Beekman 1802 Founder on Farm-to-Face and Goat-to-Glow

Speaker 1:
Welcome to TD Cowen Insights, a space that brings leading thinkers together to share insights and ideas shaping the world around us. Join us as we converse with the top minds who are influencing our global sectors.
Oliver Chen:
Welcome to the Retail Visionary Podcast series, a podcast about visionary ideas and people. My name is Oliver Chen. I'm TD Cowen's new platforms, retail, and luxury analyst. In this episode, we're excited to explore the journey of a purpose-driven pioneer who transformed Beekman 1802 into one of the most beloved skincare brands by leading with kindness, community and clean science. Today we're thrilled to feature Beekman 1802 founder and co-founder and Chief Kindness Officer Brent Ridge.
A Harvard-trained physician and former VP of Healthy Living at Martha Stewart, Brent co-founded the brand during the 2008 financial crisis after moving to a historic farm in Sharon Springs, New York. What began with goat milk soap has grown into a full line of microbiome friendly skincare available at Ulta, Walmart, QVC, and direct to consumer. Today, Beekman 1802 is one of the fastest growing skincare brands in America. It's known for its clinically proven sensitive skin solutions, loyalty, and a brand mission rooted in kindness. Brent, it's a pleasure to have you here.
Dr. Brent Ridge:
It's a pleasure to be here with you, Oliver.
Oliver Chen:
Beekman was born in a small town built on kindness. How has the brand's origin story shaped the way you make decisions as you scale?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Well, I think for us it has always come back down to this idea of neighbors. For people who aren't familiar with our origin story, we, as you said, were two New York City guys living and working in New York City. I was a physician by training. My husband and co-founder Josh Kilmer-Purcell was in advertising. And we had found this farm in upstate New York thinking it was going to be our weekend getaway. Took out a huge mortgage to buy it, lost our jobs in the recession of 2008, but took in a neighboring farmer who was losing his farm and had a herd of 100 goats and had to figure out what he was going to do with them. So we say that was the original act of kindness that started Beekman 1802.
And I think because our origin was always about how we were personally going to survive and come out of the recession, we didn't start a company thinking, how are we going to sell the company? And so because of that, we always thought of building the company neighbor by neighbor by neighbor, and we say even to this day, 16 years later, we still fight for every single customer, not only to get them for the first time, but how are we going to keep them? And I think that that's what has made us such a beloved brand is that our focus on quality, our focus on messaging, getting them in, and then delivering on the promise and keeping them there.
Oliver Chen:
Brent, goat milk is quite central as a core ingredient. What inspired you to pursue this as an ingredient and what are the benefits here?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
We started because goat milk is what we had. Life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Life gives you goat milk, you're going to make something with goat milk. And we Googled, "What can we make with goat milk?" That's how we started and saw goat milk soap was the first thing that popped up. And so we started making goat milk soap. And originally we started selling it on our website, but this was 16 years ago, so no one was making a fortune selling things on their website 16 years ago. And so then we took it to Henri Bendel in New York City and we're selling it there. And then went on to Anthropologie, they were our first big national retail partner. And as people started using the product, we started getting all of these anecdotal reports about how it was really helping their skin. And so then that just piqued my curiosity as a physician and as a scientist.
And I said, "I'm going to just examine this and see if there's something here." And I always felt as a physician that when patients came into my practice at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and they had some folk remedy that they were using, I always felt there has to be some kernel of truth to it if it has existed for so many hundreds of years and people using this product. And what's true about goat milk is that you can go to almost any country in the world and if you go to a farmer's market, you will find someone selling goat milk soap. Now why is that? It's not just because goats are, just because they're cute and people like to keep them. People have been using this for hundreds and years all around the world, and the first thing that we learned was that goat milk had the same pH as human skin.
And that really became central to our messaging early on in the company that we were not disturbing the barrier with cleansing. And still to this day, because we are a company focused on helping people with sensitive skin, we always say that the way you cleanse your skin is the foundation of your skin health. And so that's how we started the company. And then we just kept examining the benefits of goat milk. And what we've identified now is over 31 key nutrients that both help repair the skin barrier and help support the skin microbiome. And so the oligosaccharides in goat milk are very, very similar to human milk so there are great prebiotics for the microbiome of the skin, and there are some really great amino acids and peptides in the goat milk, which helps support and repair the skin barrier. I would say that the science has caught up and the ability to examine the science of goat milk has caught up to where we started the company.
