Ten Years Later (27 page)

When the kids started school, Roxanne began to notice that they felt self-conscious.
She realized her personal choices were affecting the social status of the twins in
their new environment.

“I was driving this old rickety van, and they would always ask me to drop them off
about a block away from school so nobody would see the van that they were being dropped
off in. Kids put a lot of pressure on each other, even at a very young age, to conform
to society’s standards, and it’s a very unusual kid who can reject all those standards
and just be happy for who they are, and I didn’t want to put that pressure on my kids.”

Financial pressure would soon mount for Roxanne; she lost her third and final waitressing
job.

“I idolized Sinéad O’Connor. She shaved her head, so I thought I’d do the same. I
went to work and they fired me on the spot.” She laughs. “Once I became an employer
and had my own employees, I look back on the situation and think,
Yeah, I would have fired me too!”

Roxanne, now thirty-four, knew that her lifestyle had to change for the sake of her
kids’ future. The mainstream values she’d rejected began to make more sense when she
saw them as a launching pad for Lucas and Hannah.

“I was concerned about the limitations that my choices were creating for them. They
were going to this little school in northern Maine with an archaic social structure,
not very enlightening,
with a lot of emphasis on competition instead of cooperation, and I wanted to send
them to an alternative school where kids were given more freedom to be themselves
and be creative but couldn’t afford to do that,” she explains. “I eventually scraped
together the money to get them there, but I realized as they got a little older that
I was putting enormous limitations on the way they were going to be growing up because
of choices I had made. The responsibility for their well-being motivated me to seek
other ways of making a living that would allow me to offer them the opportunity for
a better education, and for traveling, and to see the world more and understand it
better.”

Ironically, it was Roxanne’s meager lifestyle that changed her world one afternoon.
After the road-weary VW bus died, Roxanne had to walk or hitchhike to get around town.
In the summer of 1984, a local character named Burt Shavitz noticed Roxanne’s outstretched
thumb and picked her up in his beat-up, bright yellow Datsun pickup truck. She knew
him as a local beekeeper with a Howard Hughes–style reputation.

“Everybody had this notion that he was very wealthy, and yet he wore clothes that
looked like he got them out of the bottom of a Salvation Army reject bag. His truck
was a rattling can of nuts and bolts. He’d open the door and all kinds of stuff would
fall out of it,” she says, amused. “He set up his little honey stand on the side of
the road and sat there in a lawn chair with his honey stacked up, sleeping, with the
money jar set out if you wanted to buy some. He lived alone in this little turkey
coop that he had salvaged, with his chickens and his horse. People were slightly afraid
of him. He’s kind of gnarly looking. He had a big, long beard and long hair. They’d
make up stories about his life, like he was a millionaire from New York City who had
come to Maine to hide.”

Burt did indeed make his way to rural Maine from the big city.
Raised in Manhattan, he developed a love for photography and eventually made a living
traveling and selling photos to national newspapers and magazines, including
Life
and
Time
. But in 1973, Burt tired of living out of a suitcase and in the chaos of a bustling
city. He bought a twenty-acre farm in the small town of Garland, fifteen miles south
of Guilford. He fixed up an eight-feet-by-eight-feet turkey coop discarded by a neighbor
and called it home. He bought fifty beehives, scattered them across the countryside,
and earned about $3,000 a year selling honey on the roadside in nearby Dexter.

“I was completely fascinated by him,” Roxanne says. “He was so odd and unusual and
independent. I was really inspired by the fact that he was not willing to compromise
in any way whatsoever. He knew what he wanted, he didn’t care what anybody thought
about it, and I found that very inspiring.”

And quite attractive. Roxanne was not only romantically interested in the forty-nine-year-old,
but as a gardener, she was intrigued by his honeybees. She spent the summer of 1984
learning beekeeping from Burt, and before long, Roxanne realized she could add value
to Burt’s substandard business. He was packaging his honey in used pickle jars.

“People called him Dirty Burty. You would really kind of wonder whether you really
wanted to eat that honey or not.” She chuckles. “It had no shelf appeal whatsoever.
So, I had an art background, and I felt that if I had the opportunity to put the honey
into more interesting packaging with more interesting labels, we could sell it for
more, and we would both be able to make a living at it. So, I suggested that to him
and he was fine with it. He’s kind of a lazy guy.” She smiles. “Y’know,
Never do anything yourself that you can get somebody to do for you
. He said, ‘Sure, Roxy.’ He called me Roxy. ‘You go for it, Roxy.’ ”

Roxy ditched the pickle jars and packaged the honey in charming teddy bear and hive-shaped
containers. Business got sweeter, but the love affair would eventually sour.

“He’s a confirmed bachelor, and he’s not really equipped to have a relationship.”
She pauses. “Um, a two-way relationship. He didn’t have a lot of emotional vulnerability
and he’s kind of closed off, and after a while it was pretty clear it wasn’t going
to work.”

But it was very clear that the business could. Roxanne and Burt agreed to continue
their work relationship. A breakthrough came one day as they wandered into the honey
house.

“He sold the honey, which was pretty easy; you just bottle it. But he never really
figured out what to do with the wax, so he just kept it in the honey house. It’s wonderful
stuff, beeswax. It’s fragrant and
gorgeous, and he suggested that I make some candles. ‘Why don’t you make some candles
with all this wax, Roxy?’ So, I was like,
Yeah, this is like sculpture! This is very artistic and a lot of fun!
It was sort of an epiphany that we could use this wax, and as soon as we used up
all the wax he had on hand, we started buying wax from the other beekeepers who were
in the same boat.” She adds, “No one ever knows what to do with the beeswax.”

