factory in Creedmoor, twenty miles
north of Raleigh-Durham, a hub of cosmetics manufacturing. The company was selling
fifty products, some distributed as far away as Japan. The master plan was to automate
manufacturing and to recruit a seasoned management team.

I wondered if Roxanne, now making big strides toward becoming a “player” in personal-care
products, had made contact with her estranged father. Wouldn’t he be proud of her
tenacity and success? She told me no, he never called her. But Roxanne said her mom
shared with her that he’d read a December 1993 issue of
Forbes
magazine featuring a story about her business acumen.

“Someone told me that he was running around the post office in his little town, ‘That’s
my daughter! That’s my daughter!’ Also, Harvard had done a case study on the company,
and he reads the Harvard newsletter or magazine that they send out to their alumni,”
she says, “so he got letters from his old classmates saying, ‘Hey, I read about your
daughter in the business review,’ and he was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’ So,
it kind of blindsided him. It was weird for him. My sisters both had MBAs and he had
an MBA from Harvard, and he felt we should all get MBAs and follow a career path that
led to financial success, which is why he was so upset with me when I went to art
school, like, ‘You’re not gonna get anywhere that way.’ And so it was very strange
for him that he would encounter my story in a business magazine of all places.”

Another man in her life who was experiencing the strange and weird was Burt. He went
to North Carolina to help relocate the company
but felt unsettled from the start. Roxanne watched her friend struggle to navigate
life where the trees part and the pavement begins. Within weeks, Burt moved back to
his converted turkey coop in Maine.

“He was not well equipped for modern-day civilization,” she describes. “He kept getting
lost in the parking lot; he could not find his car. He just wasn’t a city guy. He
was good enough to help set up the company, but I think he only stayed six weeks and
then he went back to Maine. It was pretty clear he wanted to leave. I think the thing
that was the straw that broke the camel’s back was when the Department of Agriculture
came in on a routine inspection and told him he was not allowed to bring his dog,
Rufus, to work. And that was it for him.”

Roxanne’s twins, at seventeen, were enjoying boarding school in western Maine, giving
her time to commit to the business. She was burning the beeswax candle at both ends.
Factories for Almay, the Body Shop, Pond’s, and Revlon were within twenty miles, so
Roxanne jumped at an invitation from a factory manager at one of the large, multinational
cosmetics companies to go on a tour.

“I went over there and it was just mind-boggling. I think it was a million square
feet and it was an incredible, high-tech place. One of the things he said was that
out of every dollar they sold their product for, twenty-five cents of it went into
advertising and eighteen cents of it went into the jar. So they were actually spending
more money selling the product than they put in the jar. I was flabbergasted by that,
because our little tagline, where it shows a picture of Burt, says,
We put the beauty in the product, folks. We have to
. Sort of like, ‘We don’t have it on the box; we have it in the jar.’ And what we
did to get the word out was make these tiny sample packs of our product, and we’d
give them away,” she says. “Burt would go to one of our stores, like one of the Whole
Foods stores,
and he’d give out signed, autographed T-shirts and samples of our lotions and lipsticks.
People would try them, and if they liked them they would buy the full-size product.
We relied on word of mouth instead of advertising, and that’s how we kept our prices
very reasonable.”

Roxanne hired a plant manager from Revlon and a sales and marketing manager with experience
at Lancôme, Vogue, and Victoria’s Secret. She also added highly skilled managers in
the shipping and finance departments.

“I surrounded myself with people who had skills that I did not have,” she explains.
“I tend to be artistic and creative and experimental and I’m kind of disorganized.
My desk in my office is a complete wreck and I have to be really messy, and I surrounded
myself with people who are very orderly and very disciplined. I had a great engineer
running the plant, I had a great chemist running the lab, I had a great IT person
running our accounting department; I had really good people at what they did. I never
hired real creative types.” She laughs. “We had that. I had tons of MBAs working for
me, and I love MBAs because they’re so organized.”