Blake Hall
One of the most famous bearded men in all of America, Burt Shavitz, has died at the age of 80.
You know him as the face of Burt’s Bees, a billion dollar company and brand of natural “personal care products” that celebrated his scruffy mug on the insect-ridden logo/label now synonymous with hipsters and housewives alike (yes, that’s the one we’re referring to above).
But did you know he served two years in the United States Army? And much of it in Germany?
He did, and upon being discharged found a gig in Manhattan, snapping photographs for magazine titans like Time and Life. Some of them even bordered on being iconic: Malcolm X, Allen Ginsberg, the State of Liberty beset by a huge pile of garbage — Burt was no slouch with the lens.
After sometime, however, he got dismayed by the bruising mental bustle of the Big Apple and took action. Shavitz went forward and did something most let die with the hot air of their words when scurrying alongside the rest in the rat race: he took his mattress, threw it in a van and moved to the relative obscurity of northern New England.
The next part of the story, the part that saw him take up a craft and profession that would one day become an American business empire and household name, began as distinguished as Burt’s grizzly appearance — which is, not at all.
This from Flare:
He worked odd jobs, and one day, while going to collect firewood, he encountered a buzzing swarm. “When I saw those bees on that fence post, I said, ‘That’s gotta be an act of God.’ It was like a minor miracle,” recalls Shavitz, who had met a beekeeper the year before and already had an empty hive. He sought help from an elderly beekeeper (his “guru”), who scooped the insects—with bare hands—into the hive. That was enough to convince Shavitz he could do it, too.
Over time, he became a go-to guy for removing unwanted bees from properties around town. He called his operation Burt’s Bees. Soon he had amassed 26 hives, a source of valuable honey, beeswax and pollen. For someone after a self-sufficient way to live off the land, it was perfect. When he inherited some money from his grandfather, Shavitz set his sights on buying a modest plot in Maine, where he’d summered as a kid. There, he moved into a renovated 8 x 8 turkey coop and peddled gallons of honey in pickle jars from his truck, earning a few thousand dollars a year.
Soon after he met a woman by the name of Roxanne Quimby. Together, they turned the honey into what the brand’s primarily known for today: lip balm. They also made Burt’s “motorcycle-riding, golden retriever-raising” lifestyle the pulse (and face) of the company.
As the years went on though, business got better while Burt’s passion of the nuts and bolts of commerce lessened. In 1999, Quimby bought it all from Shavitz for about $130,000 (Burt claimed he was run out of the company after having an affair with a “college-aged” employee).
In 2007, she sold it to Clorox for $913 million.
In the final chapter, Burt retired to his modest enclave in rural Maine, and stayed there for the rest of his life. Once in a while he would get poked by the media (they even made a documentary about him) but outside of this and his accidental fame he existed as a merry, outspoken recluse — which is precisely what he was going for all along.
Shavitz summed it up quite nicely to the New Yorker a few years back.
“I’ve got everything I need: a nice piece of land with hawks and owls and incredible sunsets, and the good will of my neighbors.”