There’s a theme at Badger’s headquarters in rural Gilsum, New Hampshire, and it’s quality and legacy. There’s no exit strategy present, no short-term definition of success. Every decision is based on what will be best for the next generation, for the community, the company and their 85 employees. It’s how they run the business and their relationship with Amazon.
The company started in 1995 with a signature product, an organic, herbal hand balm the founder used to help heal his cracked hands. Now it’s a mission-driven, family-owned B-corp and one of Gilsum’s largest employers. It’s here, under the supervision of the family, that Badger manufactures their nearly 100 products out of a 100%-solar-powered post-and beam-building, which was constructed to last generations. Together with their employees, they blend the finest organic plant extracts, exotic oils, beeswax and minerals to make the safest, most effective products possible to soothe, heal and protect.
“It’s just a different way of running a business. I think when you run a business with the intention that the business itself is going to endure, you want to have a positive impact on your community. You treat your employees well. You have long-term relationships with your vendors. You build a building that’s environmentally friendly. Every choice that we make is based around the thinking ‘Badger is going to be around for generations,’” said co-CEO Rebecca Hamilton, who runs the company with her sister, Emily Schwerin-Whyte.
You can buy Badger products at Whole Foods stores, at co-ops across the country, and from the Badger warehouse in Gilsum to you through Amazon. That’s a change now that the second generation is leading the company.
In 2020, under the new leadership of co-CEOs Rebecca Hamilton and Emily Schwerin-Whyte, daughters of Badger’s founders, the company took over sales of their products from an authorized third-party seller in the Amazon store. It was a move to bring quality, freshness and control in house. In the process, they learned firsthand about Amazon’s logistics program and robust analytics they could leverage to grow their ecommerce presence.
With the barriers to their customers and stock removed, Hamilton said Amazon became one of their fastest-growing sales channels—last year contributing 40% of Badger’s overall sales. Amazon’s focus on customer experience is in direct alignment with Badger and, “as a small business,” Hamilton said, “connection to customers makes a difference.”
“We have so much control to be able to curate the experience for our customer and to reach out to our customers and communicate with our customers,” said Hamilton. “By choosing Amazon, we have access to customer insights that other channels don’t provide, as well as advanced logistics capabilities, giving us a lot of levers to pull to grow our business.”
One of the biggest levers the sisters will pull is where to direct their customers to order, between their website and Amazon. Because Badger chose Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) for their Amazon storefront, they say it’s the preferred place to send influencer mentions or growth that is rapid or unexpected. “Having Fulfillment by Amazon really helps,” said Hamilton. “We can direct that business to Amazon because we know they can handle a big spike that we would have a harder time managing internally.”
Knowing they have Amazon as a partner, the sisters are doubling down on their roots in a 100-year bet that they’ll be number-one in a whole new category of skin care. A re-formulation in the works uses a technique honed recently in the food industry. It heats and cools wax and oil to create a cream rather than their signature balms. Their new, four-ingredient sunscreen, set to launch in 2024, glides and absorbs into the skin like competitor lotions requiring 30 ingredients to achieve the same effect.
“Balms have been around for thousands of years, but nobody understood how to micro-engineer them to make them more sophisticated,” said Hamilton, who holds a degree in ethnobotany.
“Instead of working with water and oil, and creating a reaction that binds them together, we’re literally growing crystals out of waxes and oils through heating and cooling to create this sophisticated skincare line. It’s waterless, which means you don’t need preservatives, you don’t need emulsifiers, you don’t need thickeners or stabilizers. All you need is your wax and your oil,” she said.
This new technique isn’t cheap or easy. It requires new staff with doctorates in chemistry to achieve a once-theoretical, soon-to-be-commercialized product line. But, it goes back to Badger’s 100-year vision, now being visualized by the second generation. It’s an opportunity to do something that will be enduring, said Hamilton—to pioneer a different type of skincare, while raising the bar on quality. Their newest skin care line will be made with beyond-organic, regenerative farming practices sourced from farms around the world at the peak of freshness. Money is the fuel, said Hamilton, not the goal of Badger’s vision.
It’s a vision they learned from their father growing up and it’s grounded in their ethos. In 2015, as Badger’s popularity grew, founder Bill Whyte worked with state legislators to pass New Hampshire’s Benefit Corporation Legislation, a law that gives businesses the freedom to write a mission into their articles of incorporation that places a priority on the environment, the community, and employees. It transformed how many others in the country do business.
As Amazon continues to invest in services and build tools to support sellers, Hamilton said Badger will take advantage. “Because Amazon is part of Badger’s 100-year vision,” she said. Their new product line will be sold in their Amazon storefront, giving customers the ease of ordering from anywhere in the country. “There should not be a barrier to accessing quality products that support a healthier world,” she said.