Tree Huggers Stung On Burt’s Bees

BURT’S Bees has a “Mission” and a “Vision” - “We make people’s lives better every day — naturally.”

It makes people’s life’s better by flogging them Thoroughly Therapeutic Honey & Bilberry Foot Creme, Healthy Healing Carrot Nutritive Body Lotion, Body Butter and anythign else you can smear on your arse and a piece of “raw” wholemeal bread.

Over on the Treehugger blog, readers learn:

“We and our readers were surprised and some were dismayed when Burt’s Bees was sold to Clorox for $913 Million in November; The New York Times reveals that all was not going so sweetly well before this, and that Burt got the short end of the stick. It seems that Burt was living in a turkey coop when he met Roxanne Quimby in 1984; they split in 1993 and she bought him out in 1999 with a house worth $ 130,000.

She then sold 80% of the company to AEA,(according to a commenter, a buyout firm formed in 1968 by the Rockefeller, Harriman, and Mellon families) in 2003 and got $ 141 million; when Burt complained she gave him $ 4 million. She got another $150 million when it was sold to Clorox; Burt got nothing. His face is on the packaging but he is back living in a turkey coop.

No little shock to discover that the product range is not hand processed by a beared old man with a festish for yellow and black jumpers. Perhaps users can dream anti-capitalism but putting a wiry grey hair in their pot of Super Shiny Grapefruit & Sugar Beet Shampoo…

Anorak

Posted: 6th, January 2008 | In: Money Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink