Ten Years Later

by Hoda Kotb

  While she continued to grow the company, Roxanne began to consider how her mounting profits could honor her environmentally conscious customers and her love of nature. In 2002, Roxanne established Elliotsville Plantation, a private operating foundation for the acquisition and conservation of thousands of acres of wild land in northern and coastal Maine.

  “Buying all the land that we bought felt like I was still serving our customer,” she says. “I had taken the profits that all of our customers had allowed us to earn and was investing it for them.”

  As Roxanne managed the large-scale success of the company, she also navigated the similarly sized business challenges. One involved the delivery of more than a half million dollars’ worth of face cream to a major national retail chain. After the shipment was made, Roxanne received a call from the chain’s warehouse manager. Blue mold was growing on the top of every single jar.

  “Their chemist was just quality-controlling it before they sent it out to their stores. It was devastating. It wasn’t just the fact that we had six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of product that was molding; it was a credibility issue, too. We were incredibly embarrassed. This was a major chain and here we had completely disappointed them and we looked really bad,” she says. “It turned out to be a natural preservative we were using, and the company that made the preservative had moved from one factory to another and had used a new source of water in their manufacturing process, which had some kind of different formula than their old water, and it created this problem for us. We had to take the blame because it was our problem. It’s our name on the jar. That was humiliating and devastating and it made us feel horrible, but we kept soldiering on. It’s not like you can just quit. I had a little saying on my office wall that said, Success is going from one failure to the next. These kinds of things happen all along the way, from the very beginning, like when you run out of gas before you get to the craft fair and you miss the first three hours of the day because you miscalculated, all the way up to having hundreds of thousands of dollars of product go bad in a major customer’s warehouse. There are lots of setbacks.”

  That same year, with sales topping $60 million, Roxanne hired a female business broker and began entertaining offers from New York equity companies. Her plan was to sell the majority of her shares but to also keep some.

  “I was feeling my creativity was being compromised, because a lot of my time was being spent as a manager instead of as an artist, managing a lot of people, a lot of meetings, and I just was feeling really limited and I was just restless,” she explains. “I wanted to try something new. I had proven to myself that I could do it, so that thrill was over. I just felt it was time for someone else to take over.”

  Roxanne knew that as a minority owner she would be vulnerable, so she wanted to make sure she had a strong feeling about the firm she ultimately chose as the buyer. A student of metaphysics since she was nineteen, Roxanne did tarot card readings on each suitor. She paired the guidance of the universe with her own instincts.

  “I rely on it, especially with things that I don’t know enough about. I had my gut feelings about who I trusted and who I didn’t. But then, when I had an angel card or a tarot card that affirmed my gut feelings, then I would feel like, Check! Okay, that’s another check.”

  The angel card came up for a private equity firm out of New York called AEA Investors. Check!

  In 2003, AEA paid Roxanne $141.6 million for an 80 percent stake in . . . drumroll, please . . . Burt’s Bees.

  Yep. The company Burt and Roxanne started in 1984 was named after the words Burt stenciled on each of his hives: BURT’S BEES.

  “I always thought it was so funny, like, these are Burt’s bees, like, they know it. ‘Oh, yeah, we’re Burt’s, not someone else’s,’ ” Roxanne says, chuckling. “It was easy to remember. I started putting it on the labels, and I would push them toward people as they walked by the booth and they would all want to say,” she singsongs, “ ‘Burt’s Bees! Burt’s Bees!’ There was something kind of fun about that name, so it stuck.”

  When Roxanne made the AEA deal, Burt asked Roxanne for money, since he’d traded his shares years earlier for a home. She agreed to pay him $4 million.

  “And I’ll bet he hasn’t spent a penny of it. I’m sure it’s all under his mattress or hiding under his dog food bowl.” She laughs. “He hasn’t changed a bit. He’s still living out in that little shack that he lives in. I haven’t seen him for a year or two. He had a fight with the phone company over his bill, so they disconnected his phone, so now you can’t even call him anymore. He’s just really eccentric.”

  Burt did invest in some home improvements. He expanded his turkey coop from eight feet by eight feet to eight feet by twelve feet. He also bought a classic motorcycle.

  “And it was a used motorcycle, and it wasn’t running when he bought it.” With a laugh she says, “It took him about three years down at the shop to get the thing working again. That’s how he spends his days, fixing lawn mowers that don’t work. Stuff like that.”

  Roxanne admits she and Burt have grown apart but that she could find him at any time, and they are friends.

  After the first selloff, Roxanne still owned a 20 percent share in the company. She also retained a seat on the board of directors; she knew a second sale would come in the years ahead.

  “I wanted to be sure I had at least some input, and I wanted to keep my ears open and meet with the people who were running the company and owned the majority,” she says. “Y’know, kind of protecting the investment that I had and watching over what they were doing with it.”

  In 2004, Roxanne used half of her Burt’s Bees shares to form the Quimby Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports fellow nonprofits of like mind. The forest and the arts would be the benefactors; the tax shelter was gravy.

