Episode 65 Brent Ridge

[00:00:00] The Power of Helping Others

[00:00:00] Brent Ridge: We had about 22,000 people come to our little village of Sharon Springs, New York and think about how important that was because all of those people didn't just come to our store, they went to the restaurants, they went to the little stores on our main street and enabled those stores to make so much money in that one month that they survived the whole next year of the pandemic when their stores were closed.

[00:00:25] Allan: That's very cool.

[00:00:26] Brent Ridge: All because of the power of wanting to help somebody else. And I think that's a negotiating tactic that everybody should use. You know, so often, like in business school, you're taught to negotiate hard and to be self interested in your negotiation. And we say go into any negotiation thinking how you're going to help the other person as much or at more than you're gonna help yourself.

[00:00:49] ​

[00:00:54] Meet Brent Ridge: From Physician to Entrepreneur

[00:00:54] Allan: Welcome to the Lean Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Allan Dib. Today, I am joined by [00:01:00] Brent Ridge. Brent has an amazing story and he's also released a book which we'll talk a little bit more about later.

[00:01:07] Allan: But he's built a skincare brand which has surpassed $150 million in revenue, which is absolutely incredible. They've taken on a hundred million dollars plus investment, and it's all bootstrap, which is absolutely incredible. So, I asked Brent to come and join me and tell a little bit about his story.

[00:01:28] Allan: So, Brent for those who don't know you who are you, what do you do and who do you do it for?

[00:01:34] Brent Ridge: Oh, hi Alan. Great to be here and I hope my story can inspire some of your listeners.

[00:01:40] The Birth of Beekman 1802

[00:01:40] Brent Ridge: I'll go back to where our story started, at least this portion of our lives. You know, my partner Josh and I were living and working in New York City. I had been a physician. My specialty was in longevity medicine.

[00:01:53] Brent Ridge: And I practiced for several years at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and then went back to business school uh, at NYU, [00:02:00] thinking I was going to go into biotechnology. But kind of got swiped away by Martha Stewart the lifestyle Maven, who at the time was creating a new division of her company devoted to health and wellness.

[00:02:13] Brent Ridge: And so, she tapped me to head that new division, the development of that new division. My partner Josh, was in advertising. He worked with some of the biggest companies in the world, Absolute Vodka, Stouffers, Nestle, you know, some of the biggest. And in 2006 we were both 30 years old. And, you know, just kind of felt that the future was so bright.

[00:02:36] Brent Ridge: And we were doing a weekend apple picking trip in upstate New York. And we drove by this farm and it had a for sale sign in the yard. And we decided then, and there we have to have that farm. And so on the way back to the city, we concocted all the ways that we could make that farm our own. So we cashed in everything that we [00:03:00] had ever saved up at that moment in our lives

[00:03:02] Brent Ridge: made the down payment, took out a million dollar mortgage to buy this empty farm, about three and a half hours north of the city that we were gonna use on the weekends.

[00:03:11] Brent Ridge: We thought, oh, we'll grow some food, some we can do some gardening, and just have a place to go on the weekend. Well this, the town that the farm was located in was, is very rural population, is about 500 people. And so of course everybody knew that these two guys from New York City had bought this 200 year old farm.

[00:03:29] Brent Ridge: And one weekend we came up and there was a note in our mailbox from a local farmer who was losing his farm. And he said, I know you guys are only here on the weekends. And I have a herd of a hundred goats and I need to find a place where I can bring them. Otherwise I'll have to sell my herd. Is there anything you can do to help me out?

[00:03:51] Brent Ridge: And so we met with him and saw how much he loved and cared for the animals. And we said, you know what? Sure, come. There's another [00:04:00] little house on the property. You can stay there. The goats will be fine. You'll keep an eye on things when we're not there. And so in our mind. We were like, we have a petting zoo now, you know, on the weekends.

[00:04:09] Brent Ridge: And we say that ultimately was the original act of kindness that started Beekman 1802. And the reason kindness is such a big part of the ethos of our brand because just a year later, in 2008 when the big recession started, my new division at Martha Stewart folded, my husband's advertising agency basically lost all of their clients.

[00:04:34] Brent Ridge: And we were having one of those classic oh crap moments because we had this huge mortgage. Now we have this homeless farmer and his homeless goats. And we're like, what are we going to do? And you know, we were depressed for, I would say the first three or four months. But then we were out in the, in, in the barn because it was actually warmer to stay out in the barn than it was in this drafty 200 year old farmhouse.

[00:04:59] Brent Ridge: [00:05:00] And we said, okay, we've got goats. We understand marketing and media. We understand retail. What can we make with goat milk? And so we googled literally what can we make with goat milk? And one of the things that popped up was goat milk soap. And so we worked with a local neighbor who was making artisanal soaps, and she taught us how to make goat milk soap.

[00:05:25] Brent Ridge: And that was 60 million bars of soap later. That's. How we started and we say that we grew our company, one neighbor at a time.

[00:05:35] Allan: Wow. That is crazy. So you saw this random farm on a lark. You were like, Hey, that'd be a great place to stay on the weekends. Let's just uh, you know, sell everything buy it. And so it's just like one random circumstance after another.

[00:05:48] Allan: It's not like you'd had a really solid business plan to do all of this.

[00:05:54] Brent Ridge: No, it really we say that we, you know, There are people who are born entrepreneurs, probably like yourself, like, you know, you've had [00:06:00] multiple entrepreneurial ventures. We are not born entrepreneurs. You know, we both grew up in very rural parts of the United States. Very kind of lower-middle class backgrounds, and we have built our careers up to that point to be very risk averse.

[00:06:16] Brent Ridge: I went to medical school became an academic physician. 'cause I knew that's a stable career. Same with Josh. He had worked his way up into the advertising agencies into a stable career. And we just thought that's how our lives would be stable, corporate men, you know? And then, life had other things for us and you know, we just figured it out along the way.

[00:06:36] Brent Ridge: And I think probably the thing that was contributed most to our success was that we always looked at every opportunity that came before us, and even if we didn't say yes to the opportunity in the way that it was presented, we found a way to extract value from every opportunity. [00:07:00] And I think we still do that today.

[00:07:01] Allan: That's really cool.

[00:07:03] Scaling Up: From Local Sales to National Success

[00:07:07] Allan: So the way a lot of these stories go is like, Hey saw this opportunity. We were broke. You know, some magic whatever, $150 million in revenue. But talk more about some of those early days, like where did customer number one come from? Where did customer number two come from?

[00:07:21] Allan: Like how did you get to the first million? So that to me is kind of usually the most interesting part of the story.

[00:07:29] Brent Ridge: Yep. Well, when we first started out, we, you know, this again, this was, you know, 2008 and we learned how to code a website. 'cause we thought, okay, we live in this rural village, we're gonna start making. These bars of soap, we'll sell them online. You know, that was in the very early days of, you know, e-commerce.

[00:07:47] Brent Ridge: And so we learned how to code a website. We got our website up and running. We decided to name the company Beekman 1802 for a very strategic reason. always, from the beginning when we started the company, we're like, okay, [00:08:00] we wanna build a company that will last a long time way beyond us.

[00:08:03] Brent Ridge: So we did not want our personal visages to be closely related to the company.

[00:08:10] Brent Ridge: And so we're like, okay, what can we name this company? And so we made a list of all of the kind of legacy brands that we could think of. And on that list was Chanel number five. And we said, oh, okay, A name and a number.

[00:08:24] Brent Ridge: And our farm was built by a gentleman named William Beekman in the year 1802. And so that's how the company got its name, Beekman 1802, which automatically has kind of a sense of both place and gravitas. And it seems like it's something that's been around for a long time. So we had the name started the website.

[00:08:43] Brent Ridge: But we learned, you know, very quickly, I would say within the first six months that we were not going to pay off a million dollar mortgage in 2008 selling product online. e-commerce was just not where it is today, back then. And so then we said, [00:09:00] okay, where can we take this product, where the product itself will be disruptive?

[00:09:06] Brent Ridge: Now, most of the time when you think of an artisanal product, you know, like a bar of soap. It is someone at a farmer's market or, you know, at a little boutique maybe. But we said, okay, where can we take it? Where it would really stand out and be different? And, you know, we had lived for, you know, more than a decade in New York City, we're very familiar with luxury retail.

[00:09:25] Brent Ridge: And we said, you know what? No product like this exists in luxury retail at the moment. And so I said, okay let's try for, let's go for it. And so, I loaded up my soaps in a bag, and I went down to New York City, walked up and down Fifth Avenue, cold, did cold calls on every luxury department store in New York City Bloomingdale's Sacks, Bergdorf Goodman, Barney's, Henry Bendel.

[00:09:55] Brent Ridge: Almost all of them said no, except for Henry Bendel. Now, Henry Bendel, where [00:10:00] this beautiful department store on Fifth Avenue. It had been there for over a century. And the buyer said, well, we can't just bring your product in untested. You're too new. However, the holiday season is coming up, we will give you a three by three table on our main floor, and if you come and sell your bars of soap you know, during the holiday season, we'll see what the customer response is to it.

[00:10:27] Brent Ridge: And so I, without hesitation said, yes I'll take it. And so for the next six weeks, I would get up every morning at about four o'clock in the morning on the farm, load up the truck with my soaps, drive the three and a half hours down into the city, set up my table. I would stay there until nine o'clock when the store closed, pack everything up, drive back to the farm, the three and a half hours back to the farm.

[00:10:51] Brent Ridge: And I did that every single day for six weeks. And several things happened during that time. One, you know, [00:11:00] I was a physician. I didn't really know how to sell anything, right? And so I really watched what the other salespeople on the floor of Henry Bendle were doing and learned how to sell a product from them.

[00:11:13] Brent Ridge: And then I learned how they told the product story for their brands. And I said, okay, I'm gonna learn how to tell my product story. And two things happened, one. The beauty editor from Vanity Fair happened to be walking through Henry Bendle doing her Christmas shopping, and she just happened overhear me telling my story to a customer and she was fascinated by it.

[00:11:35] Brent Ridge: And she said, I'm gonna write about this in Vanity Fair. And so she gave us our first big press hit in Vanity Fair. Of course that came several months later. The second thing that happened during that six week period was that the beauty buyer for a store called Anthropology, which is a nationwide store in uh, north America.

[00:11:57] Brent Ridge: And she came by and [00:12:00] she also heard me tell my story. She was just on a kind of a scouting mission, looking for new brands that they might wanna bring into anthropology. And she handed me her card. She said, gimme a call. 'cause I want to talk to you about your product. I called her a couple weeks later and she said, we love what you're doing.

[00:12:16] Brent Ridge: We love the look of your product. We love everything you're talking about. We wanna place an order for the next holiday season. And they did. And it was an order for 52,000 bars of soap,

[00:12:27] Allan: Oh.

[00:12:27] Brent Ridge: and we had about eight months to get that order ready. And that was what took us off to the races. But I will say that in that time period when we were making those 52,000 bars of soap, which was of course more than we had ever made before we had been so hasty to take this order and so eager to get this national account that we didn't think about margins. We didn't even really look at how much money we were making, we just said yes. And it turned out that we were making about 5 cents [00:13:00] per bar. By the time we started making this big order.

[00:13:03] Brent Ridge: And we got down to the wire about three or four weeks out from when we had to ship the order, and I was still hand wrapping every bar of soap. And my partner Josh said there's no way you're gonna get all these bars of soap wrapped. And I said, oh, no, I can do it. And basically I was saying I could do it because we could not afford to hire anybody to do it.

[00:13:24] Brent Ridge: And so being a physician, I like numbers. I can't be convinced by someone just giving their opinion and I have to have some numbers. And so he stood in our kitchen while I was at the dining room table, wrapping bars of soap. Stacking them in our hallway. And he timed me and I got as fast as seven seconds per bar of soap.

[00:13:45] Allan: Oh well.

[00:13:45] Brent Ridge: And then he said, okay, if even if you wrap for 24 hours a day every day for the next several weeks, you still would not complete this order. And then I was convinced. I'm like, yeah, you're right. And [00:14:00] so I had befriended the local postmaster. The postal clerk and I was taking to some of our.com orders, dropping 'em off at the post office, and she was just asking how my day was going.

[00:14:11] Brent Ridge: And I said, oh, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I can't get all these bars of soap wrapped. And she said, well, she said, I basically know everybody in this little village. She said, I will give a call out to any housewife or retiree or you know, whoever to see if they want to come over and help you wrap these bars of soap.

[00:14:29] Brent Ridge: And I said, okay. And she's basically did a phone tree and we had about 30 people who said, yeah, we, they, they've got time, they'll come over. And for the next several weeks, 24 hours a day, we had these people cycling through our dining room, wrapping these bars. soap for free they did it just for the camaraderie and for the spirit of community.

[00:14:51] Brent Ridge: And that's the power of neighbors. And you know, that's, as I said, you know, to this day we say we grew our company neighbor by neighbor. And we still call all of our customers [00:15:00] neighbors because of that seminal event in the history of our company.

[00:15:03] Allan: that's so cool. What I love about this, and I've seen this time and time again and I've experienced it myself, is just, the incredible power of just showing up. And I mean, the first thing that you did right was like, it was not gonna change your world. It was like, all right, great. You're in a department store.

[00:15:20] Allan: Maybe you sell sell a few units or whatever. had you not been there, you wouldn't have had got the Vanity Fair You wouldn't have got the other order. You wouldn't have got the other thing. So many people missed this because had, we put together a business plan and said, Hey this would make no sense.

[00:15:35] Allan: Would say, you're not gonna make any money, you're gonna waste all day at this one department store, all of that sort of thing. But what's often missed is some of the connecting opportunities, the invisible strings, so to speak. So, It's really the power of kind of, you've gotta be in it to win it.

