As Burt’s Bees marks 40 years, co-founder Roxanne Quimby shares her keys to growing the planet-focused personal care product company from a roadside startup into a billion-dollar household name.
By Kathryn Deen
Burt’s Bees. It’s a household name and a billion-dollar personal care product company with 40 years of exponential growth and success.
But its beginnings could hardly be humbler. Behind Burt Shavitz — the late straggly-bearded beekeeper whose face became synonymous with the brand — was lesser-known co-founder Roxanne Quimby, a fiercely determined woman with a continuous drive to expand the company from its roadside roots all while keeping the planet an unwavering priority.
“Burt’s Bees was an unexpected success,” Quimby says. The queen bee sat down with Real Leaders to share her raw, unfiltered lessons on their path to building a colony — err, company — of epic proportions.
1. Start Anywhere
Some might say they had no business starting a business, but isn’t that the beauty of the wild, wild west of entrepreneurship? Shavitz, a photojournalist from Manhattan, and Quimby, an artist from San Francisco, separately traded their congested city lives for the off-grid backwoods of Maine, forgoing running water and electricity. In what turned out to be arguably the best hitchhiking outcome of all time, Shavitz picked up a thumbing Quimby in his truck and they hit it off — certainly not the typical start to a business partnership or romance, but there they were beginning both.
When they met in 1983, a solo Shavitz was beekeeping and selling honey roadside to get by, while a newly single Quimby, a mother of twins and ever the artist yearning to create, also needed work. “We were living hand to mouth,” Quimby recalls. “I really wanted to stop waitressing.” She moved in with Shavitz and started making beeswax candles and lip balm to supplement his wholesale honey and beeswax sales. “He sold the honey and beeswax as commodities, and my feeling was that we could enhance value with smaller, more aesthetically pleasing packaging, making them into a souvenir of one’s trip to Maine,” she says. “I saw really quickly that that worked, and we were able to get more revenue.”
2. Learn from Consumers
Initially, Quimby set up shop at local craft fairs and allowed observation to guide their product development. “I let the consumers teach me about what they wanted, how they gathered information about a product,” she recalls. “It was a practical, on-the-street way of understanding the relationship between a product and a person who would purchase it or not. It was fundamentally important to my ability to put together a formula to create and grow the business.”
The candles phased out and the skincare line expanded, with free samples hooking people in. “We did tons of sampling,” Quimby says. “That was really important because we felt that the product was the thing that was going to sell people — because it worked, and it felt so good, and it smelled so good. We wanted people to try it. We really believe in our products.”
3. Face the Giants
Quimby also took inspiration from businesses she admired, with Ben & Jerry’s chief among them. “They were so creative, and they broke all the rules,” she notes. “They were very countercultural and yet accepted by everybody because they have a great product that everybody loves.”
She cites Ben & Jerry’s 1984 national campaign “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” as formative to her journey. The Pillsbury Corporation, known for its Doughboy mascot, owned Häagen-Dazs at the time and threatened to stop selling its ice cream to a mutual distributor if it continued to sell Ben & Jerry’s to grocery stores, essentially blocking it from shelves. The distributor couldn’t afford to lose such a lucrative client, so it obliged.
Ben & Jerry’s wanted to fight but was still small and didn’t think it stood a chance in a lawsuit against such a giant. Instead, it created a campaign encouraging customers to push back, sending hundreds of people each week to flood Pillsbury’s hotline and write letters. Eventually, Pillsbury backed down and allowed the distributor to supply Ben & Jerry’s to its stores.
“Ben & Jerry’s gave me permission to exist in a marketplace where we were the alternative when we were very unknown and tiny,” she reflects. “I felt like we could take on gigantic companies and appeal to a customer base that was not interested in the large mega-brands.”
4. Build Your Brand
Quimby set out to create a loyal customer base for Burt’s Bees, applying the lessons she read in Building Strong Brands by David A. Aaker. “Selling a consumer product is more than just about the product,” Quimby shares. “It’s about a story. It’s about aspiration. And it’s about a connection to the consumer. Once you create this very strong attachment between a brand and a consumer, you don’t have to keep selling to them. They love and buy your brand without you having to pitch it to them every single time. We put a lot of energy into creating a brand.”
Not only did Burt’s Bees hone in on Shavitz as its small-town beekeeper mascot, but it also emphasized its values of authenticity, purity, and cleanliness. “People were ready for that story,” Quimby says.
The company’s countercultural message resonated with its audience. “Beauty and personal care products always feature beautiful women and an aspirational look of flawlessness, so we just did the opposite,” Quimby notes. “We put this bearded beekeeper on the packaging, and what we were saying was that you should be more interested in the performance of the product. It’s not going to make you look like a supermodel, but it is going to be satisfying on a very healthy and soul level. That was a story we told through the brand.”
5. Stay Authentic to Your Cause
Deeply appreciative of what nature provided them, Quimby and Shavitz respected and preserved the planet from the get-go with Burt’s Bees, from process to packaging. Rejecting consumerism and living off the grid in Maine were formative to that.
