In 2008, Dr. Brent Ridge started skin care brand Beekman 1802 alongside his partner and cofounder Josh Kilmer-Purcell. The pair had recently purchased a 60-acre farm in the tiny town of Sharon Springs, New York. That farm was supposed to be a second home for the Manhattanites, but when Brent and Josh lost their jobs in the Great Recession, they put their upstate acreage to work. From a herd of goats and a line of handmade soaps, Brent and Josh have grown Beekman 1802 into a $92 million brand of goat-milk products.
In the years since 2008, Brent and Josh have stayed committed to one core principle: kindness. The brand’s unique promise is a “kind ecosystem for healthy skin”—one that starts on the surface of the skin and extends down into the skin barrier and underneath, into the entire body and mind. To live up to this promise, the brand incorporates kindness into every aspect of its business, from its packaging design to its affiliate marketing strategy.
We sat down with Brent to learn more about what sets the Beekman brand apart, how the company has grown, and the challenges Beekman has faced along the way.
When did you realize kindness was part of your brand identity?
We are a company that’s 16 years old, and in the first stages of Beekman, we just grew neighbor by neighbor. We call all of our customers “neighbors” to this day. We were a bit haphazard with how things developed, and at around year eight, we said, “OK, the company’s getting large now. We might be getting too diffuse in terms of how we are seen.”
So we had a fantastic branding agency called Tether come in. They’re based in Seattle. They came and spent time with us on our farm and came to the Kindness Shop in Sharon Springs. They spent about a week with us. They were truly immersed in the history of the company, the founding story, what we were doing, and where we were headed.
Even though I think people felt that, up to that point, we had never used “kindness” to define what people felt. That was such a eureka moment for us. When someone asked, “What’s your company about?” it made it easy for us to answer, “We’re about kindness.” That was a real turning point.
How did Tether identify kindness as your unique selling proposition?
It came from immersion. They brought their entire team—it was probably six or seven people—and they really embedded themselves. They were on the farm. We were sharing meals on the farm. They were in the barn with the goats. They met Farmer John, the original farmer, and went to the original store. They were at our headquarters, they met all of our employees. They saw how we made sure that kindness infiltrated everything.
I think that is kind of unusual. With people who work in branding at outside agencies, particularly these days, you might just get a Zoom call. You’re giving them the brief and they’re operating off that brief, but very few people make time to do an immersion into the brand. A physical immersion, not, “I’m going to watch everything that’s available online,” but, “I’m physically going to go to the place that was the birth of this company.”
That’s also unusual to some degree, because most brands don’t have a physical place where they were born. These days, a lot of brands, at least in our industry, are born in a boardroom. People think, “There’s this ingredient; I’m going to create a brand around this.”
I think having Tether do that physical immersion was what made it so powerful.
Where did Tether see kindness on that trip?
It’s easy on the farm, because you’ve got all these baby goats. That feels like kindness. Our original flagship shop is in a tiny little village with a population of 547 people, where everybody knows you. When the Tether team would walk with us in the village and people would talk to us, they were like, “Oh, I see this idea of neighbor; I see it in action.”
When we serve meals at our farm, or even in our offices, which are very corporate-type offices in Schenectady, New York, everything is served on dinnerware and glassware that artisans from our community have made. Everything is handmade in our offices. Even the desks are handmade by our blacksmith. They really saw that, and you feel it. When you feel something like that, you create better.
We had built this mountain, and because it had come up from underneath us, we couldn’t stand a mile away and look at it. That’s what Tether was able to do.
So often, people don’t get that outside perspective when they need it. Founders in particular can be this way. They think, “No, I have the vision.” Sometimes having other people tell you how the world sees what you’re creating is so powerful, more powerful than your vision.
How do you communicate kindness through design?
We think about these things in a very meticulous way. Everything is scientific. There’s science behind the color yellow or the soft edges of the bottle. It’s not just about how it’s going to look, but the feeling it’s going to evoke. From packaging design to the design of our mascot, Goatie, we are really thinking about the science behind every decision that we make.
If you look at our Shopify website, you see that the most prominent color is sunshine yellow. The reason we chose sunshine yellow is because, of all the colors, yellow has the greatest ability to spike serotonin levels in the blood when you visualize it. So when people see the color yellow, they naturally have this feeling of happiness. If you look at yellow globally, there’s no culture where yellow has any sort of negative connotation, whereas lots of other colors do have negative connotations in some cultures.
The other way is with our little mascot, Goatie. We call him the Global Ambassador for Kindness. He’s a little goat cartoon. The reason he is designed in that specific way, in the kawaii aesthetic, is because of a field of science called neoteny. Some people call it the science of cute.
There’s this idea that when you see a character that has a large head, a small body, and large eyes (a kawaii look), that’s really powerful at stimulating oxytocin in the blood because it mimics what babies look like. All babies have large heads, tiny bodies, and big eyes taking up a lot of real estate on their face. Evolutionarily, we are trained to want to care for those things.
That’s why Goatie was designed in that specific way. When you see him speaking about kindness, or you see him on our display or on our web page, we hope you get that oxytocin surge and it makes you feel connected to the brand.
How have you seen the brand resonate with people in real life?
For example, when we’re on an airplane and I have on my backpack with a little Goatie enamel pen, it doesn’t say Beekman; it’s just this little goat icon. The flight attendant will say, “You’re the guys who founded Beekman!” That’s because they remember that goat, and if they remember it, it means something to them.
We switched what we called our stores to Kindness Shops, and we have a Kindness Shop in LaGuardia Airport. It has a giant Goatie in the front, and we get so many people sending us pictures of them in front of that Goatie—because it means something to them. It makes them feel something, and they want to say, “I saw it, I was here.”
The other thing that happens quite a bit when we’re traveling is that if someone sees us, they won’t shout out, “It’s Josh and Brent!” or, “It’s the guys from Beekman!” The first thing they will shout out is, “Hi, neighbor!” Because they know that that’s what we refer to people as.
How did “Hi, neighbor” become such an important part of the Beekman brand?
When we first started out in TV retail, which was the next step in the growth of our company, we got into the habit of saying, “Hi, neighbor,” every single time someone called in.
Before that, we had always said on our website that we didn’t have customer service: We had Neighbor Services. When we would write a promotional email in those early days of the company (Josh and I were writing all of the emails), it would always start with “Hi neighbor.” That became the thing that people knew about the company. It’s embedded everywhere. Even to this day, you email [email protected].
Do new customers always know about your brand’s commitment to kindness?
I would say it’s around 50-50. It depends on how people come into the brand. If they come to the brand because they’ve heard the founders’ story, or they’ve heard us talk about it, or maybe they’ve seen it on the website where we have more real estate to talk about kindness and philosophy and whatnot, kindness is really important and has already really resonated.
In a world like beauty and skin care that is so saturated, that differentiator is a really powerful thing for people. They have a world of choices, but they say, “I want to choose a brand that is trying to put more kindness out into the world.” So that is their reason for choosing Beekman.
If you go into a retail location like Ulta, our display says “There’s beauty in kindness,” but it also says “The sensitive skin experts.” So if someone goes in and says, “I’m having this problem with my skin or I have sensitive skin,” the Ulta employee knows to take them to Beekman.
Because they understand that we are a brand that formulates for people who have sensitive skin, they naturally feel that kindness. They think, “Here’s a brand that is trying to care better for my skin.” Then once they get into the brand and they see the kindness on the ingredient list or come to the website, it’s a 360 moment for them.
What did you do in your first six months that had the greatest impact on your business, and why?
I think the idea of spending zero was the most important thing that started in the first six months of our company that still carries through to today. We have this philosophy called the zero dollar philosophy: How can we do something for zero dollars? It was important when we were trying to start this business, because we had no money. So we had to be creative. We had to think very strategically.
Even today, when we’re in meetings with our team and we’re coming up with ideas for marketing or strategy, we want people to think big and think out of the box. If we ask, “What could you do with zero dollars?” we find that question stimulates more creativity than if we ask, “You have a $100,000 budget for this campaign: What are you going to do?” You will find an idea in that brainstorming session.
How did you find your first customers?
We started online because Sharon Springs, New York, where the farm is located, is in the middle of nowhere. It has a population of 547 people. That was 16 years ago, and there certainly weren’t a lot of ecommerce brands. We say we were one of the original beauty ecommerce brands, but at that time, nobody was making money on ecommerce. You weren’t going to pay off a million-dollar mortgage on a farm and start a business selling what you could online.
So I thought to myself, “Where could I go to sell this product where it doesn’t already exist? Where would it naturally stand out because it’s different from anything else?” You would normally think of an artisanal soap like this being sold at a farmers market or in a little boutique.
At the time, this type of product did not exist in the luxury world. In the luxury world now, craftsmanship is the ultimate luxury. But back then, craft and artistry weren’t really big in luxury, especially in beauty.
So I took a big satchel of the bars of soap and I went up and down Fifth Avenue in New York City and cold called all of the luxury department stores. I literally walked in and said, “Is your beauty buyer here? Can I speak to them?”
Most of them didn’t come out. Around three of them did, but only one of them said, “We’ll give you a chance.” That was a store called Henri Bendel, which was on Fifth Avenue. It was beautiful, but it’s sadly gone now.
The beauty buyer there said, “We will give you this three by three table on the main floor, and you come here and talk about your product and sell your product—you are responsible for selling the product. We’ll see if it resonates with the customer, and if it does, we’ll bring it into the shop after the holidays as a permanent thing.”
So that’s what I did. I got up every morning on the farm. It’s a three and a half hour drive into the city. I would drive down into the city, set up the bars of soap on this little table, and I would stand there all day until eight o’clock at night when the store was closing. Then I would drive three and a half hours back to the farm. And I did that every day for eight weeks.
Two valuable things happened. One, I watched the other saleswomen, mostly women, in the beauty section of Henri Bendel and how they sold luxury products. I really learned through osmosis, “This is what you have to do.” The second big thing that happened was that the buyer for Anthropologie came through and heard me tell the story about the bars of soap and what we were doing. That’s how we ultimately got into Anthropologie.
How did your sales strategy evolve during those eight weeks?
