Michigan State University graduate Josh Kilmer-Purcell is a New York Times bestselling author who, together with husband, Dr. Brent Ridge, founded a multimillion-dollar skin care company, starred in their own reality TV show, and won season 21 of The Amazing Race — and those are just a few of the couple’s many accomplishments in what can be described as an extraordinary life.
The secret to their success, they both will tell you, is kindness. It is the very foundation their company, Beekman 1802, was built on and continues to serve as the driving force and competitive strategy of their business today.
However, as Kilmer-Purcell explains, “This (owning a skincare company) was not our goal. This was not our dream. This just happened to us.” And, the reality TV show and Amazing Race were done as “side hustles” to help their business grow.
The story of Beekman 1802 begins in 2006 with a New York state map and a hand-written letter. At the time, Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge were living and working in New York City. Kilmer-Purcell was an advertising executive and Ridge, a medical doctor, was the Vice President of Healthy Living for Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Each fall, they would go apple picking in upstate New York. Their specific destination determined by opening a map of New York, closing their eyes, and pointing. That year, their finger pointed to Sharon Springs, New York, and at the end of their apple-picking weekend, as they drove out of town, they came across the historic Beekman farm, which was for sale.
“We had no money coming in. We had this huge mortgage to pay. We had 80 goats to feed. Farmer John to feed. We had no idea what we were going to do.”
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
“We fell in love with the farm and thought we should get a nice weekend getaway place,” Kilmer-Purcell said. “So, we cashed in all our savings and bought the farm.”
Soon after purchasing the farm, they received a handwritten note in their mailbox. The letter said: “My name is John and I grew up in this area on a dairy farm. I soon will be losing my farm, and I have a herd of 80 goats. Could I please bring them to your property to graze?”
“We met with Farmer John and saw how much he loved the goats,” Ridge said. “We told him there is another house on the property. You can come stay, rent-free, and bring the goats. We thought it would be like having a petting zoo.”
Two years later, in the Great Recession of 2008, Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge both lost their jobs within 30 days of each other.
“We had no money coming in,” Kilmer-Purcell said. “We had this huge mortgage to pay. We had 80 goats to feed. Farmer John to feed. We had no idea what we were going to do.”
What they did have was a lot of goat milk. So, they Googled, “what can you make with goat milk,” and the first thing that came up was soap.
“We did all this ourselves. And as the business grew, our neighbors would come and help us wrap the bars of soap around our dining room table because they said if this succeeds, the whole village is going to succeed.”
Dr. Brent Ridge
Not knowing the first thing about making soap, they reached out to a neighbor, Deb McGillycuddy, who taught them how and who became Beekman 1802’s first soap maker. They started by making small batches of soap in their kitchen and wrapped the bars around their dining room table. They also taught themselves photography to take product pictures, how to code to develop the website, and merchant services to process credit cards. They named their goat milk skincare company Beekman 1802 after William Beekman who built their farm in 1802. Originally, they were selling their products only online through the Beekman 1802 website.
“We did all this ourselves,” Ridge said. “And as the business grew, our neighbors would come and help us wrap the bars of soap around our dining room table because they said if this succeeds, the whole village is going to succeed.”
Beekman 1802 Success
And succeed they have.
Today, Beekman 1802 generates more than $150 million in retail sales, has about 220 employees, and is sold on QVC, the Beekman 1802 website, at Ulta Beauty, independent retailers, the LaGuardia Airport Kindness Shop, and their flagship mercantile in Sharon Springs, New York, as well as TV retail in the UK and Australia. Beekman 1802 products also can be found in many hotels and cruise ships. Next year, they plan to go into brick-and-mortar retail in parts of Asia, Australia, the UK, and possibly Germany.
Beekman 1802 has enjoyed much success with retail TV. The first time they appeared on a television shopping network was for the Evine network, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and they sold out of their product within eight minutes. Within the first year, they became the top-selling brand on that network.
“We didn’t know anything about television retail, so we started watching and we kept flipping the channels. We realized that the biggest obstacle to success was catching someone’s eye and thought of how we can stop someone from changing the channel,” Kilmer-Purcell said. “So that very first trip to Minnesota, we brought goats all the way from New York state to the Minneapolis studios. We thought if we just had baby goats running around people wouldn’t change the channel, and it worked.”
“QVC was really our first gigantic leap. We had to figure out how do we go from a couple million-dollar revenue company to within two years we were at $25 million.”
Dr. Brent Ridge
HSN later approached Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge and they moved to HSN where they had the biggest launch in the history of HSN and went on to become number one on that network. QVC then bought HSN and they went on QVC and beat their own launch with HSN.
“QVC was really our first gigantic leap,” Ridge said. “We had to figure out how do we go from a couple million-dollar revenue company to within two years we were at $25 million. That’s when we started working with other farms because we realized we couldn’t supply all our own goat milk.”
The company now works with 24 different goat farms across the United States, and just this spring, in April 2023, Ulta Beauty named Beekman 1802 the skincare brand of the year.
Along their entrepreneurial journey, Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge starred in their own reality TV show, The Fabulous Beekman Boys, which aired for two seasons on the Planet Green network in 2010 and 2011. Then in 2012, they competed in and won The Amazing Race, earning them the $1 million grand prize, which allowed them to pay off the mortgage on the farm and start investing more in their company.