[00:15:50] Allan: You've gotta be in, in the game. And a lot of people miss that and a lot of people overanalyze and try to plan every little thing, and [00:16:00] it's just really not possible to do that. I think that's a very powerful first step is just to go do the thing.

[00:16:05] Brent Ridge: absolutely. And you know, it was, and it was so critical that relationship with anthropology was so critical because as we were successful there. Then they said, oh, well we want you to develop more product and here's the type of product we know our customer likes. So I got access to free market research through this national retail chain of what their product might want from us.

[00:16:30] Brent Ridge: And so the next four products we developed. We already had built in hits because we knew that these were the types of products that people wanted. And what happened as a result of having more and more people using our product was that we started getting these anecdotal reports from people saying, wow this product is really changing my skin.

[00:16:50] Brent Ridge: And that really peaked my curiosity as a scientist. And I said, well, what is it about goat milk that could be helping these people's skin, [00:17:00] particularly if they had, you know, these were people who had problematic skin, maybe they had eczema or psoriasis. And you know, I said, well, you know, you can go to basically any farmer's market in any country around the world, and you will find somebody selling goat milk.

[00:17:12] Brent Ridge: Soap is. This long remedy for sensitive skin bathing in goat milk. And I said, there must be something to it. And so I then just started researching goat milk and what are the properties of goat milk and what are the components of goat milk? And now we have really basically become a biotech company.

[00:17:32] Brent Ridge: Because what we learned was that these nutrients in goat milk are powerful prebiotics, which nurse the microbiome of the skin. And that's really the scientific underpinnings of all of the skincare products that we now make. So going all the way back to when I went to business school, thinking I was going to go into biotechnology, took this little detour, but then ended up having a biotech skin company.

[00:17:57] Allan: Hey, it's Allan here, ready to dive [00:18:00] deeper into today's marketing insights? Head over to lean marketing.com/podcast. To get a full summary of today's episode, including all of the resources mentioned, go to lean marketing.com/podcast. Now, back to the show.

[00:18:14] Allan: That's very cool.

[00:18:15] Allan: One thing I want to understand from you is how much do you think the product mattered versus, because like you say, you can go to any farmer's market, there'll be someone selling goat milk bars of soap. I've seen it myself as well, so I you know, the by the sounds of it, there was nothing super unique about the actual product, right?

[00:18:35] Allan: I'm sure it was a quality product beautifully presented, all of that sort of thing, but how much of it was your story and the brand component versus this is an amazing product? Yeah.

[00:18:46] Brent Ridge: Well, when it was just the bar of soap, the story was everything, right? Because we had to get the product in the customer's hand so that they could use it and see how great it was for their skin. And as you know, you can never underestimate the power of [00:19:00] story. And we were always very good.

[00:19:02] Brent Ridge: Like even in that first set, when the anthropology buyer came through. You know, we, we had first started making a bar of soap that was completely fragrance free. And we thought, well, there's no way we're going to ever grow a business if we have one product. But our original idea was we wanted to have the purest product and we called it Soap for Sensitive People.

[00:19:22] Brent Ridge: That was our original kind of tagline. And when we got this opportunity and Henry Bender we're like, okay, I need to have more than just one sku. And I said, okay, how can I do variations of this SKU that will give more options for people? But also, is there a way that I can personalize it? And so when by the time we entered into Henry Bendle, what we had decided to do was create a different fragrance that represented every month of the year on the farm.

[00:19:54] Brent Ridge: So there was a blend of essential oils that made the month of January, of February, so and so [00:20:00] on. And what that enabled me to do when I was telling our story. Is that even if I didn't captivate people with, oh, here's this guy who's dressed in a suit in muck boots, and he's a farmer and he is selling these products in this luxury department store, even if they weren't compelled by that.

[00:20:15] Brent Ridge: My next line of storytelling would be, oh, what month were you born in? Or are you looking for a gift for someone? What month were they born in? And then they would say, oh, I was born in May. You've gotta smell this May soap. It's the scent of sweet pea because that's when the sweet peas are blooming on the farm.

[00:20:31] Brent Ridge: And that's one of the things I've learned from the sales people at Henry Bendle, was that if you can get the product into the person's hand, just get it physically into their hand. They're about 60% more likely to buy that product just because they have physically touched it, like you cross a massive hurdle.

[00:20:52] Brent Ridge: But again, that just came from thinking creatively, thinking how I can embed a story into the product that I'm [00:21:00] creating, and how can I make that product personal to either the person who was buying it or to the person that they were gifting it to.

