Ten Years Later

by Hoda Kotb

  In an effort to reduce drive time to countless retail craft fairs, Roxanne shifted their sales effort to the wholesale market. In 1989, the move paid off in a big way. At a wholesale show in Springfield, Massachusetts, a buyer for an upscale Manhattan boutique named Zona ordered several dozen teddy bear candles. When he put the products in the store window, they were a hit. The Fifth Avenue boutique reordered hundreds of candles, and several big chains followed suit: Gardener’s Eden, Smith & Hawken, and the Smithsonian Museum Store. Roxanne knew it was again time to move. Corporate headquarters became an abandoned bowling alley in the middle of Guilford.

  “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.

  TEN YEARS LATER

  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.”

  While Burt, the unconventional face of the product, continued to make store appearances several days a month, Roxanne was in charge of every dollar and every product. In 1998, with $8 million in annual sales and a new life a thousand miles from home, Roxanne had a moment. For the first time, she allowed herself to take her eyes off the road ahead and sneak a look in the rearview mirror. She was all alone in the one-hundred-thousand-square-foot production warehouse.

  “It was quite late at night. Everybody had left, and for some reason I needed something out in the warehouse,” she recalls. “I went out to the warehouse from my office and started walking back to the shipping area, and I was looking at these racks, and I thought, Wow! I just can’t believe this! It looked like a great big old factory, and I just had this moment when I just stood there and looked at it, like When did this all happen? Where did this all come from? And I felt at that moment that we had kind of turned a corner, and we were now a mainstream company with departments, and we had a couple hundred employees and a lab. We were getting pretty sophisticated in the way we were doing things, and at that point I felt quite gratified that we had taken it out of a little kitchen and put it into a mainstream factory.”

  The wonder of all she’d achieved made Roxanne sentimental. In the days ahead, she picked up the phone and called her father, whom she hadn’t spoken to in decades.

  “I felt like, I’m probably the one who should call him because I’m younger and have more flexibility and he’s kind of stuck in his ways, and I’m just going to reach out. He was very happy that I had. He was very proud, and I don’t think he knew how to bridge the gap,” she says, “but when I reached out to him, he was really happy that I did.”

/>   Roxanne says that she never tapped into the pain caused by the rift in their relationship; she instead used it as a motivator.

  “I tend to move on and take my lumps. I don’t tend to dwell on the upsets of life, but on some level I think my ambition was a way of proving to myself and proving to him that he was wrong about me,” she says. “And it could have been that if he’d been more accepting of me all along, I wouldn’t have had this need to prove anything to him or myself, so in some ways I was clearly affected by his hard-line approach.”

  By 1999, annual sales approached $14 million, and products became readily available with the launch of an e-commerce website. Roxanne was weary of life away from her beloved Maine, so she moved back to the coastal lobster village of Winter Harbor and bought a 1,600-square-foot house on the rocky shore. She also bought the adjacent lot for privacy. E-mail and overnight shipping allowed her to oversee the company from afar, with bimonthly visits to North Carolina. Roxanne made the company her own the same year; she bought out Burt’s one-third share. The buyout came in the form of a trade. Roxanne bought Burt a $130,000 house in Maine, which he sold just a few months later and returned to his treasured turkey coop. The next year, revenue soared to $23 million and Roxanne began to receive offers to sell the company. She wasn’t ready yet but knew the day would, and should, come.

  “I knew it was just a phase in my life, not my life,” she says, “and so I ran the company as if it were the last product I would sell. I positioned it in a way that would make it very attractive to an acquiring firm. I had a bottom line that was very attractive; good, steady, healthy growth; I never took a lot of money out; I never cooked up any fiction with the books—it was just really solid.”