Burt’s Bees started out making candles from beeswax and created a successful, memorable personal care brand that made lip balm, lotion and a ton of money. From its beginnings in Maine, Burt Shavitz and business partner Roxanne Quimby grew the Burt’s Bees brand into a global entity using bearded, hippie Burt’s iconic image on its packaging to convey the brand’s nature and soul. Shavitz was a beekeeper; he died this week at age 80.
The Burt’s Bees brand, which started in 1984, was purchased 23 years later by Clorox for $925 million. To assuage the back-to-nature loyalists of the brand after the Clorox purchase, the company told users it was “proud to send ZERO waste to landfill from our manufacturing facility and office since 2010. We compost most of our waste and we also started reclaiming water from our manufacturing process, so we use less. Additionally, our operations are now carbon neutral.”