[00:21:06] Allan: And do you think the people who were buying it were already buyers of goat milk soap or they were new to the category. They were like, okay, I've now discovered goat milk soap and it's great for

[00:21:16] The Discovery Moment and Early Manufacturing

[00:21:16] Brent Ridge: New to the category. New to the category. 'Cause we were in this luxury setting where most of the people there were buying, you know, LA Mer or they were buying, you know, some other luxury product. They weren't looking for an artisanal, handcrafted bar of soap. So it was a, it was truly a discovery moment for them.

[00:21:35] Allan: And were you guys literally manufacturing on the farm or had you outsourced the manufacturing or No.

[00:21:41] Brent Ridge: no. even when we got into the national account and we're in about 130 anthropology stores, we were still manufacturing very locally.

[00:21:49] The QVC Breakthrough with Baby Goats

[00:21:56] Brent Ridge: What really took us to the next level was when we were offered the opportunity to go on TV retail. You know, you probably know QVC. And so we were given this opportunity [00:22:00] to do TV retail, which is a massive audience, but also a massive platform for storytelling.

[00:22:07] Brent Ridge: And we had never, we were not that familiar with TV retail at the time. And so when we got the opportunity, we really studied the medium. And at the time this was like around 2000 and. 12 2011, 2012 you know, people were still watching linear tv. So the way that you found a channel was you were just clicking through the guide, you know, seeing something caught your attention.

[00:22:33] Brent Ridge: And we said, okay, what is going to make people stop on QVC when they see these two guys? Talking about bath and body products, what's gonna be disruptive? The same way we thought, what's gonna be, where can we put the product initially that would be disruptive. We thought, how can we do something disruptive?

[00:22:53] Brent Ridge: 'cause there are lots of people selling skincare products and bath and body products on tv, retail. [00:23:00] And we said, okay, if people are clicking through, what's going to make them stop even just for a second? What can we do to capture their attention? And we said. Let's bring the baby goats on air with us. And that turned out to be an massive unlock because first, if people were clicking through the channel guide and they saw these two guys on, you know, QVC with baby goats running around, or sometimes we were holding the baby goats, the first thought was, is QVC selling baby goats?

[00:23:32] Brent Ridge: Like, what's going on? And so people would stop. And stop long enough to get involved in the story. But the other thing about that is that the audience for TV retail in general, you know, the bulk of their purchases come from about probably 90%. You know, 9% of their purchases come from like 10% of their.

[00:23:51] Brent Ridge: the people who land on the channel. And so to be successful on those channels, you have to get the viewers to always watch your [00:24:00] show, right? You always want them to be seeing what you're talking about and come back to you time and time again and what the baby goats did, because they're so random, right?

[00:24:09] Brent Ridge: They're so chaotic. You never know what they're gonna do. Are they gonna climb on the table? Are they gonna. You know, poop on the host, like you don't know. And all of that has happened. People, it became a destination viewing. So when people would see Beekman is going to be on, they would watch, they would record an hour of us selling product just so they could rewatch what the baby ghosts were doing.

[00:24:33] Brent Ridge: And it was a complete revolution in TV retail here in the us. And so even to the point that now sometimes. Brand founders who just have dogs will bring their dogs on air because it's like a disruptive thing. And people love to, to see that.

[00:24:50] Allan: That's really cool.

[00:24:51] Scaling Up and Facing Challenges

[00:24:52] Allan: And so, um, you got your ma first major kind of distribution deal. You're in a hundred and 150 stores or, or so. And you said that [00:25:00] didn't set you up in terms of, because you were selling at a pretty low margin. What was the ne next step?

[00:25:05] Allan: How did you scale from there?

[00:25:07] Brent Ridge: Well, it really was going onto TV retail that gave us the infusion of cash that did two things. One, it helped us start scaling up production of the products that we already had. And it also helped us really invest into the scientific research of where we knew that the company was going to ultimately go with research in the microbiome.

[00:25:27] Brent Ridge: And so it just really. Exploded the company having access to all of those millions of customers. And now, you know, we grew to be the number one skincare brand across two of the major TV retail retailers in the US QVC and HSN by the power of storytelling. And we just kept investing in the company and, you know, because we had started the company in the midst of the recession, we were very convinced that we would never take outside funding [00:26:00] because being two guys who were very risk averse, who had worked our careers, had thought we had, you know, made it in New York City with our careers,

[00:26:09] Brent Ridge: and then had everything pulled out from under us because of I don't wanna say a corrupt financial industry, but one with a perverse set of incentives.

[00:26:20] Brent Ridge: And which led to the great recession. And so we were just dead set against that. We would never take outside funding and for the first, you know, decade of the company, we didn't, everything that we made, we invested back in the company. You know, we didn't pay ourselves a salary for, you know, the first eight years of the company.