  “Because it was a nonprofit, it was not a taxable transaction, which was fabulous, because that was a lot of money that would have had to have been paid in taxes,” she says, “so I was able to shelter quite a bit of money from taxes by creating this nonprofit, and that allowed me to take up a social mission, and the mission was the environment.”

  Lucas and Hannah, at twenty-six, joined the foundation’s board of directors in 2005.

  “Oh, yeah, they love it. They feel very important,” she says through a smile, “and they truly are.”

  Roxanne’s entrepreneurial burnout didn’t last long. In January 2006, she founded Happy Green Bee, a company that manufactures all-organic clothing for children and babies. One of the collections is called “Oxanna,” Russian for Roxanne.

  The final sale of Burt’s Bees came in November 2007. Potential buyers swarmed and made offers, eager to grab market share in the lucrative “green” products sector. AEA sold Burt’s Bees to Clorox for $925 million. Roxanne’s remaining 20 percent share netted her close to $183 million. The unemployed mom who realized she wanted more for her kids had banked a whopping total of $325 million.

  I ask Roxanne if she ever envisioned that large a payday in her wildest dreams.

  “Never, no, never. It’s strange. I just had a very indifferent attitude about money because I had always understood way back when that it didn’t buy happiness, it couldn’t buy you peace of mind, it couldn’t buy you love, it couldn’t buy you the most important things, which is why I moved to the country and lived such a simple life,” she says. “I think my indifference to money allowed me to make decisions that were not based on emotions, so those decisions were better. If you’re making decisions based on fear, or want, or greed, or pride, or some of the other things that accompany money, your decisions are compromised by those emotions, and you don’t make the clearest, best decisions that you could. I didn’t have a lot of emotions attached to money; it was just there. I didn’t covet it or fear that it would go away, or that I wouldn’t have enough.”

  Roxanne viewed the dollars as a pat on the back, not as a way to pad her wallet.

  “I never really was
all that interested in money for what it could buy. The money for me was more like the score, and business was the sport,” she says. “I prided myself on playing the game well and the skill was measured by dollars. The money I was able to make by selling the company was more like gratification that I had done a good job as opposed to, Oh, good. Now I can go out and buy stuff.”

  Lucas says his mom instilled the same view of money in him and Hannah. Their lifestyle never changed even as the company grew. Boarding school was the big splurge. Lucas says his mom, while she values education, has never lost sight of the learning that takes place on a hiking trail, rock wall, or trip across the globe.

  “She’s given us amazing opportunities, but it’s always really focused,” he says. “It’s never like, ‘Hey, y’know what? You should have a Maserati,’ or ‘Here’s a bunch of money to go do something.’ It’s always, ‘Let’s go as a family to Africa,’ and we would experience that culture, and it was an amazing thing that we’ll always remember as a family.”

  Roxanne has traveled to Hawaii and Antarctica and all the places she’s always wanted to go. She studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and bought multiple homes in Florida and Maine. But the majority of “stuff” Roxanne spends her millions on is acreage. For years, she’s been purchasing large tracts of forestland in northern Maine with the ultimate goal of creating a new national park. She hopes to give the National Park Service seventy-four thousand acres of her northern Maine woods to create the Maine Woods National Park. Her donation would ideally fall on the Park Service’s centennial anniversary in August 2016. Roxanne’s dream is not shared by all. Her land acquisition is not popular with many hunters, loggers, and outdoorsmen who fear their freedom to work and play may be compromised by the creation of a national park. Her mission is a work in progress.

  Not surprisingly, Roxanne is sought after as a public speaker. Her story is so compelling that she’s frequently asked to share her “secrets” of success. When she speaks to young people interested in starting companies, she’s direct.

  “Very rarely are you gonna have a home run right out of the box. You’re gonna go through a lot of trial and error, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes, and you’re gonna have a lot of things that don’t sell. And the major thing is not to be discouraged,” she advises, “because you learn so much more from your mistakes than you do from your successes, and as long as you’re making mistakes you’re probably on the road to success. You’re learning what doesn’t work, and you’re refining your vision.”

  Now sixty-two years old, Roxanne is still as busy as a bee. She spends as much time as she can with family. Her mother has passed away, but her father, who’s almost ninety, lives in Florida with his girlfriend. Roxanne says he’s had three failed marriages, one that lasted just six months.

  “Now he’s decided that he’s had such little success with marriage that he’ll just have a girlfriend instead,” she says with a laugh, “so he lives with his girlfriend who’s ninety-one.”

  Hannah, Lucas, Roxanne. Maine, 2011. (Courtesy of Roxanne Quimby)

  Lucas and Hannah are now thirty-three. Both have hiked the Appalachian Trail and paddled the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. Lucas lives in Seattle with his wife and fourteen-month-old daughter Gabriella. He works full-time with the Quimby Family Foundation and part-time as a fly-fishing guide. He’s a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in London and worked in the food and wine industry for more than a decade. I ask Lucas if he ever buys Burt’s Bees products.

  “Yeah,” he says with a laugh, “I got a tube of lip balm in my pocket.”

