They needed to become more professional.  So, what does a hippie do?  They hired a 14-year-old to manage the books.  This was before Clorox bought them for $925 million dollars.  Today, there is a Burt’s Bees Lip balm sold every second.  This is a story that starts off the grid in Maine.

Dave Young:

Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from Mom-and-Pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young.

Dave Young:

Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor which is, well it's us. But, we're highlight ads we've written and produced for our clients, so here's one of those.

[Aurora Pro Services Ad]

Dave Young:

Stephen, I'm driving across West Texas a couple weeks ago, as one does. You're driving, the air is dry, my lips are getting chapped. So the next time I pull over to get gas, I'm wandering around looking at all the different ... There's Carmex, and there's Blistex. I don't know, I'm just bored of all of that stuff, it tastes like medicine. So I grabbed one called Burt's Bees. It worked, I liked it. I think it's the only thing I've ever bought that was Burt's Bees.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, they have a lot of products today and that's who we're going to talk about. But, I want to give you an idea of how popular Burt's Bees lip balm is.

Stephen Semple:

There's a Burt's Bees lip balm sold every second. I'm not kidding. So by the time we're done this podcast, 500 Burt's Bees lip balms would have been sold. Crazy, eh?

Dave Young:

That's crazy. Yeah. My office that I'm recording this in would fill up with lip balm, by the time we were done.

Stephen Semple:

By the time we were done, right. Even though they're all little, it would still fill up.

Dave Young:

Wow, that's amazing.

Stephen Semple:

It is and it has a crazy history behind it. It was started by Burt Shavitz, Burt's, and Roxanne Quimby in Bangor, Maine in the mid-80s. But, she's been the main driving force behind the business, a real counter-culture, arts student, hippy homesteader.

Stephen Semple:

I'll give you an idea of how much they were hippies, because they were basically the poster children for being hippies.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

They started this business in the mid-80s, they incorporated in 1991. In 2004, 80% of the business was sold for $173 million. And then in late 2007, Clorox bought the company for $925 million, so just shy of $1 billion. She still had 20% of the business, so that was another 200 million in her pocket.

Dave Young:

She's doing okay.

Stephen Semple:

She's doing okay. But again, this is a crazy story about two hippies, who frankly had no interest in business, or money or things.

Stephen Semple:

So in the 1970s, Roxanne moves from New England to the West coast to attend art school, and she discovers the counter-culture. She meets a boyfriend, George Sinclair, at that time. They buy a van, and they fix it up and they head back East. They've got $3000 and they're going to buy some land. They go to Vermont, and they meet with a real estate out of Vermont who says, "This is Vermont, $3000 will get you nothing. Try Maine."

Stephen Semple:

So they go to Maine, for $3000 in Maine, they buy 30 acres of land in the fricking middle of nowhere and they build this simple house. No running water, no electricity, heated by a wood stove in fricking Maine.

Dave Young:

They're living the dream.

Stephen Semple:

Living the dream. They wanted to be part of this back to the land movement. They wanted to leave civilization. They wanted to have this idea where they needed very little money to live, they just needed money on food. At that point, they were living on $4000 a year.

Dave Young:

Okay.

Stephen Semple: