A look at what happens when a small, personal care company gets acquired by the big guys.

The story of Burt’s Bees is humble enough. In the 1990s, a woman named Roxanne Quimby met a beekeeper named Burt Shavitz, and together they launched a small line of honey and beeswax products, which they sold at craft fairs in Maine.

But soon after, Quimby took the reins, buying out Burt’s shares, growing sales, and ultimately selling Burt’s Bees to the Clorox Company for $913 million in 2007. Wait, Clorox as in bleach? Yes, the very same. It sounds like a classic story of the little guy selling out to the big guy. Or is it? This week’s Behind the Label takes a look at the surprising results of corporate acquisitions in the green space.

The Good

From the start, Burt’s Bees has described itself as an “earth friendly, natural, personal care company” that operates in alignment with what it calls The Greater Good™.

The Greater Good™ is the highest ethical choice any of us can make to maximize our overall well-being. That means doing what’s best for you, your family and the environment. At Burt’s Bees, ensuring The Greater Good™ for our consumers, our employees and the world around us is a hard job, but we do it by adhering to a strong set of beliefs that we apply to every choice we make, every day.

In line with this principle, Burt’s Bees produces more than 150 products, most with a honey or beeswax base and all produced with natural ingredients and socially responsible business practices. A sampling of these practices can be found by examining one of Burt’s Bees’ best-selling products, their replenishing lip balm.

Among its clearly outlined beliefs and commitments, Burt’s Bees believes that natural products should be 100 percent natural. Together with the Natural Products Association and other leading Natural Personal Care Companies, Burt’s pioneered The Natural Standard for Personal Care Products, a set of guidelines that helps to define what a “natural” personal care product is and what it is not. Products that fill the bill are branded with a Natural Seal, which indicates that the product has met guidelines related to natural ingredients, safety, animal testing, and packaging. While only half of Burt’s Bees’ existing products qualify as 100 percent natural, the company is open about working toward complicity across the entire product line, and each product’s “percent natural” is clearly indicated on its packaging.

Burt’s Bees also works to ensure safe working conditions in the sourcing of its ingredients, maintain a strong stand against animal testing, and use packaging made with high levels of post consumer recycled materials. The company also pledges at least 10 percent of all burtsbees.com sales revenue to partners through The Burt’s Bees Greater Good Foundation.

The Bad

In 2007, Burt’s Bees was acquired by the Clorox Company for a reported $913 million. The Clorox acquisition allowed the Burt’s Bees brand to expand throughout major retailers across the country, including Walmart, Target, and CVS. The Clorox Company highlights Burt’s Bees as a success story in the media, and the company continues to report Lifestyle Brand sales growth in its fiscal reports.

But that hasn’t stopped environmental groups and conscious consumers from labeling Burt’s Bees as a sell-out and dismissing its products because of negative connotations associated with the Clorox brand. The Clorox Company is one of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the country, with a large portfolio of brands like 409, Liquid Plumr, Pine-Sol, and Tilex. Not to mention its flagship brand: a bleach product that environmentalists say is harmful to the environment (the company maintains that Clorox bleach is perfectly safe, since bleach essentially comes from and degrades into salt).

What good could possibly result from this acquisition?

The Questionable

As it turns out, there’s more than might meet the eye. In 2006, the Clorox Company identified sustainability as one of four mega-trends that it wanted to pursue in terms of potential business opportunities. Soon after, the company acquired Burt’s Bees, repositioned Brita as a sustainable brand, and launched Green Works, a line of “green” household cleaning products.

When Clorox acquired Burt’s, it was explicit about its desire to learn more about sustainable business practices and become a major player in the green space by introducing sustainable household products, like the Green Works line, into the mainstream. According to GreenBiz.com:

Clorox attributed the success to the company overcoming three common consumer complaints about green products: They don’t work, are hard to find, and cost too much. “The products that are explicitly green we want to get them to same prices as conventional products,” (Clorox CEO Don) Knauss said. “If we could give people a natural option at the same price that they would pay for a conventional cleaner, for example, we think we could explode the category and really make it part of the mainstream.”

This kind of commitment to making sustainable products accessible is pretty incredible. And according to Knauss, the acquisition of Burt’s Bees has inspired Clorox to incorporate more sustainable practices across the board, from setting new goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, water use, and waste, to replacing its sales cars with hybrids.

So while Burt’s Bees may have “sold out” by joining the Clorox Company, the deal may have had much more positive consequences across the corporation’s brands than was immediately evident. And while purchasing power is better spent on honey and beeswax products from a vendor at a crafts fair, in a pinch and if your only option is the local Duane Reade, at least a Burt’s Bees purchase will confirm to Clorox that sustainability is a solid investment.

SEE ALSO:

Behind the Label: H&M’s Conscious Collection

Behind the Label: McDonald’s See What We’re Made Of Campaign

Behind the Label: Levi Strauss’ E-Valuate Program

Behind the Label: Chipotle, Food With Integrity

Behind the Label: West Elm Green

Behind the Label: TOMS’ One for One Campaign

Behind the Label: Design Within Reach

Image: Claire

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Looking at the costs of making modern design accessible.