“It really changed my point of view,” she says. “I was much more careful about the way I used resources and on very, very limited resources financially. The way bees live — the way bees make a living, the way they organize the workflow to create their products — that was sort of one and the same with my way of living. It wasn’t like I could start a company that contradicted those values that were completely baked into the way I lived and looked at things. It never occurred to me to do anything contrary to the way I lived and looked at the world. So that was all part of the DNA of Burt’s Bees.”
The company committed to botanical ingredients sourced from the Earth, as opposed to chemicals made in a lab. However, keeping packaging environmentally friendly presented hurdles. “It was definitely challenging because at that time, things were packaged in plastic, metal, or glass — and you don’t want children’s products or products used in the bathroom or shower to be in glass. Metal has its limitations. So plastic was the alternative, and it was very hard to get around,” Quimby reflects. “But we just didn’t make a product until we figured out how to do it without a damaging environmental impact. There were a lot of products that we couldn’t make, like shampoo and lotion. I couldn’t see us adding to the waste stream with a virgin plastic bottle that gets thrown out after you use the contents.”
Burt’s Bees’ first lip balms were packaged in terracotta pots, then metal tins. Only once Quimby learned about postconsumer recycled plastic did Burt’s Bees start making shampoo and lotion, significantly boosting sales while giving plastic a second life and helping increase recycled plastic’s industry demand.
Today, the company continues to use postconsumer recycled materials in its packaging and responsibly sourced ingredients from nature under landfill-free operations.
6. Navigate Your Partnership
Shavitz and Quimby navigated highs and lows in their personal and business relationships. Eventually, the end of the former relationship would lead to the end of the latter. “Having a partner is a double-edged sword, but I still recommend it,” Quimby says. “I would feel very lonely without having somebody by my side for better or for worse.”
Among the benefits of working with a trusted partner, she lists loyalty, a different viewpoint, and a safe space to vent. “Partnerships can be incredibly beneficial,” she states. “I could go to Burt and tell him every bad thing that happened that day, and he was there for me. As Burt would say, ‘If it was easy, Roxy, everybody would do it.’”
Quimby also valued his photography experience, which came in handy while working with their catalog photographer. “Partners should bring expertise complementary to yours,” she notes. “Those differences can also cause conflict, but struggles are what make for a better person, a better product, a better company because the resolutions can make you stronger. Burt and I were partners in that sense.”
7. Know When to Exit
As the company grew, operations outgrew Shavitz’s kitchen to a one-room schoolhouse, then a bowling alley, and eventually headquarters relocated to Raleigh, North Carolina. After a brief stint in Raleigh, Shavitz returned to Maine to live on a piece of property Quimby gave him in exchange for his third of the company, bringing her to full ownership of Burt’s Bees in 1999. Along the way, Shavitz and Quimby’s romantic relationship went south.
“We did separate for personal reasons that had nothing to do with the company,” Quimby shares. “It was a personal situation that we were not able to resolve, and so we went our separate ways, and he still maintained his ownership share of the company for a few years.”
After the breakup, Quimby’s heart was no longer in Burt’s Bees, and she recognized it was time to plan her exit. “Burt’s Bees was our child, and we put everything into it,” she reflects. “When he and I split up as romantic partners, it was very difficult for me to still stay buoyant and happy and inspired by the company, and that led us to want to sell it.”
Quimby and a business broker met with 40-plus potential acquiring companies over the span of a year. “We had a pretty hot property to sell,” Quimby notes. In 2003, she sold 80% of her stake in Burt’s Bees to private equity firm AEA Investors, who valued the company at $177 million. She stepped down as CEO soon after. “I wanted to go with people whom I really cared about and whom I thought really cared about us and our values,” she shares. “I love that we went with a private equity company, and they never lost respect for what we created.”
8. Find Fulfillment Post-Exit
In 2007 Clorox bought the entire company for over $900 million, with Quimby selling the rest of her stake. “I didn’t really need all that money,” she admits. “I wasn’t going to change my lifestyle, start getting fancy cars, and make mansions. It seemed logical to put a great deal of the proceeds into some kind of environmental enterprise.”
Quimby ramped up her focus on wilderness preservation, starting a philanthropic foundation, giving $90 million to charities, and acquiring 87,500 acres of untouched Maine woodlands through lip balm profits, which she donated to the National Park Service to become Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in 2016.
“You feel connected to something bigger than yourself,” Quimby says. “I can think of no better thing to do with Burt’s Bees profits than to return them to the Earth. We want people to enjoy the land in a non-consumptive way.”
In 2019 she purchased a company that combines her passions for art and environmental consciousness — Eco-Kids, which sells sustainable art and craft supplies for children. “I felt a real affinity to the beeswax crayons,” she says.
In 2020–21 Burt’s Bees invested $3 million to help build her national monument’s Tekakapimak Visitor Contact Station scheduled to open summer 2024. It’s a tribute to the native Wabanaki people in partnership with the Roxanne Quimby Foundation, Elliotsville Foundation (led by her son), a Wabanaki advisory board, and the National Park Service. For its 40th anniversary in 2024, Burt’s Bees also honored Quimby with a limited-edition lip balm that celebrates her legacy and the brand’s investment in the monument.
“We’re thankful for the blueprint of kindness toward people and planet that Roxanne built into the brand,” says Paula Alexander, director of sustainability and responsible sourcing at Burt’s Bees. “Our team is proud to continue her legacy of reinvesting in nature and our communities.”