Oliver Chen:
Brent, those are great topics you're bringing up. Microbiomes are quite important terms of how we're thinking about innovation in skincare. What are microbiomes and why are they important? And peptides as well? It'd be great to hear about both from you.
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Yeah. Well, the microbiome is the ecosystem of microbes and there are thousands and thousands of them. And of course people are very familiar with the gut microbiome and how important and central that is to not only helping digestion, but controlling systemic inflammation in the body. But it's only been within the past, I would say decade that people have really started looking at the skin microbiome and even starting to make the connection between the gut and the skin and even the brain. So the gut, skin, brain axis of the microbiome. What seems to be coming more and more clear is that our entire body and the way our body functions is based on the microbiome and having a healthy microbiome. And it has been difficult to study the microbiome and laborious to study the microbiome because there are so many potential connections between all these organisms and how they're supporting each other as a true ecosystem. Which is, for me, one of the most exciting things about AI is that AI is going to help find these connections so much more quickly than we ever imagined that we would.
So I do think that the skin microbiome science is going to really be propelled by this AI revolution that we're seeing now. And then of course, so many people know about peptides. And peptides are basically, the simple way to think about it are these chains of amino acids and they're like the computer code that can tell the cells of your body what to do. So basically everything in your body is programmed by various types of peptides. And goat milk is naturally rich in peptides, but also goat milk is naturally rich in exosomes. And what we found in the study of our goat milk is that we have about 116 billion exosomes per milliliter of the goat milk. And what we're looking at now is how these exosomes in the future can be used to deliver specific peptides into the skin. But again, just like the microbiome, the exosomal science, it's still in its infancy, but we're there and we're examining it.
Oliver Chen:
Yeah, these ideas around growth factors and using peptides and exosomes is quite powerful. On that topic of microbiomes, what do you see going forward and how will that innovation play a role in your brand?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Well, as we've developed our brand, we have always thought how we could be like clearinghouse of science. We really focused on how to build a loved brand and a brand that was trusted so that as the science continues to develop, whether it's microbiome, whether it's peptidomics, the study of the peptides or exosomes, that people know that Beekman as a brand, they trust Beekman as a brand to deliver them the best science. And I think that's what's going to be really important. So much now in the skin health industry has talked about ingredient and clinical efficacy, which is super important, because we've kind of gotten away from that in the past decade.
But I think because people are looking for that clinical efficacy, so many, many brands can come up with an ingredient that it's clinically efficacious or have a study that shows that the product is efficacious. And as that becomes so saturated, just like we saw with great visuals in the past decade, the industry becomes so saturated with that idea, your trust is going to become more and more paramount. And I think the trust is what's going to separate greatest of all time brands from just a merely good brand.
Oliver Chen:
Greatest of all time that's a good one for GOAT. What about a new generation of customers and community building? What's your approach to thinking about that and this conversational social commerce we talk about a lot? The other part B of this is, in addition to science, kindness is a big deal for your brand. Love to hear about both topics.
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Yes, yes. And all of these things are fundamental to how we grew their brand and why we wrote about it in the book G.O.A.T. Wisdom. The way we approach kindness in our company, going all the way back to Farmer John and that original act of kindness when we brought him onto the farm, we've made that central to our DNA, and that's what's made our brand so sticky. We've had customers who are still with us for 16 years, they've been using us for 16 years, and also is very powerful about bringing new customers into the brand. And if you look at how we approach our ambassador program, which we call the Kindness Crew, right now we have about 3,000 of these Kindness Crew ambassadors. By the end of the year, we're going to have about 7,000 of them. And unlike, I would say, other beauty companies who really just work with beauty enthusiasts or people who talk about product only, the way that we screen our Kindness Crew is very unique.