In 1999, while on a trip to London, Rob Forbes bemoaned the fact that authentic modern design was only available to architects, decorators and people in a certain strata of society. Forbes made it his mission to make design accessible to the every day home shopper, and a new type of furnishings store, Design Within Reach, was born.

Thirteen years and more than 40 retail locations later, Design Within Reach’s message has certainly resonated. But in recent years, DWR has experienced significant financial difficulties and been accused of knocking off popular designs from lesser known brands. This week’s Behind the Label looks at the costs of bringing modern design to the masses.

Design Within Reach’s launch came at a time when pocketbooks were full and respect for design was starting to flourish in the United States. In its early years, DWR enjoyed healthy profits, entering the stock market in July 2004 with a $211 million valuation. But then, partly due to a series of recessions and partly due to poor management, the company started to slip.

Fast Company, in a December 2009 article dramatically titled The Rise and Fall of Design Within Reach, points the finger at former CEO Dave Brunner, who held the reins from 2006 to 2009. The article describes Brunner’s many shortcomings as a leader, from his dismissive attitude toward plagiarism to his impractical long-term vision for the company’s expansion. Under Brunner, management was “mean, dictatorial and mercurial,” said his successor, John Edelman, in a later Fast Company piece. “The people are hand-shy, like a dog that’s been hit. It’s almost like I have to put a piece of food in my hand to let them know I’m a friend.”

Since Edelman came on board in early 2010, he has worked to turn things around for Design Within Reach. Here, a rundown of the good, the bad, and the questionable, especially as it relates to company ethics.

The Good

One of Design Within Reach’s original goals was to educate the American public about modern design. Among the designers it highlights are masters like Charles and Ray Eames, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Philippe Starck. Though most of its furnishings are still “out of reach” for many consumers, DWR has certainly shown that appreciation for modern design transcends socioeconomic status.

Under Edelman’s leadership, Design Within Reach also went back to showcasing lesser known designers, including a handful who work with eco-friendly materials. Among these brands are Loll Designs, which creates outdoor furniture collections from recycled high-density polyethylene, and Jesús Gasca, whose mission is “to improve the habitat in which we live, by refining our designs, and [using] recyclable components and environmentally friendly manufacturing processes.”

DWR takes pride in its manufacturers, most of whom are top-quality, well-respected and based in the United States or Europe. “Behind every great designer is a dedicated manufacturer that strives to transform concepts into highly engineered, sustainable and beautiful pieces,” the website reads. These manufacturers are highlighted alongside the designers.

The Bad

From the start, Design Within Reach has had a funny relationship with borrowed designs, selling a mix of licensed and unlicensed items in its first stores, including an “inspired” version of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Barcelona chair, which DWR called “the Pavilion.”

But in 2007, the company started copying designs in a much more blatant way. The Fast Company article reported:

At least a dozen of the company’s current offerings are essentially unauthorized reproductions of a foreign design. “Rather than saying, ‘Let’s come up with something better to replace it,’ they said, ‘Let’s come up with something similar to what people liked,'”says a former DWR employee.

The article continues:

(Former CEO) Brunner saw DWR’s strategy as ‘completely legal. We’re not doing anything wrong.’ In every case, he said, DWR’s product-development team improved on the original design. In most instances, the tweaks were small and not obviously better.

Around that time, two companies sued DWR for trademark infringement: Heller, who claims that DWR ripped off its Bellini chair and called it the Alonzo, and Blu Dot, who says that DWR duplicated its Strut table and called it the Metric. Blu Dot says that DWR even went so far as to use Blu Dot’s own photograph of the Strut table in its advertising. Both lawsuits were settled out of court, and neither brand is sold at Design Within Reach today.

The Questionable

When Edelman took the reins from Brunner in early 2010, he immediately instituted a “no-knockoffs” policy and got to work mending DWR’s tattered reputation within the design community. While the company continues to sell licensed classics like the Eames Lounge Chair for Herman Miller and Phillip Starck’s Louis Ghost Armchair, the focus moving forward is on collaborations with new and upcoming designers.

The community has taken notice, and Edelman was included in House Beautiful’s list of “12 Design Visionaries to Watch” for 2012 and named a 2012 Game Changer by design-focused Metropolis Magazine.

Despite its previous transgressions, we have to admire Design Within Reach’s commitment to turning itself around, as well as its emphasis on supporting upcoming designers and working with reputable manufacturers to create high-quality products that last.

We do see, however, a lot of potential in DWR’s ability to promote not just great design, but also environmentally responsible practices. DWR has already proven that it can reclaim its position as a thought leader in the design world. Hopefully the next step is to use this prominence to promote a green design revolution.

SEE ALSO:

Behind the Label: H&M’s Conscious Collection

Behind the Label: McDonald’s See What We’re Made Of Campaign

Behind the Label: Levi Strauss’ E-Valuate Program

Behind the Label: Chipotle, Food With Integrity

Behind the Label: West Elm Green

Behind the Label: TOMS’ One for One Campaign

The post Behind the Label: Design Within Reach appeared first on EcoSalon.