Beauty and the Bees

Lifestyle Exclusive from Taiwan

It’s weird enough seeing a celebrity in the flesh. What about seeing a logo come to life?

That’s what happened when I saw Burt’s Bees founder Burt Shavitz arrive at Taiwan’s Taoyuan airport. The exit doors slid open and out came a tall, thin man in a blue chambray shirt. He had on a fisherman’s cap and sported a huge, gray beard — no doubt about it, this was the guy portrayed on the lid of my Burt’s Bees Hand Salve.

“We love Burt! We love bees! We love Burt’s Bees!”

As Shavitz approaches, a day late after missing his flight from the United States (Maine, to be exact), he is engulfed by a horde of excited Taiwanese clad in bee shirts and antennae — the sales force of Burt’s Bees Taiwan, led by Cindy Lin, the dynamic young mother who is Burt’s Bees’ Taiwanese distributor. They’ve made placards. They’ve made banners. One places a lei made out of lip balms and Res-Q Ointments around Burt’s neck.

Burt’s Bees is huge in Taiwan. They have 29 stores and counters in high-end department stores like Mitsukoshi, and the top-grossing one — in Taipei’s Sogo — pulls in around US$650 million a year. Never underestimate the power of beeswax-based beauty products.

Burt’s Bees is also one of the top personal-care brands in the Philippines. “Burt’s Bees was first introduced in the Philippines in 2001 through Beauty Bar,” says Reena Rosario, Stores Specialists, Inc.’s merchandise group manager. “It was among the very first brands carried in Beauty Bar’s multi-brand offering, and among the first natural brands introduced in the market. Twelve years later, it remains one of the chain’s top sellers, having established a loyal following.  The Burt’s Bees community is increasing every year, with more and more customers looking for natural products.  Burt’s Bees’ integrity in the Natural category is recognized worldwide.” 

Burt and the bees

The next day is my chance to talk to Burt, but not very privately. Canadian filmmaker Jody Shapiro has also followed him here to shoot a documentary on his life, and his New York crew tracks Burt’s every move, filming our conversation. A reclusive figure who rarely gives press interviews, Burt, who is close to 77 now, has a Howard Hughes air of mystery about him, but his story has all the elements of great cinema.

Minding their beeswax: The Burt’s Bees store at Eslite, a book-cum-lifestyle emporium in Taipei

A photojournalist who captured images of Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy for publications like Time-Life, Burt says that his becoming a beekeeper was an “act of God.” While collecting firewood in Maine, he encountered a swarm of bees on a fencepost that he didn’t know how to deal with.

“I knew nothing about bees, so I went to see a (beekeeper) who came down, barehanded in a T-shirt and slacks, scooped the bees off the fencepost and put them in a hive for me. He stuffed old underwear in the holes, put it in my Volkswagen van, and I drove it home. Nobody got stung, and I said if he can do it, I can do it.”

The beekeeper became Burt’s guru, recommending books for him to read and answering all his questions on beekeeping.

Jump to 1984, and Burt was living in a turkey coop he had converted into a humble home. He had a flock of chickens and was selling the honey from his bees from the back of his yellow pickup truck.

One fortuitous day he stopped to help a woman whose car had stalled on the road. Her name was Roxanne Quimby, an enterprising young mother who was making ends meet by “buying low and selling high at yard sales and flea markets.”

Roxanne was instantly taken with Burt: “Well, you can see by Burt’s picture what a good looker he is, so I figured I’d get to know him better by volunteering to help with the bees,” she said. They developed a relationship, and “by the end of summer we got around to the heart of the matter, which was the beeswax. He’d been storing it in the honey house for years, figuring sometime he’d use it for something.”

Burt suggested Roxanne use the beeswax to make candles. “It was very crude,” he says. “We did hand-dipped candles first. Well, the bigger the variety of products you made, the more you sold, so we brainstormed and did fruit and vegetable candles, tree-limb candles, hand-dipped candles.”

Roxanne sold them at a crafts fair and made $200 in one day. That’s when she knew that their little business venture was bound for glory. Buzz about the candles soon spread, and in 1989, Zona, a hip New York boutique, ordered hundreds of them, so Burt and Roxanne needed to expand from their turkey coop. They hired 40 employees to help make candles and set up shop in an abandoned bowling alley. It was also around this time that Roxanne happened upon a 19th-century book of homemade personal-care recipes. That’s when Burt’s Bees really began.

Logo come to life: Burt Shavitz, the cofounder of Burt’s Bees, is the bearded man portrayed in the iconic logo.

“All of our products were initially things that came out of bee journals that went out to beekeepers,” adds Burt. “That, and historically, Cleopatra was known for using beeswax for her makeup.”

By 1991, Burt’s Bees was incorporated and making half a million candles a year, as well as natural soaps and perfumes cooked up on gas stoves. That’s when they got the idea to add lip balm to their lineup — a familiar product that again used the nourishing, protective beeswax that had fueled the beginnings of their small company. Burt’s Bees produced its first clay pot of lip balm, which eventually became the little yellow tube that would become so iconic.