Several years ago, we helped fund a research study with kindness.org using some researchers from Oxford and Harvard to develop the first statistically significant measurement of kindness in population. So it could be in a university population, it could be in a corporate population. And we use this kindness quotient to pre-screen any ambassador that comes into our program. And not only do we use their score, but we also look at the types of comments in the community that they have already built to see, "Oh, is this a community that talks kindly to one another even in their comments section on their posts?" And our Kindness Crew members get rewarded not just for the amount of sales that they're drive, but also for actually doing acts of kindness so that they're showing up for our community, not just talking about a new product launch, but actually in helping promote this idea of kindness.
And the way that circles back to everything that we do at Beekman is that we see kindness as wellness. Because if you think about that glowy feeling that you get when you either give a moment of kindness or you receive a moment of kindness, that warm feeling that you get, well, that's caused by this surge of chemicals in your body, you get a surge of serotonin, you get a surge of oxytocin, you get a surge of dopamine, and that's what causes that feeling. Well, guess what, Oliver? All of those chemicals influence the microbiome and the health of the skin. And that's why if you look on the back of any of our products, kindness is actually listed as an ingredient on the [inaudible 00:12:32] list because we think it is central to not only your skin health, but your mental and overall physical health as well. And our Kindness Crew helps us deliver that.
Oliver Chen:
Happiness and building these connections and caring about one another, certainly a key part to driving this holistic perspective. G.O.A.T. Wisdom is quite impressive. Your book, congratulations, you go over 12 principles in this book. Can you speak to the book and some of the highlights and how that journey has been and writing the book and publishing the book as well?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Yeah. Well, yes. We started working on the book about two years ago, and we partnered with Harvard Business Review to publish the book. And there were a couple of reasons that we wanted to do the book at this time. One, as a company that's been around for 16 years and has evolved quite a bit over the past 16 years, we wanted to gather all of the stories about the growth of the company all into one place. And so that could kind of be a record of the growth of the company, but we also wanted it to be very didactic and both inspirational but also formative to people who were reading it. And so that's why we wanted to do it with Harvard Business Review. And so what we did was we took these age-old, these maxims that have been around for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, many of which had their roots in agricultural economies because farmers were the original entrepreneurs. And we said, "You know what? If you want to create a really greatest of all time business, you really have to get back to the fundamentals of creating a business."
And that's what all of these principles help us do. Because of social media, which of course is very, very important not only in the beauty industry, but in all industries these days, we're so accustomed to people presenting things as ease like, "Here's the biohack to accomplish this, or the easy way to do this." You can have a very, even a very lucrative company trying to hack your way to success, but there is a difference between having a good and even a lucrative company and having a greatest of all time company. And the message that we want to convey through the book is if you want a greatest of all time company, one that is a legacy company, one that is going to last for years and years and years, you have got to make sure you have all of your fundamentals addressed, and that matters no matter what industry you're in. And so this book is really meant to help people think about their business from that perspective.
Oliver Chen:
Brent, what have been the biggest challenges to having your fundamentals addressed?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
I would say the biggest challenges that happened for us in the course of growing Beekman 1802 was probably early on in the game, finances. Because we started the company out of the recession and we had had all of our hopes and dreams kind of ripped out from us during the 2008 recession, we were very hesitant to take any outside financing. And for the first 10 years of the company, we bootstrapped it, didn't take any outside financing because we felt that that made you build a business on that shaky foundation. And because of that, during the big rise of Instagram and the big rise of social media, we didn't have the resources easily at hand to invest in those new modalities. And so we kind of got behind the A ball when it came to growing on social media. But now in retrospect, now that we're kind of coming out of the Web 2.0 era and going into whatever new era that we're in, obviously we're in a new era.
I think that actually is a saving grace because rather than having wrong triple digits over the past five years, we've grown very steady double digits over the past several years. And that really helped us create this wonderful foundation, this wonderful community, and a very sustainable type of growth, which if you think about pre-Web 2.0, that's how businesses grew. And this last decade has been a perturbation of how you grow a business. And I think so, even though it was painful to see other brands come and spike up during that time period while we were just being steady, I think in the long term, it has helped make us a greater company.
