What Beekman 1802 actually taught me about building a brand that lasts
- Paula Ironside
- Jun 6
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 8
A Real Talk conversation with Dr. Brent Ridge
I walked into this interview thinking I knew the Beekman 1802 story.
I had read the book. I had done the research. I knew about the goat farm, the recession, the 52,000 bars of soap. I knew that kindness was the strategy, not the tagline.
What I didn't expect was how much of the conversation would feel personal, not just as someone who studies brand strategy, but as someone who is, right now, in the middle of building something herself.
Dr. Brent Ridge is the co-founder of Beekman 1802, one of America's most beloved beauty brands, built from a goat farm in upstate New York during the 2008 financial crisis with no funding and no roadmap. He is also a physician, a longevity researcher, and, as of this conversation, someone I can confirm is as warm and generous in person as everything he has built would suggest.
Here is what stayed with me.
Meet Dr Brent Ridge
Before Beekman 1802, Dr. Brent's path was anything but conventional. He trained as a physician specialising in longevity and ageing, conducted research on the genetics of ageing at Harvard University, and joined the faculty of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
It was there that he caught the attention of Martha Stewart and was brought on board to build an entirely new health and wellness division for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a role that took him from medicine into the world of lifestyle, brand, and media. Then 2008 happened. Both he and his husband Josh lost their jobs within a month of each other, retreated to a farmhouse they'd bought on a whim in upstate New York, and started over, with a herd of goats, a dining room table, and very little else.
What they built from that is Beekman 1802: today one of America's most beloved beauty brands, with over $150 million in retail sales, a community of fiercely loyal Neighbours across the world, and a philosophy, kindness as a full business operating system, that has outlasted every trend the beauty industry has thrown at it.
It started way before the goats.
I asked Brent what most interviewers don't: how much of the kindness and belonging at the heart of Beekman came from knowing personally what it feels like not to quite fit in, and then finding a place where you do?
He didn't deflect.
"I think it does come from our upbringings. Josh grew up in Wisconsin and I was in North Carolina. And I think, yes, do we feel like outsiders sometimes in those environments? Yes. I think it's just part of our personal DNA — how you treat people, that moral matters. It's probably why I got into medicine in the first place, because I wanted to help people live healthier lives."
Beekman's origin story is usually told from the moment they found the farm. But the real origin is earlier, in two people who grew up in rural America, found each other, built a life that looked nothing like where they came from, and brought that understanding of what it means to belong somewhere into every single decision they made about their brand.
That's not a brand strategy. That's a life philosophy that became one.
The science and the soul are the same thing.
Brent spent years studying the genetics of aging at Harvard before he ever thought about skincare. So when I asked him when he realised his medical background was actually the R&D foundation of Beekman, his answer surprised me.
"I would have never imagined myself running a skincare company. My specialty was always aging. I believed — and I still say this — that better aging begins at birth. It's not something you start thinking about when you're fifty or when you see your first wrinkle. It's the buildup of inflammation throughout your body. So our entire practice was about prevention."
The oligosaccharides in goat milk are almost bio-identical to human milk, a powerful nutrient source for the skin microbiome. Goat milk has the same pH as human skin, so it cleanses without disturbing the barrier. This wasn't a marketing claim someone invented in a product development meeting. This was 18 years of a physician's research meeting a farm.
"We don't think of ourselves as a skincare company or a beauty company. We think of ourselves as a skin health company."
And then he said something that stopped me.
"There are two key ingredients in everything we make: goat milk and kindness, in equal proportion. Because when you give an act of kindness or receive one, particularly when it's unexpected, there's a surge of neurochemicals. Your serotonin increases. Your dopamine increases. Your oxytocin increases. And those neurohormones also impact the microbiome on the surface of the skin. Kindness is listed on our ingredient list. There is true science as to why it's working."
Kindness. On the ingredient list. Scientifically validated.
I have been in brand strategy long enough to recognise when someone has built something genuinely unreplicable. This is it.
A product is not a brand. And a collection of products isn't either.
This is the part of the conversation I want every founder I work with to hear.