To this day, it is Burt’s Bees’ bestselling product, and has evolved into tinted lip balms, lip shimmers, and Burt’s Bees pomegranate-infused Replenishing Lip Balm.

The idea behind the company was simple: create products made from natural ingredients that were good for you and whose names you could spell, like honey, aloe and lemon. Consequently you’ll never see synthetic chemicals like sulfates, petrolatum and parabens in Burt’s Bees products, not even in the sunscreens. They were natural long before natural became fashionable, and one of the company’s lasting contributions is setting the standards for what products could be labeled “natural.” Today, this Natural Seal certifies that products meet the stringent requirements set by America’s Natural Products Association.

Burt’s Bees is also committed to building communities through Habitat for Humanity, never testing products on animals, and encouraging a respectful culture in their offices. All packaging is sustainable and eco-friendly. By 2020, Burt’s Bees intends to be a zero-landfill-waste company operating on 100-percent-renewable energy in environmentally progressive buildings, producing 100-percent-natural formulas in biodegradable or recyclable packaging.

“Not a lot of people know that Burt’s Bees has a strong CQR program,” notes Rosario.  “They strongly believe in giving back to communities and preserving the environment.  These commitments are deeply ingrained in their corporate culture and business ethics.  They encourage their partners to do the same.” 

28 bee-tiful years

Bee good: Cindy Lin, the Taiwanese distributor of Burt’s Bees, dreams of making the brand a household name in her country.

A lot has happened in Burt’s Bees’ 28-year history. Roxanne moved Burt’s Bees from Maine to more business-friendly North Carolina in 1993, and decided to forsake the candles to focus on personal care. Burt retired from day-to-day operations in 1999. The company first launched in Asia — in Taipei and Manila — in 2000.

Taiwanese partner Cindy Lin tells me that she discovered Burt’s Bees after reading an article on supermodel Cindy Crawford, who was a big fan of their Baby Bee products. “I also had a baby,” Lin says, “so I was looking for those baby items that were safe and organic, and I found this one.”

So passionate was Lin about bringing Burt’s Bees to Taiwan that she kept applying after being turned down repeatedly, and, once she got a meeting with Roxanne, flew to the US one weekend and drove all the way to North Carolina in a rented car with just a map to guide her.

Roxanne eventually sold Burt’s Bees to investment group AEA in 2003, this time deciding to bow out but retain a voice in the company. After she and Burt had a falling out, it’s reported that Roxanne made hundreds of millions from her stake in Burt’s Bees, while Burt moved back to the turkey coop with a few million to his name.

Bleach company Clorox acquired Burt’s Bees in 2008, vowing to work on sustainability initiatives and eco-friendly household cleaning products like Green Works, which Burt’s Bees’ Taiwan stores also carry.

What Burt and Roxanne started in 1984 has become a leading natural personal-care company in the US and it’s expanding globally, available in 19 markets and counting. Dozens of new products have been added in the past 10 years, resulting in a range of almost 200 products that address everything from acne to aging skin, sun protection to whitening. Burt’s bearded visage is a familiar sight in drugstores, groceries, department stores, health-food stores and beauty outlets worldwide.

“In Beauty Bar, the Burt’s Bees Lip Balms and Lip Shimmers are the top sellers,” says Rosario.  “Other products that are popular are the Burt’s Bees natural remedies: Hand Salve, Res-Q Ointment, Lemongrass Insect Repellent, Muscle Mend, and the Baby Bee line.  Over the last few years, the brand has expanded their face category, offering new lines such as Acne, Sensitive, Daisy White and Intensive Hydration.  It is a category that has grown so much over the past few years and has been seemingly embraced by our customers!”

Back to Burt

And what about Burt? Though his official duties are long since done, he travels infomally to countries like Taiwan to touch base with close friends like Cindy, and talk about issues like Bee Colony Collapse Disorder, which, if left unaddressed would make beeswax and honey a lot more expensive than it is now.

“I’m afraid beekeeping in the area I’m in is dead,” laments Burt. “There’s a new breed of beekeeper with no knowledge, who think they know everything. And rather than go and ask someone or go to the library or read a textbook, just buy bee equipment and spend a lot of money putting bees into it, only to find that they’ve got disease because they didn’t do things properly.”

Burt has upgraded from the turkey coop to a proper home on 40 acres of trees and fields in Piscataquis County, Maine, where he takes his dog for rides on the BMW motorcycle that was the first item he bought with his Burt’s Bees profits.

“I have a 24 x 24 two-story building that I live in currently,” he says. “My needs are very limited. Occasionally I use Burt’s Bees lip balm but my favorite, really, is the Res-Q Ointment, which is good for windburn, sunburn, cuts, bruises, scrapes.”

I ask him what achievement he’s proudest of, and he pauses a long time before answering. “To the best of my knowledge, we were doing things no one else was doing,” he finally says. “Many of the products we made went back to Cleopatra’s time and back to near-prehistoric times. We gave it a more contemporary face. I’m proud of the fact that we raised the public’s consciousness of the value of bees and beekeeping.”

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In the Philippines, Burt’s Bees is exclusively distributed by Stores Specialists, Inc. (SSI) and is available at all Beauty Bar stores.