The biggest thing that I learned from the saleswomen is that you have to get the product in the customer’s hand. They’re in a sea of other products, and they’re just walking by. We didn’t have the benefit of a big flashy sign or a supermodel advertisement behind us.
You have got to get the product in their hand for a couple of reasons. You want them to smell it and you want them to experience it. Two, just psychologically, once someone has it in their hand, they’re going to be much more likely to pause and listen and then to put it in their basket.
The original soap that we created was completely fragrance-free, but because I needed to fill out this whole table, we created 12 different scents. Each scent was based on a month of the year at the farm—what was happening on the farm during that particular month. We blended essential oils to create the fragrance for that month. My trick to getting people to stop as they were walking and to get the product in their hand was to ask, “What’s your birthday?” Or, “What month were you born? What’s your sign?”
They would tell me, “May,” and I’d say, “The month of May is the scent of sweet peas. You’ve got to smell it.” They respond, “Oh, what does sweet pea smell like? Let me smell.” They would take it and smell it, then they would buy it for themselves. And then they’d say, “My mom’s birthday is in July, what does July smell like?”
I’d respond, “July is the scent of tomato leaf. You’ve got to smell the tomato leaf.” Then before you know it, they will have purchased for 10 different people, who are having an anniversary in that month or a birthday in that month.
That came about because the other saleswomen said that you’ve got to get it in their hand.
What challenges do you face now when trying to acquire new customers?
We’ve been around for 16 years; we’re not going to be the hot new thing that people haven’t heard of. When you’re brand new and people haven’t seen you before, there’s a natural ability to get new customers, because they haven’t seen you and they’re curious.
We don’t have the benefit of being the new kid, and we are also at the stage where we’re still an independent brand, but we’re now competing against brands that are part of big strategic companies that have huge budgets. They can put out endless amounts of content and have mega influencers or celebrities talking about their product.
This goes back to the zero dollar philosophy. What can we do that is going to be creative and unique? What is not going to cost a lot of money but still allow us to compete with these companies that have much bigger budgets than we do?
Our team somehow manages to do it, and we keep growing. They utilize our USP by thinking, “What costume can we put Goatie in for our Fourth of July sale or our launch of this new eye cream? What is Goatie going to be doing?”
For our new eye cream that just launched a couple weeks ago, we had a tease of it with eye charts that spelled out that something was coming—all in neon yellow, of course. Then when Goatie came into the frame, he was carrying a magnifying glass looking at everything. They keep coming up with really creative things to do with our USP that makes it stand out, because no other brand does that.
It sounds like you’re slowing down and being very intentional, while big companies might be churning out content a lot faster.
Right, but at the same time, AI is really helping. Instagram helped independent companies start competing with bigger companies, which is why indie beauty had such a rise during the Instagram era.
AI is going to do the same thing. These bigger companies have huge marketing teams and reams of data. They could say, “With this focus group, this is the message or this is the image that is going to convert this many sales.” Now, everybody has access to AI that can do that.
Those tools can say, “This is the image that’s going to capture attention in the first three seconds, and this is the caption that is going to convert.” Everybody has access to that. So AI is the next revolution in competition. It’s accessible to so many people, just like social media was.
How does your commitment to kindness impact your social media strategy?
We’re very scientific with this, too. About three years ago, we started working with an organization called Kindness.org. They are the world’s largest nonprofit that studies the science of kindness. We helped fund a research study that, for the first time, created a statistically significant measurement for kindness within communities. Those could be communities of any type: It could be a workplace community, it could be an online community, it could be in a school, whatever. It’s called the KQ, the Kindness Quotient. A researcher at Oxford University worked on that, and now the KQ has been deployed all over the world.
You can even go to the website Kindness.org, and you can take your personal KQ and see where you land. Our ambassador and affiliate program is called the Kindness Crew. There are about 4,000 of them now, and every single one of them is encouraged to take the KQ as part of our onboarding process. It gives us an indicator of where they’re at. Are they going to be a good representative for Beekman 1802?
We not only look at the content that they produce—like any brand would—but we also look at every single comment on their posts. It’s in the comments where you can truly see what type of information and feeling that they are putting into their community, because the community will always give that back to them. So if we see someone who has a lot of provocative commentary in their comments section, or if there’s negativity in their comments section, we know they’re not the right person for Beekman.
So we form the Kindness Crew through a scientific approach to how much kindness that person is going to subsequently put out into the world. They are incentivized not only with how much product they can sell through their affiliate links, but also for putting out acts of kindness. Those can be messages of kindness in their feed that don’t even mention Beekman.
We’ll say, “We saw this post that you put out. It was about a moment of kindness, or you doing something kind, or someone doing something kind to you. And here’s a free product for you, because we saw that.” So we really try to incentivize people to put more kindness out into the world.
It’s a ripple—you’ve got to start the kindness ripple.
Dr. Brent Ridge is the cofounder of science-backed skin care brand Beekman 1802. Before launching Beekman, Brent led a career as a doctor and vice president of healthy living for Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Today, Brent serves as Beekman 1802’s “chief kindness officer,” helping his company live up to its motto, “There is beauty in kindness.”
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