Oliver Chen:
As you spoke earlier, Brent, kindness, it's quite unique in terms of your approach and innovation here. What have been some major controversies with this? Are there oftentimes non kindness news can travel much faster?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Yeah. Well, I would say for us particularly, we have never had any real controversy because we, and I don't say that we're not a political company, we certainly speak our values, but we try to be empathetic because obviously empathy is the root of kindness. And if you think about empathy, empathy requires you to try to see the world through the eyes of every other person. And of course, it's very easy to see the world through the eyes of someone who thinks like you or is in the same position as you. So it's very easy to be kind in that respect. The ultimate act of kindness is being empathetic to someone who doesn't see the world in the same way you do, and trying to understand how they got that perspective. And I wouldn't say it's controversial to us, but we do try to do that, try to meet people where they are and just try to lead by example. And we try to give kindness to all people and by virtue of that, I think all people see us as a kind of company who is respectful of all people.
Oliver Chen:
And as you evolve kindness in the models, how has it changed the most or what tweaks have you made over time?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
I think this is actually interesting. We're always trying to see how we can ripple kindness in different and better ways. And I'll give you an example of this. As we started growing the company, I would say like year five, when we were expanding employees to the point that not every employee had a direct connection to the farm and to Sharon Springs where we started the company, we started thinking, "Okay, how can we make sure that in every new hire we've instilled this idea of kindness and that this is the DNA of the company?" And so we created a kindness curriculum that every employee, as they were brought on, they had to go through this kindness curriculum, and then we would do a yearly update. And that actually became so popular and so loved among our employees that we actually turned it into a consumer-facing product. So pre-pandemic people could come and with our little Kindness Shop, which is what we call our retail shop, with our original Kindness Shop in Sharon Springs, New York, people make a pilgrimage there because it's the origin of the brand.
They can tour the farm and come to the original shop. And so we made this consumer-facing experience where people could come for a full-day kindness immersion. So they'd take the course, they'd come to the farm. So it became this wonderful deep dive into the ethos of the company. And then of course, the pandemic hit and we're like, "Okay, well, how can we make sure that we're continuing this and trying to touch as many people as possible?" And we had already during the pandemic created a platform at beekman1802.com where people could come in and have skin assessments from our estheticians, these free 15 to 20 minute assessments, live assessments. And so we had that platform existence. We thought, "Okay, we can still use that platform, but why do we bring in live coaches and therapists who specialize in kindness? And now people can come and they can book free 20 minute sessions with what we call our kindness coaches to incorporate kindness into their daily lives in different ways." And so even though kindness remains at the core of the company, we're always looking at technology as a mode to spread more kindness
Oliver Chen:
In terms of scaling and balancing the two, and also addressing this as a lifestyle brand and opportunity. Speaking of brands, Brent, what are the biggest lessons you've learned about brand building and what advice would you give to founders in the beauty space today?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
I would say that every company, beauty company, any other type, any company, you're a hospitality company and making sure that your customer feels respected, that they feel treated well, that they feel like you've provided them the greatest service or product or the value, that's what you need to be aiming for. I think if you approach every customer as if you are a hospitality company and you're providing the best experience for them, you're going to be a winner.
Oliver Chen:
What's also interesting, Brent, is your background in medicine. Not all doctors have great bedside manners. How did being a doctor and your experiences there shape your success today?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
I think because my field of study was longevity and aging, I worked with a lot of patients, older patients who had a wealth of history, a wonderful perspective on life, and I also worked with their families. So I was just always learning about life and about what matters in life, particularly as you're getting toward the end of your life. And so I think that did give me a really interesting perspective on how to treat people and what people really value. And I think ultimately, I know longevity is a big buzzword right now in our industry, and I think that ultimately people don't want to live longer, they want to live better. I think that's what I've done my entire career is tell people, "Hey, let's help you age better." In fact, before I started working at Martha Stewart, I was developing a new division of her company devoted to health and wellness.
Martha and I were having dinner and she said, "What is the secret to successful aging?" I said, "Martha, better aging begins at birth. It's not something you start thinking about at 50. Every decision that you make throughout the course of your life, what environment you put yourself in, what type of education you get, what type of career you have, what type of foods you take, what you put on your skin, all of those things contribute to how well you're going to age." And that's one of the most wonderful things I find about the beauty industry is that as a physician, I could have had one-on-one conversations and counseling sessions with patients and say, "Hey, make these better decisions." But because people have such an intimate connection with their beauty routines, it gives us the opportunity to influence people's life decisions on a daily basis throughout the course of their life through something that they love doing. And as someone who really does passionately care about helping people age better, it is such a powerful platform that I never thought I would have, and I just think it's fantastic.
