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It all started when Burt Shavitz, a small-time beekeeper living in a turkey coop, picked up hitchhiker Roxanne Quimby, a part-time waitress, back in 1984, and Burt's Bees has since become a major global company.
After first finding success using leftover beeswax from Burt’s bee hives to create candles, the two made their foray into natural personal care with the development of the Burt’s Bees Beeswax Lip Balm in 1991. Created using a basic formula, 30 years later and the Beeswax Lip Balm continues to be the brand’s best-selling product. In fact, the Beeswax Lip Balm is the number-one selling product in the lip balm category in the US.
When we started making lip balm, we had no idea it’d become the recipe for a whole company. My co-founder, Roxanne, and I didn’t have a real plan. But we did have a passion for nature and an old beekeeper’s almanac, where we found a time-tested beeswax formula,” says Burt. Pretty soon, we couldn’t make our lip balm fast enough. In fact, these days we sell a tube every two seconds! Of course, none of this would have been possible without the generous support of the world’s greatest sponsor – nature.”
Heritage and history
Distributing over 150 products for everything including lips, facial skincare, hair and body, the brand remains a classic brand with a strong focus on its heritage products. We call them our heritage products and they are truly representative of our brand. They have been with us the longest,” explains Burt’s Bees senior brand manager Emma Martin. These unique products have time-tested effective formulas and continue to be customer favourites year after year. Throughout all the years, these have been the consistent products. We don’t necessarily follow the trends. If it works, then we keep making it,” says Martin.
Key products in the classics range include the brand’s number one product - the Beeswax Lip Balm, the brand’s most awarded product ever - Lemon Butter Cuticle Cream, Shea Butter Hand Repair Cream, Coconut Foot Crème, Res-Q Ointment, Hand Salve and Almond Milk Beeswax Hand Crème.
With constant innovations in the skincare market, it’s the simplicity of Burt’s Bees heritage products that sees its continual success. It’s all about using ingredients that you recognise and are comfortable with. If I said I have a coconut cream, you would know it has coconuts in it. It’s all easily identifiable and it goes back to our philosophy of our kitchen-chemistry approach to formulating,” says Martin. As Burt himself says, When was the last time there was a major technological breakthrough using coconuts?”
The Australian market
Since launching on the Australian market in 2007, the brand has racked up achievements. Last year Burt’s Bees won 11 Australian beauty awards and has been named the fourth fastest growing brand in pharmacies in Australia. Building on these successes, the next 12 months will see Burt’s Bees drive awareness about the brand with a focus on the heritage products. For our market, it’s actually going to be a return to classics. It’s about more people discovering our brand and our classic products as we raise our awareness and really get the brand out there and communicate our philosophies and our story and our history,” says Martin.
Back to the future
But while the brand’s main focus for 2013 is on the past, there are also exciting things happening in the future for Burt’s Bees. The brand has just launched its pop-up store at Westfield in Bondi Junction, which will remain there until January next year. The pop-up store’s major function will be to drive awareness to the brand. Another big brand driver this year is its new lip care range. We have a really strong heritage in lip care and we’re going to be building from that. We’ve obviously just launched our new lip colour product – our shines and our glosses. I see that is where we’re headed in terms of building on our strengths - in lip care and colour,” says Martin.
Burt’s Bees will also continue its Wild For Bees initiative to help fight against the disappearance of bees in the US, Europe and Asia as a result of Colony Collapse Disorder. CCD has dire economic and human consequences on our food chain; if there were no bees, $US16 billion of produce in the US alone would disappear so Burt’s Bees is helping fund research into this disorder. We’re all about the bees. We use the beeswax in a lot of our products, so they’re important to us in that perspective, and also on our belief in the greater good and being nature’s champion,” says Martin. We really need to be supporting them on a broader scale for their role in our eco system.”
With the new pop-up store, exciting lip launches and its environmental crusade, Burt’s Bees is well on the way to reaching its goal for 2013 to dominate the natural beauty sector. Particularly for us here in Australia, we’re on a mission to be the leading natural personal care brand and until we achieve that, I don’t think we’ll be going into any different categories,” concludes Martin.