"One single product doesn't make a brand. And I think where people get confused is they think a collection of products makes a brand — but that also doesn't make a brand. You just have a collection of products."
He went further. In the era of TikTok Shop and viral beauty, you can build a very successful business on a product. You can even make real money. But:
"Once you've maximised the number of people who responded to how that product looked, it's very hard to keep them coming back. Because the next person with a product is also going to figure out how to make them want theirs."
The brands that last, he said, are the ones that reach the third stage of selling, where the customer sells the product for you.
"When you first launch your business, you are the salesperson. As you grow, you hire people and they become your salespeople. But to scale a brand, you have to get to the point where your customer is selling for you. When your customer believes so strongly in what that product is bringing to their life that they want to tell other people about it — that's when you know you have a great business."
Beekman reached that stage by building something they called Neighbours, not customers. Not because it was a nice word, but because it was literally true. The original neighbours of Sharon Springs, New York sat around a dining room table for four weeks, wrapping bars of soap around the clock, because a postal clerk named Maria made a phone call and asked if anyone wanted to help two guys they barely knew save their first big order.
"They didn't do it for any money or remuneration. They did it because they wanted to be part of something. They wanted that feeling of community. That's how those people came to our table. And we still say, even though we do three, four hundred million in retail sales every year, we grow neighbour by neighbour by neighbour."
What 2008 actually teaches founders navigating today.
I brought up the parallel deliberately. We are not in 2008, but the uncertainty rhymes. Inflation, shifting consumer habits, technology disruption, a generation of buyers who are more deliberate and more sceptical than any that came before.
Brent didn't soften it.
"Over the past decade, entrepreneurship has been kind of rebranded as something very sexy. It's been the easiest time in history to be an entrepreneur — social media opened up the world, startup costs were low, there was a lot of free money. Private equity and venture capital existed in a way that did not exist in 2008. And I think it's given people a false idea of what it really takes."
What it really takes, he said, is desperation.
"Prior to the era of private equity throwing money at entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs got by on grit. They got by on being so desperate that nothing — if they didn't make this work, their life was not going to work out. Either their family was not going to survive, they were going to lose their house. You have to have that level of hunger and desperation. That has to be the motivation. Or you simply will not have what it takes to survive."
He said it while looking at the name of my company on the screen.
"You named your company after your children. Every day when you turn on your computer and you see those names, that is the motivation. I am doing this for my children. You have to have that level of motivation."
He is right. Some mornings, that is the only thing that is enough.
The kindness finding that surprised even him.
We ended where the brand began, with kindness. And I asked him what the Oxford research, which Beekman helped fund through kindness.org, had shown him that actually surprised him.
"The primary reason that people do not extend kindness in their everyday life is because they are embarrassed about the response they're going to get back. And I thought — how sad is that? That we carry around this idea that if we give kindness, we're going to get an awkward or embarrassing response — and that actually prevents us from being more kind."
I sat with that for a moment.
We are not withholding kindness because we don't feel it. We are withholding it because we are afraid of how it will land. Afraid of being vulnerable. Afraid of the gap between what we offer and what we receive back.
It is, I think, also true of brands. And of founders.
The ones who break through are the ones who extend kindness anyway, in the product, in the community, in the way they show up, without waiting for the guaranteed response.
"Kindness works," Brent said simply. "It does double the work for us."
This was one of those conversations that reminds you why you started.
Not because it told me anything I didn't know. But because it gave me the permission, and the language, to trust what I already understood to be true.
Which is, I think, exactly what the book "G. O. A. T. Wisdom: How to Build a Truly Great Business" is for.
This interview was recorded as part of Real Talk, Hunter & Florence's interview series with founders, investors, and creatives building in beauty and wellness. Watch the full conversation here (link to youtube)
If this conversation made you want to go deeper, “G. O. A. T. Wisdom: How to Build a Truly Great Business” is available in digital and hardcover. You can find it online wherever books are sold. It's the kind of book you'll read with a highlighter in hand.
And if you haven't tried Beekman 1802 yet, I've already placed my order. Head to beekman1802.com to explore their full skincare range. Your skin microbiome will thank you 💛.
Paula, Hunter & Florence
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