Focus on Kindness and Inclusion
Now as Pride Month is celebrated throughout the month of June, Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge look forward to celebrating their 10th wedding anniversary on June 28, 2023, and say that representation of the LGBTQIA+ community is the key to helping create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. When The Fabulous Beekman Boys debuted, it was the first reality show that focused on a gay couple in a long-term relationship. And when the couple won The Amazing Race, their celebratory kiss marked the first same-sex couple kiss that was aired on a prime-time CBS reality TV show.
“Nothing we have ever done is about being gay, but we realize how important it is just to have gay representation,” Kilmer-Purcell said. “We just normalized it and realized the power of that. The example we are setting is that we are just like you.”
Not only is diversity, equity, and inclusion important to the Beekman 1802 company and its founders but so too is kindness. It is the cornerstone of the company whose products are based on two ingredients: goat milk and kindness.
“Kindness is the very essence of the company,” Kilmer-Purcell said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen taking in Farmer John. We call that the original act of kindness that started our company. Then two years later, when we needed it, that kindness came back to us.”
Farmer John still lives on the Beekman farm and the Beekman 1802 company has gone on to spread kindness in any way they can, whether they are creating a “Mortgage Lifter” pasta sauce with a percentage of the proceeds going to farmers to help them pay off their mortgages or celebrating the hardworking nurses of this country with special events, products, and Kindness Grants offered through their Nurses First initiative, and many other ways that the company works to share kindness to community.
As part of the company’s total commitment to kindness — kindness to skin and planet — Beekman 1802 is the leading microbiome-focused skincare company and is using the latest advances in biotechnology to enhance the components of goat milk and to create a vegan bio-synthetic formula.
“Kindness is the very essence of the company. We didn’t know what was going to happen taking in Farmer John. We call that the original act of kindness that started our company. Then two years later, when we needed it, that kindness came back to us.”
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
The company also is now investing in the science of kindness and recently partnered with Kindness.org in the research they are doing on this.
Through this partnership, MSU’s College of Arts & Letters was invited in Fall 2022 to join a select group of companies in a research study exploring the impact of kindness in the workplace. The study, led by kindness.org and sponsored by Beekman 1802, is helping to inform the future standard of workplace culture with the goal of not only making an impact on the companies that participated but on professionals everywhere. Now, because this survey has been validated by those that participated, other businesses around the world can choose to implement that tool in their companies to see how they measure up.
“We believe that kindness is an amazing strategy,” Kilmer-Purcell said. “We have used kindness as a competitive strategy. We have realized that kindness pays off and that there are rewards with it, so we decided we were going to donate and invest in the science of kindness. If people knew how valuable kindness was, more people and more organizations would adopt it as part of their value system.”
The MSU Connection
Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge recently visited Michigan State University’s campus where they met with the College of Arts & Letters to discuss how the results of the kindness survey are being used within the College. They also met with students from the Citizen Scholars Program to learn about their community service projects and they delivered opening remarks for the Earth Day Student SERVE event and the keynote address for the MSU Alumni Club Leader Summit (See the video of their presentation at the MSU Alumni Club Leader Summit).
When he graduated from Michigan State University in 1991 with a B.A. in English, Kilmer-Purcell says he never could have predicted where his career path would lead or all the experiences and opportunities along the way. But he is thankful for the strong foundation MSU gave him to begin that journey.
“I came to Michigan State as a hotel restaurant management major but was not good at the math, so I switched to English, which is where I found my home and my calling,” he said. “I loved the English Department. Diane Wakoski, a very well-known poet, was the poet-in-residence. She became my mentor and defined my academic life. I just cherished her and cherish her still. I also worked in the Advertising and Marketing Department for The State News and used to hand draw illustrations for the ads for SBS and all the other clients. I also became the cartoonist for the paper. Between The State News, the English Department, and writing, that defined my time at MSU.”
After graduating from MSU, Kilmer-Purcell used his creative writing background and experience working for The State News to pursue a career in advertising. In his spare time, he wrote a book, I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir, about his life as a New York City advertising executive by day and adventures as a drag queen, known as Aqua, by night. Published in 2006, the book became a New York Times best seller. Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge have since gone on to write several books, including children’s books and four cookbooks.
“Creativity has always been central to everything that I have done, and a liberal arts degree is the best education you can have for that. Liberal arts degrees also are the best education you can have to be an entrepreneur.”
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
“Creativity has always been central to everything that I have done, and a liberal arts degree is the best education you can have for that. Liberal arts degrees also are the best education you can have to be an entrepreneur,” Kilmer-Purcell said. “The benefit of having a liberal arts degree is the ability to think critically. You’re not just trained to do a specific career or a specific task within a career. You’re learning how to think, and when you are an entrepreneur, you’re faced with all sorts of new challenges every day that aren’t in any textbook. So, you take each challenge as it comes and think critically about ways to solve that particular problem in ways that haven’t been done before.”
One way Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge have differentiated their company from others is by calling all their customers neighbors.
“We don’t use the word customer in our company. Everybody is a neighbor,” Ridge said. “Anybody who comes in contact with Beekman 1802 is a Beekman neighbor.”
And both Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge would agree that if you have read through this entire article, you are a neighbor too. So welcome to the Beekman neighborhood.
Written by Kim Popiolek
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