They struck up a deal: Burt would keep the bees and gather the honey; Roxanne would
package the golden treat and make the candles. She bought wicks, drew bees and hives
on labels, and experimented with various molds.

“It was trial and error. I’m not really afraid of failure because it usually leads
to understanding something that you didn’t know before.”

The local junior high Christmas craft fair and bake sale would be their first shot
at selling the handcrafted products; a vendor table cost five dollars. Game on.

“We made two hundred dollars that day,” she recalls, “and I was really psyched, because
that was a lot of money at the time for me.”

Burt and Roxanne pooled their funds to buy basic kitchen appliances for mixing, pouring,
and dipping. They traveled to craft fairs around the region, and Roxanne set a goal
of $20,000 in sales for the first year. That number would mean $10,000 in profits,
tripling her current income. Roxanne was exhilarated by the promise of a brighter
future for her children and a creative challenge for herself.

“I just unleashed this energy that I didn’t even know I had,” she says. “I was thrilled
with the packaging of the honey, designing labels and hang tags, taking it out to
the craft fairs, and making candles with the beeswax. I just loved this little craft
business that we had going, and Burt was fine with it, like, ‘Yeah, I don’t have to
sell honey by the side of the road anymore. I can sleep in my own cabin instead of
in a lawn chair in the middle of town,’ ” she mimics, laughing.

Over the years, Roxanne traveled to the majority of trade shows solo, and George would
watch the kids. She’d set out at midnight in her old pickup or van and arrive in the
morning to avoid paying for a hotel room. Sometimes she slept in the truck. When the
twins were around seven years old, Roxanne started taking them along to weekend shows.

“It was like these little adventures every weekend,” says Lucas. “We would pile up
the car with candles and honey and get to go to a place where there were a bunch of
people. It was always exciting because there were so many people around.”

Hannah remembers looking forward to heading out in the early-morning darkness, knowing
a special treat was in store at the first gas station or drive-through.

“I can remember stopping one time and getting McDonald’s or Burger King, or someplace
we would never go, and I got French toast sticks.” She giggles. “I can remember so
clearly sitting in the back of the van and eating my French toast sticks.”

Roxanne says, “They looked forward to that because it was a trip into civilization.
It was very exciting for them. They used to tell me that they were old enough to make
change, and then at the trade shows they would try to convince me they were old enough
to take orders. They would be highly insulted if I would take the pen away and tell
them
I
was writing the orders.”

Roxanne traveled to larger and larger craft fairs around the region, and before long,
to the big city of Boston. Daily retail sales grew from hundreds of dollars to more
than a thousand. In an effort to expand the limited product line, Roxanne began to
explore additional items she could make with beeswax, like polishes. On her tiny cabin’s
wood-burning stove, she brewed batch after batch of shoe and furniture polish. Craft
fairs served as the company’s research and development department.

“I didn’t participate in the marketplace very much because I was broke; I didn’t buy
anything. I didn’t think I was a consumer myself,” she reasons, “so they were almost
sort of an alien species and I was watching them very carefully. It was obviously
very important to me to understand what made people buy things. I watched them to
see what motivated them to purchase something or when they decided not to buy something.
Why didn’t they? I listened very carefully to people who were there with their friends
to see what they said to each other, and I would watch their actions. One of the things
I noticed was that everybody would pick up a candle, turn it over, and look at the
underside of it for some reason. I don’t know why, but I always made sure the bottom
of the candle looked as good as the top.”

Before long, it was time to add square footage. Burt and Roxanne convinced a friend
to rent them his abandoned schoolhouse for the price of the annual fire insurance:
$150. The building had plenty of critters but no running water or electricity. Still,
it was an upgrade in terms of space and allowed them to hire several employees to
help meet the growing demand. They installed a gas kitchen range and worked at night
by the light of kerosene lamps. Although she was working around the clock, Roxanne
was extremely engaged.

“I think I was a born merchant. I just really was fascinated by the whole thing about
selling stuff. Making stuff and selling stuff. It really caught my interest, and once
I started doing it as an adult I was really into it.”

Hannah says her mom’s laser focus on developing the business didn’t interfere with
family time; it actually enhanced it.

“For a long time, I would say until we got to high school, we were very much a part
of it,” Hannah says. “When we were younger, we were going to the trade shows and the
craft fairs, and we were
helping. We probably saw more of our mom than most kids did, because we were helping
wrap soap and packaging things up, and doing a lot of that with her. She was working
nonstop, but there was this blurred line of what was work and what we were doing as
a family.”

The passion and hard work was paying off. Not only had they met the first-year goal
of $20,000, by 1987 retail sales reached $81,000. From day one, Roxanne made sure
the freedom and independence she valued as a person were intrinsic in their business
plan.

“The company grew without debt. All the sales that we made were reinvested in growing
the company, and because we had no debt, we had no one that we needed to explain our
business strategy to,” she says. “We never had to pay back any loans or interest,
which is very liberating because you don’t have a bank or a lender second-guessing
your every move. And if we made a mistake we paid for it, so you learn really fast.”

In an effort to reduce drive time to countless retail craft fairs, Roxanne shifted
their sales effort to the wholesale market. In 1989, the move paid off in a big way.
At a wholesale show in Springfield, Massachusetts, a buyer for an upscale Manhattan
boutique named Zona ordered several dozen teddy bear candles. When he put the products
in the store window, they were a hit. The Fifth Avenue boutique reordered hundreds
of candles, and several big chains followed suit: Gardener’s Eden, Smith & Hawken,
and the Smithsonian Museum Store. Roxanne knew it was again time to move. Corporate
headquarters became an abandoned bowling alley in the middle of Guilford.