Oliver Chen:
Brent, what should listeners know about longevity today and perspectives now versus prior? And that is a great question. How can people age better? How do you answer that question today in terms of, I'm sure you get asked a lot.
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Yeah. Well, there's lots of course, new research coming out where there is exosomes, growth factors, senescent cells, the science is really booming. But I'll go back to this study. Right out of medical school, I received this fellowship from the American Federation of Aging Research to join this research project that was going on at Harvard, and they were looking at centenarians, and we were really working hard to try to find what was the genetic factor that would contribute to healthy aging. And so we were looking at all of these genealogies, all of these families that had multiple generations of longevity, and we just felt for sure we were going to find some protein or some DNA difference that was contributing to these families and their longevity. And after all of this study, the conclusion was it's your social interactions that help you ate better. It's the number of friends that you have, the number of connections that you have, your attitude, your optimism, the way you see the world.
And if you take that back to what we do at Beekman 1802, that's why we say, regardless of all the science that we put into our products, all the research on the exosomes and the peptides and whatnot, is this idea of kindness and how it builds community and how it builds your social interactions. That's going to be the biggest contributor to how well you age. Still to this day, even with all the latest technology and the gadgets and the buzzwords and whatnot, your attitude and your social interactions of what's going to contribute, how well you age.
Oliver Chen:
Brenda, has that surprised you, and why is that true?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
I think it will come down to inflammation. I think that when you are optimistic, when you can control your stress levels, when you are controlling your cortisol levels in your blood, I just think that that helps control this sub-acute level of inflammation in your body, and that's what helps your cells age better. And I think that's hard to create a direct connection to, but I do think that that's probably the mechanism of action.
Oliver Chen:
Okay. Brent, I guess that leads us to GLPs. What are your thoughts in terms of that's taken the beauty world by storm and it's interrelated with science and inflammation as well?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Yeah. Well, of course GLPs are a fantastic breakthrough. I always get excited when there's something that is so monumental like that, particularly with the cure of diabetes, which is of course where it started. And the obesity epidemic has been something that in particular, America, now most of the developed world has had to deal with. And so it is going to have a monumental change in our health. And what we're finding with the GLPs is that they're not just contributing to weight loss, there seems to be a connection between a whole host of other ways that the body functions. But I think as far as what we know now, the biggest direct connection that we can make with the GLPs is that they are reducing our cravings for certain types of food.
And as we know, so much of our diet is ultra processed food. And when you consume these ultra processed foods, which make up such a huge portion of particularly the American or the Western diets, when you consume these ultra processed foods, you increase the burden in the body of these advanced glycated end products and these advanced glycated end products to send these free radicals around the body doing all these micro damages, causing all this inflammation. And so these GLP ones are ultimately helping you control the amount of inflammation in your body because you're consuming less of the types of foods that increase those amounts of things in the body. So I think that's probably the most direct thing that we have right now, but I think the science around this class of drugs is just in its very beginning stages.
Oliver Chen:
Brent, would also love to hear from you, what are you seeing from today's beauty consumer that's most different from five years ago? What will be the next chapter in the science of sensitive skin? I know we briefed on this earlier as well.
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Yeah. Well, I think if you are a company that is focused on sensitive skin like we are at Beekman 1802, I think this is the most wonderful time to be doing the type of work that we're doing. Because what happened really during the pandemic is that just prior to the pandemic, you had the rise of Instagram, you had the barrier of entries for the beauty industry were also decreasing at that time. And so you had all of these wonderful products coming out, beautifully packaged, really captivating textures and packaging and that dovetailed at the same time that the consumer was at home behind their computer screen bored and also had fatter wallets. And so they were just trying everything, just trying all of these different products. And if you look at the data you have over that time period, the amount of consumers who self-report that they have sensitized skin has just continued to go up and up and up and up.