[00:26:37] Brent Ridge: We were just continually reinvesting, and then we got the opportunity to expand in the biggest beauty retailer in North America, a company called Ulta Beauty. They have 1300 stores all across the United States. And we were going to introduce our latest research. And so [00:27:00] if you've never had the opportunity to launch product in a major retailer like that, you don't understand the expense of that because you have to not only get all of your inventory, not only for the set order, but then hopefully for the sell through and the replenishment, but you also have to pay for all of your end caps. Huge expense. You have to pay for your field team who are gonna go out and educate you know, the store employees, you know, educate consumers when they come into the store.

[00:27:31] Brent Ridge: It's just, you know, it was a multimillion dollar investment to ready the company for this launch in Ulta Beauty and we had made the investment, everything was good. And then we were launching in February, the year that COVID struck.

[00:27:48] Allan: Oh.

[00:27:49] Brent Ridge: And so right as I, all of our end caps were being set in the store, the stores shut down and they were, it was that time period where they were letting [00:28:00] like six people into the store at a time.

[00:28:03] Brent Ridge: And you know, at that moment in the pandemic. You didn't know what was going on. You didn't know how long this was gonna last. Was this a complete paradigm shift where this was just gonna be how it was from now on, you just didn't know? And so in order to you know, be a going concern, we said we're gonna have to take investment.

[00:28:23] Brent Ridge: You know, just to make sure that we have the cushion to get through whatever this new phase is. And so that's what necessitated us. Going out on the road show, talking to dozens of private equity firms, and then settling on the one that that became our partner.

[00:28:40] Allan: And now, are the bulk of your sales still in retail or online, or how do you

[00:28:46] Brent Ridge: We're pretty evenly split. We are about a third on TV retail a third at Ulta Beauty and a third DTC. And in DTC we include both Amazon, north America, and our own website.[00:29:00]

[00:29:00] Allan: Okay.

[00:29:01] Creative Marketing and Collaborations

[00:29:01] Allan: So, what have been some of the most effective ways that you've been able to market yourself break through, Simon you talked about a few strategies, but like, what are some of the ways that you've been able to really break through the noise? Because it is a very crowded market. The beauty space, right?

[00:29:17] Allan: There's there's tons of advertising, there's tons of influencers, there's tons of people pushing product. How are you able to get cut through?

[00:29:25] Brent Ridge: Well, we're at, if you can't, haven't been able to ascertain so far, we're very creative and very strategic thinkers. We're always trying to solve our way out of a problem. And as we talk about in GOAT Wisdom, we believe in frugal innovation like. How can we spend the least amount of money to accomplish the biggest thing?

[00:29:45] Brent Ridge: And so early on in the company, we always did this. We said, what can we accomplish and spend $0. Now, at that point in time, we had $0 to spend. So it was just, that's what we had. But even now, anytime we're [00:30:00] doing a product launch, concepting a marketing campaign, we always tell our team, we want you to brainstorm what you could do.

[00:30:09] Brent Ridge: $0, generate that first list of what you can accomplish with $0. And out of that list, you're gonna get the most creative ideas, right? 'cause people are really having to drill down and think and then you can, we can decide what we invest in. But one of the most effective things that we found in our company to not only be disruptive, but also to find new eyeballs is collaborations and we approach collaborations, I would say very differently than most brands, you know, approach collaborations because a lot of times when other companies approach collaborations, they're always trying to take equity away from the other brand, right? Like, maybe you're partnering with Disney and Mickey Mouse because they have this great brand equity and you wanna do something with that and use that.

[00:30:59] Brent Ridge: We [00:31:00] always go into every conversation, not just for collaborations, but any negotiation we do with our vendors, with whatever thinking first, what can I do for the person sitting on the other side of the table from me? Because if I can deliver something for them, then I'm going to get what I want in return.

[00:31:19] Brent Ridge: And there's a great example of this. I have two great examples with for collaborations based on this idea. One was we were launching this product. This new product called Omega milk, which was a completely new type of facial oil. It was a fermented facial oil. We ferment each bottle for 120 hours to break the lipids in the product down into nanoparticles that can really penetrate into the skin.

[00:31:45] Brent Ridge: So a very interesting technology. And we said, what would be a disruptive way to launch this new type of facial oil? We want people to change their perception of facial oil. And so we [00:32:00] said, you know, in America there's this chain of oil change

[00:32:05] Brent Ridge: drive-ins called Jiffy Lube. And so Jiffy Lube, you go in and they change your car oil in like 30 minutes. Like that's their promise. Very quick. And we said, wouldn't it be funny if we turned the waiting rooms of Jiffy Lube into a spa so that when women came in to get the oil change in their car, which of course everybody hates to go there, sit there and do that, right? Walked into the waiting room. It was a full on spa experience. And they're gonna change their facial oil while they're getting their car. Oil changed. And so I reached out to Shell Corporation who shell Oil, who owns Jiffy Lube, and they thought it was the funniest idea that they had ever heard. And they said, yes, we want to do this.

