John Paul Mitchell Systems is a new-wave profit machine with few moving parts and a direct connection to Paradise
ON NOVEMBER 1, SOME TWO DOZEN teams will send cars off the blocks in the first Pentax World Solar Challenge: a grueling 1,980-mile trans-Australian road race through the belly of the Red Centre Desert, from Darwin to Adelaide. Open exclusively to solar-powered vehicles, the race will be the severest -- and most public -- test yet for an embryonic technology that has long interested everyone from hobbyists to major automobile makers.
Many of the contestants will fly the familiar flags of car companies. Japan's Nippon Motors is fielding an entry, for instance, as are General Motors and Ford Motor Company of Australia. The car with the most intriguing logo, however -- and, some say, the best chance to win -- could well be one belonging to a small Beverly Hills, Calif., shampoo company.
Christened the Mana La ("power of the sun" in Hawaiian), the $250,000 car -- built at one-tenth the cost of some of its rivals -- utilizes a patented vertical-wing design that makes maximum use of wind power as well as solar power. Composed of urethane foam, carbon fiber, and high-temperature vinyl ester resin, the entire vehicle weighs only 500 pounds, sports an on-board computer and a six-and-a-half-foot-high solar canopy, carries NASA-grade storage batteries, and is, in the opinion of one consulting aerospace engineer, "aerodynamically ahead of any [model] I'm familiar with." The Mana La will also be featured in a National Geographic Society film about the race, thus providing its creators with a worldwide audience for their exploits.
What's more, this car will actually be driven by a shampoo company -- and in more ways than one. Two of its pilots are Paul Mitchell, founder and president of John Paul Mitchell Systems Inc. (#71 on the 1986 INC. 500), and his cofounder and chief executive officer, John Paul Jones De Joria. Their commitment to funding the Mana La with company capital got the project rolling in the first place, and soon it will test their driving skills as well. A third pilot, Jonathan Tennyson, the car's overall architect, is partner with De Joria and Mitchell in a separate but related enterprise: a self-sufficient, solar-powered fruit plantation on the "big island" of Hawaii.
It is on this plantation, high above the cane fields in the tiny village of Paauilo, that both the car and the corporate vision have taken form. Mitchell, De Joria, and Tennyson bought the 30-acre site in 1980 as a personal investment, not a corporate one, intending to make real their dream of establishing a working experiment in tropical agriculture and energy independence.
Seven years later, that dream has been realized in spectacular fashion. A kind of Polynesian version of a hippie Disneyland, the farm not only provides workers and family members with their own food, water, power stations, and living quarters, but it also supplies the company with a key ingredient for one of its most popular products: awapuhi, a wild Hawaiian ginger plant used in Awapuhi Shampoo. As both company and farm continue to develop, moreover, the Paauilo operation is expected to grow and process other native emollients unique to the company's product line.
It is here, too, on a recent summer weekend, that Mitchell and De Joria have come to inspect Tennyson's prototype and to explain, in this improbably utopian setting, the leap from selling hair-care products through salons to driving twentieth-century vehicles that run on sunshine.
"I believe you have to visualize your dreams before they can happen," says Mitchell, 51, lounging on the deck of his gardenia-scented guest hut. "And one of my dreams has always been finding a better way to live on this planet. When I moved to Hawaii from New York City 12 years ago, I was one of the most recognized hair artists in the world -- and totally burned out on the whole success trip. For nearly a year I lived in a one-room beach shack, doing nothing but yoga, meditation, and vegetarianism. Hawaii healed me. Now that I'm successful all over again, I have the opportunity to show the world that there is a better way to live. The car and this farm are parts of that vision."
De Joria, 43, a 15-year veteran of the industry's sales and marketing sides, adds that while he and Mitchell always believed they could make a lot of money -- and have a lot of fun -- launching their own line of hair-care products, "We're just beginning to understand the real possibilities here. What comes off [the farm] could be the wave of the future for businesses as well as for people -- proof that you can operate at lower cost, greater efficiency, and design practical products in the process. Instead of a system in which huge offices and factories are required to create one little idea, why not put the human brain -- the greatest computer of all -- to work on ideas that could revolutionize they way we live? That's the alternative we're exploring.
"When we opened up China last fall," he continues, referring to the latest market for the company's hair-care products, "members of the China Trade Co. expressed serious interest in our ideas about alternative energy and transportation. We're already talking about a co-venture with them, mass-producing solar-car kits. If that works out, we could instantly become a multibillion-dollar company. And that's pretty mind-blowing."
It is Tennyson, however, a onetime Miami marketing executive, who most succinctly expresses the philosophy governing these myriad enterprises: shampoo company, solar-car company, self-sufficient farm, way of life. "The whole idea," he avers, "is to design your way out of overhead. Design your way out of a water bill. Design your way out of an electricity bill. Out of a car payment, a gasoline bill, all those things you think you need, but it turns out you really don't. And the best way to do that is to minimize the number of moving parts."
This union of philosophy and practice -- of lifestyle and workstyle, if you will -- has been as much a cornerstone of John Paul Mitchell Systems as it has the Mona La or its lush Hawaiian habitat. Like the lagoons and papaya groves that now dot the Paauilo hillside, it did not spring up overnight. Products of the 1960s all, Mitchell, De Joria, and Tennyson first connected during a decade when conventional wisdom was mostly good for turning on its head and "alternative energy" referred to solar, water, and wind power, not cocaine or venture capital.
"A lot of us were dreamers then," remembers Tennyson, 42, who in the mid-'70s abandoned the business world and went off to live in a homemade pyramid on the banks of the Suwannee River. "We'd all sit around fantasizing about what we'd do if a) we had the money and b) we could master the appropriate technology. My own particular interest turned out to be ancient Egyptian culture, which pointed me in the direction of exploring solar energy and, ultimately, solar-powered vehicles. But there were many different dreams back then. Unfortunately, most of them got derailed along the way."
