The Undiluted Genius of Dr. Bronner's
How Dr. Bronner's, truly one of America's great weird brands, grows more and more successful by being less and less conventional.
Jeff Minton
A New MissionDavid Bronner, left, runs the company with his mother, Trudy, and brother, Michael. The original Dr. Bronner was David and Michael's grandfather. "You couldn't talk to him on a human level," David says.
There's a common narrative that unfolds the first time you buy Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. It starts in the store, where the bottles, with their brightly colored, text-heavy labels, line up like cure-alls from some deranged medicine man. You pick one up. Later, in the shower, there comes a curious tingling sensation after you've lathered up your nether regions. That's when you reach for the bottle again to give it a closer read.
There are quotes from Mao, Jesus, Hillel, Einstein, and George Washington, among others. There's something called the Moral ABC, which appears to be a philosophy for uniting all humans on Spaceship Earth. There's a lot of religious ranting, a liberal dose of exclamation points, and instructions for cleansing your "mind-body-soul-spirit instantly."
Now you're more curious than ever. And if you read enough of the label and happen to Google Dr. Bronner after you've toweled off, you'll discover the story of the late Emanuel Bronner, which reads like bizarro fiction. (We'll get to it shortly.) That story is just the beginning.
The Bronner's story also happens to be the tale of the top-selling organic liquid and bar soap brand in North America. Dr. Bronner's notched more than $44 million in sales in 2011. It has grown well over 1,000 percent in the past 12 years. The company's president since 1998, 38-year-old David Bronner, is a ponytailed marijuana activist who drives a rainbow Mercedes that runs on French fry grease. David is the grandson of Emanuel Bronner, and, along with his younger brother, Michael, he has turned Dr. Bronner's into an instantly recognizable brand and a pioneer in sustainable business, from its vertically integrated organic and fair-trade supply chain to its highly progressive labor practices—all without spending a dime on advertising.
By remaining independent at a time when other hippie-ish personal-care brands such as Burt's Bees and Tom's of Maine have been bought up by major consumer-goods companies (Clorox and Colgate-Palmolive, respectively), Dr. Bronner's has been able to pursue a kind of radical purity that defies conventional business logic.
But first, some background.
Emanuel Bronner was a third-generation Jewish master soapmaker from the small town of Heilbronn, Germany. (The Bronner family, known in Germany as the Heilbronners, commercialized liquid soap.) Alarmed by the rise of the Nazis, Emanuel immigrated to Milwaukee in 1929, at 21, to start consulting for American soap companies.
A self-styled philosopher, Emanuel responded to the Nazis by traveling around the U.S., lecturing about a plan he had been developing for achieving world peace—the Moral ABC, he called it. The basic idea was simple: If people would stop focusing on their religious and ethnic differences and find common ground, we would all be better off. We're all humans, and we all have to share this Spaceship Earth. It was a timely message, despite its wacko undertones, and he started drawing crowds.
Tragedy struck in the 1940s. First, Emanuel got word that his parents, who had stayed behind in Germany, were killed in Nazi death camps. Then, his wife, the mother of their two sons and one daughter, fell ill and died. As he always did, Emanuel responded by diving deeper into the Moral ABC—to the extent that he put his children in foster care so he could continue lecturing without the distractions of fatherhood.
To an unsuspecting bystander, Emanuel couldn't have seemed like a stable guy. His speaking style was laced with bursts of shouting that, in his clipped German accent, could sound almost violent. In 1947, he was arrested in Chicago after giving a public talk without a permit and was committed to a mental institution, where he underwent shock treatments. He escaped and made his way to Southern California, where he started calling himself a rabbi and a doctor and alleged that he was Albert Einstein's nephew (none of which was true).
As he picked up his lecturing again around L.A., he started giving away bottles of his family-recipe peppermint soap on the side. Eventually, he realized that people were showing up for the soap and not sticking around to listen to him, so he started printing his message on the bottles and selling them. Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap was born. The Moral ABC grew into a 30,000-word screed that Emanuel would fine-tune every day for the rest of his life, dictating passages to his loyal assistant until he achieved the optimal levels of outrage, poetry, and staccato punctuation.
As a business, Dr. Bronner's never achieved the same level of polish as its famous labels. The soaps had a brief moment of popularity in the late 1960s—hippies dug the all-one message, and it turned out the versatile soap was useful for outdoor bathing—but the company stagnated in the ensuing years. Annual sales hovered around $1 million for decades, until, in the early 1980s, everything very nearly came to an end.
"The DNA of this company is, my grandfather ran it as basically a nonprofit religious organization—which it was only to him," says David. When the IRS finally caught up to him, it turned out Emanuel owed $1.3 million in back taxes, and in 1985, the company was forced into bankruptcy. Emanuel was suffering from Parkinson's disease and had gone blind, and at this crucial juncture also had pneumonia. The company would have disappeared had it not been for his son Jim (David's father), who set aside his resentment for how he had been raised and stepped in to right the ship.
David Bronner is wearing a red Dr. Bronner's polo shirt, baggy black hemp chinos with a rasta stripe on the pocket, and a black windbreaker emblazoned with a logo for Proposition 19, the failed 2010 California ballot initiative to legalize marijuana. We're sitting in his office at Dr. Bronner's world headquarters, a warren of low buildings off Highway 78, just north of San Diego. There's an orange velour sofa against the bright blue wall, a few car-stereo parts stacked on the floor, and a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces on the desk.
David didn't grow up wanting to run this company. His father, Jim, a successful industrial chemist, was nothing like Emanuel, and David was raised in a conservative household in suburban L.A., where he had scant contact with his eccentric grandfather. "You couldn't talk to him on a human level," David remembers. "It was just these tirades. 'Why are we not talking about uniting Spaceship Earth? What's more important?'
"My dad was much more down to earth. He didn't care about all the cosmic stuff. As soon as my grandfather would start talking about it, he'd be like, 'I don't want to hear that crap!'"
David left California for Harvard and graduated with a biology degree in 1995, after which he decided to set out with a Eurail pass for a few months of adventure. His second stop was Amsterdam, and that's where things started to change for him.