[00:32:49] Brent Ridge: This is disruptive. But here's the thing, Allan, they then paid for the whole thing.

[00:32:53] Allan: Oh.

[00:32:54] Brent Ridge: We thought it was such a good idea that they paid to set up these spas in their waiting [00:33:00] rooms. And it was very disruptive. It got tons of media coverage and won a ton of awards in our industry for creative marketing.

[00:33:08] Brent Ridge: So that's one example. And again we thought about that 'cause we're like, how can we improve the experience of the Jiffy Lube customer?

[00:33:15] Allan: Yeah.

[00:33:17] Brent Ridge: And then the second, collaboration. Came about with this TV show called Schitt's Creek. I don't know if you're familiar with that TV show, do you know Shit Creek?

[00:33:26] Brent Ridge: So we had been fans of this show for, you know, since it first came on. It was on this very small channel in the US called Pop TV. For the first four years of the program no one had ever heard of this show, but because it told this story of these outsiders who had moved to this small town. Opened up a mercantile, like it's our story.

[00:33:47] Brent Ridge: Like, so we were in love with it and they announced that they were gonna do their final season. And so, we said, ah, we're so sad that more people didn't get to see this show. I said, what if [00:34:00] we can do some, because we've grown to quite a large size by then and we were already on tv. And I, we said, what if we could do a collaboration with them that would give them more viewership. And so I reached out to the producers and I said, Hey, we just wanna do a collaboration that we can get some press around and drive people to watch the final season of the show. And the producer's like, great. That'd be amazing. And so, we started working on this collection of products, which we called Rose Apothecary from the fictitious store that was in the show.

[00:34:30] Brent Ridge: And we had the whole collection designed. And then the pandemic hit. And Netflix picked up Schitt's Creek and aired that the fifth season, pretty much right as it aired. And so the whole world discovered Schitt's Creek and that collaboration, we thought it was gonna be, you know, couple hundred thousand dollars.

[00:34:55] Brent Ridge: It became a multimillion dollar collaboration. [00:35:00] All because we wanted to do something for them, not 'cause we had expected to become rich from it. And the other great thing that happened from that, Allan, was that in our little town of Sharon Springs, New York, our main street is about half a mile long. There are a few small businesses on it.

[00:35:18] Brent Ridge: We had already decided when we were gonna do this collaboration that we were going to convert our store, which is on Main Street into the Rose Apothecary, so we completely re-skinned our store to look just like the Rose Apothecary on the show. When that product launched, we had people come from all over the world into our little village of Sharon Springs.

[00:35:44] Brent Ridge: This was in January before everything shut down from, as far as way as people came from the UK, people came from Australia. We had about 22,000 people come to our little village of Sharon Springs, New York and think about how important that [00:36:00] was because all of those people didn't just come to our store, they went to the restaurants, they went to the little stores on our main street and enabled those stores to make so much money in that one month that they survived the whole next year of the pandemic when their stores were closed.

[00:36:17] Allan: That's very cool.

[00:36:18] Brent Ridge: All because of the power of wanting to help somebody else. And I think that's a negotiating tactic that everybody should use. You know, so often, like in business school, you're taught to negotiate hard and to be self interested in your negotiation. And we say go into any negotiation thinking how you're going to help the other person as much or at more than you're gonna help yourself.

[00:36:41] Allan: I love that. I love that you've made kindness, like a really core value of your business, haven't you?

[00:36:47] Brent Ridge: We really have, it goes back to that original act of kindness with Farmer John. And, you know, you know, taking him on the farm. And, you know, for us, I think if you asked us now what do we hope the [00:37:00] company is known for? We wouldn't even say we wanna be known for our great skincare or our great innovation.

[00:37:05] Brent Ridge: We wanna be a company that is known for kindness and putting more kindness out into the world. And self-kindness the rituals that you do every single day in the morning before you go out the door, at night, before you go to bed. Those do ripple forward. If you feel better about yourself because of the way you've treated yourself or you know how you feel or how you look.

[00:37:26] Brent Ridge: You're gonna treat other people with more kindness because you feel better about yourself. And so we really think of ourselves as a kindness company. And if you look on the back of. All of our products in the ingredient list, kindness is actually listed as an official ingredient on our inky list because we believe that is one of the most important ingredients in our brand.