And that's because we were selling the consumer too many products, they were trying too many products because they were so enticing and they had the extra money to try them. And so we actually created more skin sensitivity as an industry than had ever existed before. And I think coming out of all of that, this kind of over trial period, coming into a period where the consumer may be making more conscientious decisions about where they spend their money, I think the consumers are going to be looking for efficacious products that provide them true value, that they can see the results and that they're not being asked to overpay for because of either some sort of hype or some sort of trend. And I think that if you are that type of company who's doing the research, you're demonstrating the results that are clinically powerful and you're giving it to a good value for the customer, that is going to be the sweet spot in the industry going forward.
Oliver Chen:
Brent, as we look forward, what are your thoughts on channels and how you scale and how you balance your direct relative to wholesale? Would love to hear that. And part B of this is, what are your biggest challenges now?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Yeah. Well, at Beekman 1802 we are a true omnichannel brand. So we started 16 years ago on DTC, and that's still a significant portion of our company, but we're also in 2,000 independent retailers around the United States. We're of course at Ulta, which is our biggest brick and mortar store. We're on TV retail, the number one brand that crosses QVC and HSN, and of course Amazon. So we are a true omnichannel brand, which is great because five years ago people didn't even want to look at you unless all your sales were in DTC. And now that started to normalize where people are like, "Oh, no, we can't put all of our eggs in one basket because it needs to normalize to be a sustainable brand." But the problem with being an omnichannel brand, it's just incredibly difficult. That's why you don't see many true omnichannel brands because you have many, many masters.
Every channel that you're in needs a special team of people working on that channel. And then you have to figure out how at key moments you are supporting that channel to its maximum degree. For Amazon, you have to say, "How am I maximizing Amazon Prime Day?" Ulta Beauty, "How am I maximizing 21 days of beauty?" QVC, "How am I supporting the TSV in the appropriate way?" And so it's a very complex thing. Think even if you're at a strategic, a big strategic with all the resources, it's still difficult to do. So I think the most important thing, I think omnichannel is the most important thing that all brands should be thinking, how is my brand going to carry omnichannel? But you have to, that's why it's so critical to think about slow, steady growth where you're building the right team, you're deploying your resources at the right time and in the right way, and just do it in a sustainable way. Don't try to think, how am I going to sell my company and get rich quick? Just think about building a brand for the long term.
Oliver Chen:
As we conclude. What is your favorite product that everybody should buy after listening to this podcast?
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Well, I would say as someone who's really interested in aging, I would say probably the newest products that we're doing. We have a new category that we call Better Aging. I'd always forbid our company to ever use the word anti-aging. So we have this new series called Milk RX, which is based on the exosomal science and the exosomes that are in goat milk and truly great product. We launched our Milk RX cream last year, became our number one best-selling cream. We just launched the serum component to Milk RX, which we sold 30,000 units on QVC in one day. It's just people love this product, particularly if you're a consumer who's 50 years old or older. So I would say personally, that's my baby because I'm so interested in better aging. I would say our team is, they're excited about that, but they're also very excited about our Milkshake franchise.
We started with the Milkshake facial two-in-one products as a toner and a moisturizer, and you have to shake it to activate it, so it just makes it super compelling on social media and on TikTok. And then we just launched the body version of Milkshake, Milkshake Body, which comes in fragrances, which we worked with Givaudan with their microbiome-friendly fragrance profile, which is all alcohol-free. So it's like a fragrance that is truly healthy for the skin. And again, because of those colors, because of the unique kind of shake to activate format of that product, it really is very popular on TikTok and that product, it's just skyrocketed because people are so interested in the body mist and body care category anyway, and we had this very unique approach to it. So I would say our team is probably really loving that series of products right now.
Oliver Chen:
Wow. Yeah, tons of innovation. Givaudan's an excellent partner too. Well, Brent, it was so amazing to talk with you today about science as well as the magic and logic of empathy and kindness and how that evolves, and also the evolution of your business. And congrats again on your book.
Dr. Brent Ridge:
Thanks, Oliver. We appreciate your time, and thanks for all you do too. I always listen to every podcast and I've learned something from every single one.
Oliver Chen:
Well, we learned so much from you, and it's been amazing to hear the story and learn the secrets to better aging as well as the evolution of what's happening in beauty.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode of TD Cowen Insights.