The
Art of Business
The Natural Business
Bob MacLeod and Steve Byckiewicz of Kiss My Face
Photo by Chris Lopez
Meet Bob MacLeod and Steve Byckiewicz, two entrepreneurs who started
Kiss My Face with a few hundred dollars start-up money, no business
plan to speak of, and the vigilant belief that things put in and on
the body should be pure. That formula seems to have worked—Kiss
My Face is now a well-respected, multi-million dollar “obsessively
natural” beauty care giant. Despite the fact that three out of
four new businesses begin with outside capital, the Kiss My Face Company
has remained debt-free and a top competitor in the world of natural
beauty care products since 1981. Impressively, the original owners still
retain 100 percent of their privately held company. And twenty years
into it, they still believe in what they’re creating—pretty
rare for a company rumored to be edging toward the $30 million mark
in annual sales.
Just about as friendly and accessible as they were when they were selling
their then meager line of products door-to-door, the partners come to
work in hip, casual clothes and are on a first name basis with every
one of their employees. There is the incessant playful bantering of
old friends, which the sprawling team of 35 seems to be, since there
is very low employee turnover. MacLeod said cheerfully, bright blue
eyes beaming, “We haven’t hired or fired anybody in years.
It’s all about them.” (These feel good references are par
for the course with these two, but consistently delivered with such
sincerity that you can’t help but want to pull out your own tiny
pom-pom.) He continued, “Yeah, we’ve known Donna Meyer, here,
for so long she’s gone through three name changes! Oh, just kidding,
Donna. We know it’s just been two!” Meyer laughed openly,
teasing, “That’s off the record boys!” as she walked
off chuckling.
The Soapy Road to Success
Kiss My Face was not an instant success, however. Two long-time vegetarians,
MacLeod and Byckiewicz noticed the scant choices of personal care products
in health food stores, back when, as co-owner MacLeod joked, “jojoba
and aloe were still hard for people to pronounce.” So in 1979,
they launched their first few products, a facial scrub, moisturizer,
shampoo, conditioner and an astringent. “They were bombs,”
MacLeod laughs. With sales dragging along and “making hardly enough
to stay alive,” the partners moved to a farm in New Paltz, in search
of a more relaxed existence. But their life upstate would prove to be
a turning point for them in many ways. They began growing organic vegetables
that they sold to Manhattan health food stores from the trunk of their
VW Rabbit, along with their few beauty products. Sales continued to
creep along. Then one day while shopping at a men’s store in Woodstock
in 1981, they crossed paths with the ugly green olive oil soap that
would change the future of their business.
“It was beautiful. It had a wrapper and we unwrapped it so it looked
raw. This was way before unwrapped soap was cool,” offered Byckiewicz.
They immediately contacted the Greek importer, then located in Tribeca,
and bought several cases. He continued, “The soap just took off!
We used to go to Franklin street, load up the car, then drive it around
New York with our produce.” Then they got the alarming news that
the importers would have to move. The partners were offered the opportunity
to buy the remaining inventory on 90 days credit. Kiss My Face was born.
With a rented U-Haul truck filled with 4 tons of soap, the seedling
company was forced to find broader distribution immediately, which they
did. Soon the soap supply was dwindling and the pair was pressed to
fly to Greece to get more soap directly from the manufacturer. Their
ambition was paying off.
MacLeod explained how their different roles evolved along with the company.
“I was the delivery person. Steve was the taper of the boxes. I
was writing invoices—” Byckiewicz finished the thought, eyes
glinting, “You just did whatever had to be done. You just did it!”
Another stroke of ingenuity came to them in 1982 when they contacted
Bic, which was then launching a campaign for disposable razors. At eight
cents each, Kiss My Face purchased 200,000 razors on a 45 day grace
period. With 3,000 floor displays at $3 each, the razors, and their
olive oil soap, sold out completely in just three days to stores in
New York, New England and the Mid-West. By 1983, sales for the company
had shot up to $500,000.
Selling the Natural Way
Nestled unobtrusively in the center of the quaint town of Gardiner,
Kiss My Face’s 35,000 square foot headquarters is tastefully concealed.
In fact, one could drive by the barn-red building with the classic Americana
lines, unaware that the company was packing and shipping its vast line
of products to more than thirty thousand national retail stores and
more than thirty countries then and there. But subtle blending seems
to be one of the company’s best traits, whether of its more than
150 products’ “aromatherapeutic” ingredients or the achievement
of creating a forward-thinking business based on the tried and true
goodness of the natural ingredients of our grandmothers.
