E.L.F. Beauty Visited Beekman 1802 To Drink In The Co-Founders ‘G.O.A.T. Wisdom’

Beekman 1802 co-founders Dr. Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell have just released their first business book with Harvard Business Review Press – G.O.A.T. Wisdom: How To Build A Truly Great Business.

The book distills their learnings from nearly 20 years together running a working goat farm and building a nine-figure goat-milk skincare business that’s succeeded in the notoriously fickle and competitive beauty business. Their accomplishment is even more impressive because neither knew anything about the industry when they bought their farm in Upstate New York and started their Beekman 1802 journey.

To drink in some of the partners’ time-tested, greatest-of-all-time business wisdom is why industry giant E.l.f. Beauty’s CMO Kory Marchisotto and her senior marketing team turned up at their door. At first glance, one might expect that the much smaller Beekman 1802 team would be taking notes from E.l.f. – the number three mass-market beauty brand in the U.S. after L’Oréal and Maybelline, with $1.3 billion in sales last year.

Instead, it was the E.l.f. team who listened intently to Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell explain the company’s secret sauce, that goes way beyond the skin protective and renewal benefits of goat milk. It’s kindness – the founding principle of the company that they infuse in every aspect of the business from their products, management philosophy and out into the world. “There’s Beauty In Kindness” is the brand’s tagline.

“Writing this book made us realize that our greatest accomplishment is having created a brand that stands for and promotes Kindness, and one that has a foundation strong enough to outlive those that laid it. That is a GOAT thing,” Ridge shared with me.

Age-Old Wisdom

Both men started their business with impressive resumes. Physician Ridge was vice president of healthy living for Martha Stewart Media and Kilmer-Purcell worked for years as a creative director at leading advertising firms.

But it was the wisdom passed down from their humble beginnings – both men came from rural, lower-middle-class backgrounds – that they leaned into to build their business.

The book reveals 12 time-tested, common-sense principles for building a greatest-of-all-times business –“When the Well is Dry, We Know the Worth of Water” (budgeting) and “A Bad Workman Blames His Tools” (learn and grow) – that have been all but forgotten in today’s fad-driven, get-rich-quick business world.

To make the principles applicable to the reader’s circumstance, each chapter ends with a checklist of ideas and key thought-provoking takeaways.

“We live in a world in which the average person is expected to process over 74 gigabytes of information every single day,” Ridge explained. “What people are less skilled at is converting information into wisdom. Each chapter is full of information and concludes with specific, quick and fun ways to turn that information into wisdom that will drive your business forward.”

Kindness In The DNA

Kindness is part of both men’s character – I know from personal experience – and it was built into the company from day one when they welcomed displaced goat farmer John Hall to move his herd into their barn.

“We had no plans of starting a business,” Kilmer-Purcell shared with the Social Capital Insider. “We only say that that first act of kindness by taking in our neighbor was what eventually started our business, without even knowing we were going to have one.”

After the Great Recession hit and they both lost their high-power New York City jobs, they had to make the farm pay for itself. So following the maxim explained in the book – “Chop Your Own Wood and It Will Warm You Twice” – they did a Google search on goat milk, which they had a surplus of. It yielded information about the skincare benefits of goat milk, which fed into Ridge’s medical background.

The search also turned up information that goat milk soap isn’t widely available to consumers, other than from small makers selling at farmer’s markets. Following the “Make Hay While the Sun Shines” principle in the book, they seized the opportunity.

Starting with a simple bar of goat milk soap sold originally on the company website, its local Sharon Springs Beekman 1802 specialty store and a popup table at the Henri Bendel department store in NYC that Ridge personally manned, Beekman 1802 has grown into a full line of advanced science-backed skincare formulas now carried by Ulta, Target, Amazon and on television shopping channels QVC/HSN.

The pair make compelling on-air hosts, having honed their television skills early on as stars of The Fabulous Beekman Boys reality TV show and as winners of CBS’ The Amazing Race, which greatly expanded their range of influence, as explained in the “You Can Lead A Horse To Water, but You Can’t Make Him Drink” chapter.

To further their kindness mission and extend its influence, they’ve cultivated a Kindness Krew of like-minded content creators who amplify the kindness message, touching skin, animals, community and the planet.

The Beekman 1802 brand has won numerous awards, including being named Ulta’s “Skincare Brand of the Year,” as well as awards from Allure, Good Housekeeping, Glamour and Cosmetic Executive Women (CEW). It’s been an Oprah’s Favorite Things pick and repeat HSN and QVC Customer Choice winners.

Beyond product awards, WWD honored the company with the Beauty Inc. award for its kindness initiatives and Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell joined Ulta to ring the Nasdaq bell on World Kindness Day on Nov. 13, 2023.

All For Kindness

E.l.f.’s Marchisotto explained what she and her team learned at the Beekman 1802 farm in a LinkedIn post. “We had to take the pause to actively listen about how infusing kindness into everything they do, to the point of listing it as an ingredient on the INKY list of their goat-milk products, makes a better product and better people.”

The INKY list is the industry term for the officially recognized list of ingredients specified by the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients guidelines.

“That’s the ripple effect of making kindness the north star of everything they touch: their neighbors are better for it, our industry is better for it and we’re all going to keep paying it forward until the world is better for it,” she continued. “This is not just warm and fuzzy, it’s science. The science of kindness is worth studying in the pages of ‘G.O.A.T. Wisdom’ and from Kindness.org.”

Ridge is on the board of Kindness.org and is active in its research into the science of kindness and studies on kindness in the workplace.

Why Now?

In writing G.O.A.T. Wisdom, Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell have done the ultimate kindness to the business community, not just for those in the beauty business but for every business leader and entrepreneur seeking lasting success rooted in values, not the latest business trends.

“The strategy and tactics that worked best for us embodied timeless proverbs that our parents and grandparents had taught us – the greatest-of-all-time principles for good living that also can be applied to any business,” they wrote.

“We chose to turn our backs on the trendy management advice of the day. We soon realized that this insight amounted to a fresh playbook that anyone can use to build a Kinder and more profitable business in the twenty-first century.”