  Hannah lives in San Francisco and works part-time with the foundation. She has a degree in human development and photography, as well as a master’s degree in integrative health. She’s now pursuing certifications in holistic nutrition and personal fitness. She’d like one day to share her love of the outdoors by running a nonprofit organization that would make health and wellness more accessible to adults and children. Hannah, too, still uses the products that decades ago she and her brother watched bubble on the kitchen stove.

  “Even when I went to college it really wasn’t even known then; just by people who shopped in health food stores or who bought natural products,” she says. “But now I’m in class and I’ll see someone pull it out and use it and I’ll think, That is so crazy. It’s all around me now, and I have a clear memory of wax melting on the woodstove and what it used to be, and to think it’s become what it has still surprises me sometimes.”

  The twins have maintained a close relationship and see each other every few months.

  “I just want them to be happy and fulfilled and do right,” Roxanne says of the twins, “and to live according to the values I hope I instilled in them. And to be honest with themselves and others. That’s what I want for them.”

  Perhaps surprisingly, knowing all Roxanne has accomplished, she considers her most stunning achievement a 2010 summit of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain.

  “You can’t have anybody do it for you,” she says. “You can’t hire a really great engineer to do it for you. You gotta do it yourself, and it’s tough. For me, it was really challenging. I’m not the best hiker in the world and it was always very intimidating for me. I felt like, Aw, I can’t do it. It’s too high and I’m not strong enough. It’s too scary. It’s too steep. So when I got to the top I felt like, Wow! I did it! It was just a really great feeling. I had to do it on my own. That’s why I felt it was such a great achievement for me.”

  It’s that can-do spirit that Roxanne talks about passionately when I inquire about the message of her journey so far. Those same buzzwords hum behind her answer: “freedom,” “restlessness,” “independence.”

  “This country is still great enough that you can make it no matter what. I was not trained to be a Wall Street wizard. I didn’t know anything about business. I didn’t have any financial leverage or advantages. I was a woman, and yet, even with those obstacles, I was allowed to be successful in this country. For me, this country gives us enough freedom and enough opportunity that a person can still make it,” she says. “My mother was born in a different country, and my grandfather was born in Russia, and his father and sister were murdered one night because they were Jewish. He ran away from Russia and he went to China and got married and they had to leave China during the Communist revolution, and they left with nothing. So in our family, there was always this story about America, and how no one would be persecuted for their religion, and that this was the land of opportunity, and I really believe in that. I know we’re not perfect and I know there are problems in our society, but I still feel like there’s a lot of opportunity in this country to succeed and to dream and to aspire.”

  I’ll never again see a Burt’s Bees display without thinking of Roxanne. And Burt, happily cooped up. Every Walgreens, Target, and Walmart carries Burt’s Bees, and the product line continues to grow. I ask Roxanne her gut reaction when she walks by the brand during her daily doings.

  “I sort of feel like it’s overexposed right now. When something gets overexposed it doesn’t seem quite as special, quite as unique,” she says. “I controlled the marketing of it a little more strictly, but obviously, the people who own it now want to sell it to every single company they can, so they do. I don’t know, once in a while I have a little glimmer of, Oh, yeah. I did that. I remember one day I was taking a hike somewhere, and I saw this little yellow piece of litter in the mud. It was a used-up Burt’s Beeswax Lip Balm, and I had a little moment there, thinking that this product was so ubiquitous that it was now litter.” She laughs. “It was like a Coke can on the side of the road, and I thought, Wow! I’ve really made it in America.”

  Boy, have you ever, Roxy.

  Addendum

  How’s Burt doing? The mystique continues. Burt declined an invitation to be interviewed for the story. A little bee told me he was headed to Taiwan soon for a company appearance. He’s apparently a rock star in East Asia. All the best to
you, Burt, and your bees.

  CONCLUSION

  In 1988, Stan Sandroni hired me after twenty-seven other television news directors turned me down for my first job out of college. I never dreamed I would be rejected so many times; I never thought I’d live and work in Greenville, Mississippi. But that chance meeting with Stan gave me the start I needed to develop a solid career. In 1998, ten years after Stan gave me my first reporting job, NBC called and offered me a position as a correspondent for Dateline NBC. I’ve been working for the network in New York ever since. That fateful day when I met Stan taught me that one person can change your life. If just one person believes in you, the army of people who don’t are inconsequential. All you need is someone to take a leap of faith, and your world can change. That road trip also proved to me that persistence pays off. When you’re worn out and feel like you have nothing left in the tank, you most likely do. I say stick fatigue, rejection, and doubt in the trunk and hit the gas one more time. Your Stan could be right around the corner.

  My game changer isn’t nearly as dramatic as the ones described in the stories you’ve just read. The game changers for Amy, Lindsay, Patrick, Diane, Ron, and Roxanne all required guts and the determination to not only survive, but to also accept the scars and welcome the lessons that followed. Does that mean they are different people ten years later? After all, chaos and adversity are often catalysts for great change. Ron knows something about that. Then again, one brave step followed by a second can also blaze a trail to change, if we’re patient enough to go the distance. Just ask Amy. Sometimes we seek out change, other times it finds us and demands our attention. Can people really change? And if so, does the change stick around for good?

  Here’s what they think:

  Amy Barnes—survived domestic abuse and lost 340 pounds