The bold, whimsical packaging may be “the very first impression
you get; your first meeting with the product,” as MacLeod explained.
Playful names like Miss Treated Shampoo, Swy Flotter bug repellant,
patchouli Liquid Rock deodorant, Peaches and Cream moisturizers, and
of course, the company name itself, have appealed to a wide variety
of consumers. MacLeod continued, “We get lots of mail. We have
celebrities, we have moms, our audience is all over the board—sex,
ages, races, everything.” But as light-hearted as the packaging
is, the booming company remains on the pulse of trends in beauty, as
well as groundbreaking scientific research concerning health, beauty,
and the planet.
Their now extensive 100 percent biodegradable line is packaged in almost
entirely 100 percent recycled materials, with scrupulous attention to
the omission of artificial ingredients, animal products or testing.
Incorporating the restorative, soothing properties of various herbs,
flowers, vitamins, vegetables, and fruits, the company has taken a consistently
prescient stand on the deleterious effects of such common ingredients
as paraffin, sodium laurel sulfate, aluminum, petroleum, and fluoride,
offering the health-concerned consumer a choice. And now, as the term
“natural” becomes a catch phrase mass-marketed by the mainstream
personal care market, whether scrupulously natural or not, Kiss My Face
launched their new Organics line, to up the ante even further in their
pursuit of “pure”. “We were the first company in the
country to do organic facial care,” Byckiewicz explained. “We
launched Organics about three years ago; it’s doing really well
and the line has expanded to sixteen products.”
Nature & Nurture
Visitors to the Kiss My Face headquarters are greeted by chipper employees
buzzing purposefully through spacious rooms flooded with natural light.
There are baked goods on the conference table, a lushly landscaped garden
where meetings are held, weather permitting, and employees at all levels
contributing their voices to product and marketing ideas, as well as
package design. There is an obvious chattiness among the employees,
while at the same time business is getting done. This balance of inspired
productivity seems pervasive, due most probably to the feeling of being
part of a team where an active contribution of ideas is respected and
appreciated. Whatever the secret, it seems to account for an unusually
low turnover, with a significant percentage of employees working five
years or more.
MacLeod and Byckiewicz seem to have a particularly empathetic attitude
toward their employees and are committed to promotion from within. One
explanation was best summed up by MacLeod in a 1998 interview with Forbes,
entitled “Lessons From Mom.” “At thirty-nine my mother
inherited a tiny hotel chain in Canada. Her only qualifications were
a driver’s license and a high school education. And yet she did
very well. She simply had a lot of common sense. So it doesn’t
frighten me to hire or promote someone who doesn’t have credentials
on paper. One of our highest paid employees, our director of domestic
sales and marketing, was once a checkout girl at Caldor.”
The Kiss My Face owners make a concerted effort to accommodate the demanding,
erratic schedules of working parents by allowing “total flextime”
so they can work around kids’ schedules, even going so far as allowing
children to come to work when needed. “There’s even a video/play
room just for the kids,” offers MacLeod. But the Kiss My Face owners
know that it helps having an in-house panel of working parents to represent
that large percentage of their target Internet audience, especially.
MacLeod explained, “For example, someone in accounting will say,
‘Why don’t you try a Ms. Claus bag?’ and then it becomes
a huge hit for us, so we run it next Christmas too.” After a thoughtful
pause he added, “Everybody sort of has a hand in it, the office
manager, the people in accounting, the ladies who do shipping. And they’ve
all sort of become, amazingly, experts.”
When MacLeod and Byckiewicz were asked about the social responsibility
of large businesses, the symbiotic team enthusiastically toppled over
each other’s sentences, one finishing where the other began. “Yes,
definitely. I think businesses at every level have an enormous responsibility,
because corporations are as powerful as government in this country.
We sort of take that as part of our credo.” They went on to describe
their involvement with Operation Smile, the Virginia based non-profit
devoted to providing reconstructive surgery and medical services to
indigent children. Then there’s Gods Love We Deliver, the New York
organization delivering healthful meals, nutrition education, and counseling
to people with AIDS/HIV.
Without any outside capital or advertising, the owners of Kiss My Face
have built their business on intuition, basic grunt work, and spirit.
MacLeod and Byckiewicz have actually managed to propel their company
forward while staying true to their original mission: “To guide
the company in the manner we aspire to run our lives—with honesty,
humor and style.”
—Jenny Wonderling
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