[00:37:50] Allan: I love it. And you've bottled a lot of your wisdom in your new book, G.O.A.T Wisdom, right? So

[00:37:56] Brent Ridge: greatest of all time wisdom.

[00:37:57] Allan: Greatest of All Time Wisdom. [00:38:00] Yes. Tell me a little bit about what what's in the book and yeah, give us a preview of coming attractions.

[00:38:06] Brent Ridge: Yeah, well, we, you know, we were asked to write this book kind of, serendipitously. We were on the train the Amtrak train and a neighbor who uses our product happened to be a book agent, and he saw us sitting on the train and he just came up and was making small talk with us. And he said, have you guys ever thought of writing a business book?

[00:38:25] Brent Ridge: And we said no, we're busy. you know, that's not on the top of our list of things to do. And he was just very persistent. Oh, your story. Like people love your story. And he's like, it's a grit and determination and like, it's gonna be great. And we said, well, we don't wanna write a memoir.

[00:38:42] Brent Ridge: Like, we don't wanna do that. I said, and so I just kind of flippantly said, well, if you could convince Harvard Business Review to do our book. We will write this book. And the reason I said that was because who would've ever thought that HBR, who does [00:39:00] these really academic management books, would ever do this book about this company that started on a farm, you know, just didn't make sense. And so I never even thought it would happen, but sure enough, Harvard business said this is exactly the type of story we need to be telling because the backbone of the economy are these small businesses and nobody is writing books for these small businesses.

[00:39:27] Brent Ridge: And so, we, we said, okay, here's how we're gonna do this book. We're gonna take all of these old proverbs and all of these old maxims things that all of us have heard before. You know, you have to make hay while the sun shines. You know? A stitch in time saves on you. All these things that you have heard actually heard so many times that you don't even pay attention to what they mean anymore, right?

[00:39:50] Brent Ridge: And we said, we're going to tell people you don't need an MBA, you don't need venture capital, you don't need all of these things. Everything that you need to [00:40:00] create the foundation to make a great business. You already know. You just have to convert that information into wisdom. And so in this book, we took those proverbs, which interestingly enough, most of them are a agrarian in nature, right?

[00:40:17] Brent Ridge: Because farmers were the original entrepreneurs. And so each chapter is based on one of these old proverbs and then sifting through all of the, you know, social science and behavioral research that comes out of Harvard. We match these old proverbs with the scientific proof that proves that these proverbs are the foundations for great businesses.

[00:40:41] Brent Ridge: And so that's really how we decide to write the book. And we have 12 of these principles great exercises at the end of each chapter to convert what you've just learned into something applicable right in the moment. Because, as you know, Alan, the world is full of information. We are bombarded with [00:41:00] information all the time, and it's only getting worse with ai.

[00:41:04] Brent Ridge: However, we are a severe lack of wisdom, and what we hope that people will do by the time they finish reading this book, looking at the exercises that we've done, is to know. Not only can they convert the information they've just read in our book into immediate actionable wisdom, but they will have trained their mind as they're being bombarded with all of this information to clue in on the things that are important to the decisions that they're trying to make in that very moment, and convert it into that information, into wisdom right then and there, and take action on it.

[00:41:39] Brent Ridge: So that is the goal of Go Wisdom.

[00:41:42] Allan: That's very cool. I've always felt that running a business is the best personal development journey. I mean, you know, there's no such thing as business problems. There's just personal problems that manifest themselves in your business. And so I think a lot of that will be super, super applicable.

[00:41:58] Allan: I'm really looking forward to [00:42:00] reading, reading your book.

[00:42:01] Brent Ridge: I can't wait to get your review.

[00:42:03] Allan: You. I'm on it. I'm on it. Brent it was a real pleasure speaking with you. I really enjoyed our chat. Your story's incredible. Everyone should read your book as I will, as well. And I really thank you so much for your time. Where can people find out more about you, your products?

[00:42:19] Allan: Where should we send people to follow?

[00:42:21] Brent Ridge: Mm-hmm. Our website is beekman1802.com. You can also find the products on Amazon or if you're in the US QVC HSN at Ulta. Hopefully we're coming to the UK next year. And they can follow us on Instagram at Josh and Brent LinkedIn and Facebook.

[00:42:37] Allan: Amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today.

[00:42:41] Brent Ridge: Thanks, Alan, the Spanish pleasure.

[00:42:42] Allan: Thanks for tuning in to the Lean Marketing Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by the Lean Marketing Accelerator. Wanna take control of your marketing and see real results with the Accelerator. You get proven strategies, tools, and personalized support to scale your business. Visit lean [00:43:00] marketing.com/accelerator to learn how we can help you get bigger results with less marketing.

[00:43:06] Allan: And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review or share it with someone who would find it helpful. See you next time.

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