Richard Christiansen traded in a life of luxury (goods) for life on the farm, though it happened in an unexpected way.
A vegetable farmer he was in touch with during Covid told him they were going to “lose the farm” as all the restaurants they sold to closed. “We said bring the vegetables over and we will sell them,” Christiansen recalled in an interview at CNBC’s “Small Business Playbook.”
“I had spent my whole life in advertising and one farm became two, and then ten, and then 150 farms,” he said in an interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at the virtual event.
While he spent decades coming up with campaigns for companies like Hermes, farming was part of Christiansen’s DNA, with both of his parents farmers in rural Australia, where he grew up.
“It’s backbreaking work and the toughest job in the world,” he said. “I know the grunt and grind of farming.”
And after running an ad agency for two decades, he founded Flamingo Estate to take a look at farming, he said, with “a new set of eyes” that considered agriculture as a brand which could benefit from “luxury brand cues.”
Christiansen says it turned out that trading in the world of Hermes for the farm was a wise decision. “Mother Nature is the last great luxury house,” he said.
Flamingo Estate has expanded from those original vegetable boxes to olive oil, and olive oil as an ingredient for soap and candles. That was part of a big shift in Flamingo Estate’s expansion as Christiansen realized that the company could help farmers make higher margin products by taking food grade ingredients into areas like household goods, beauty and the kitchen pantry.
Many celebrities have endorsed, or directly worked with Flamingo Estate, starting with Chrissy Teigen and John Legend. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and Oprah have both featured its products.
“Many were customers, just really happy customers and said we like what you are doing, can we get involved?” Christiansen said. That led to Flamingo Estate transporting bee hives to the homes of celebrities to harvest honey for charity, with maybe the most famous example the hives on the roof of Lebron James’s house.
Julianne Moore has also produced honey, while Laura Dern has made olive oil, and next up, Christiansen said, is growing pickles with Pamela Anderson.
Christiansen said if we want people to think about the environment differently, we have to show it to them differently. “Taking unexpected faces and getting their hands in the soil,” is one way to accomplish that, he said.
One thing he did learn from work on Hermes branding was what it takes for a brand to hold “the test of time,” he said, which has led Flamingo Estate to closely control its messaging, or as Christiansen said, “police the brand cues very tightly,” with his partner Aaron Harvey overseeing all of the design and Christiansen all the writing.
“There are so many people making things but not building brands,” he said. In the way every product is made, bottled, and packaged, Christiansen says he sees “real magic” and a question that many bigger-scale product companies never even consider: “Is there a true story to tell?”
Christiansen boils down his approach to building a broad consumer products company to “making things I use every day at home. One great coffee, and one great product for skin, and one great thing for being in the sun all day.”
“Even though it is broad, we have a really sharp focus on utility,” he said.
Christiansen also said he is a big fan of being “radically inconsistent,” an idea which is recognizable in the wide variety of products that the company now offers.
“We expect that from wine, season to season it’s different and we celebrate it, but something made well like hand soap should be different season to season because botanicals will change and ingredients will change,” he said. “It’s a little bit of calculated madness.”
That approach may have reached its peak with a $75 compost bag that was produced as a Mother’s Day-timed gift and got a much larger reaction than the company anticipated. There was utility in the idea, in that farm goats were producing so much manure, but Christiansen said it was also born of a belief in “the power of play and trying things.”
“Just to work seasonally and pivot and try and have fun. There is joy there that many brands don’t have,” he said.
Flamingo Estate has dreams of being a billion-dollar company. It is not close to that yet, but it is growing, doubling sales this year to $30 million and forecasting $50 million in sales by early next year, according to Christiansen. The company has already expanded to Australia, is about to launch in Japan, and will enter the European market next year, he said.
One of the biggest hurdles was finding investors. Christiansen says it took several years to find the right partners and get properly funded, a process that included over 60 pitch meetings.
One issue, he says, was the fact that Flamingo Estate is not a “single SKU” product company. The venture capital community loves one-product companies, but Flamingo Estate is doing food, beauty, and household goods, and efficiently running the different businesses, which Christiansen said is “a riddle” for many investors.
He said many of the initial investment meetings would always circle back to the “exit goal,” a topic that Christiansen was not interested in.
“I would say ‘we started running, why are we talking exit?'” he recalled.
Many investors also wanted the company to focus on beauty because it has the highest margins and “kill everything else,” he recalled.
“Not following other people’s playbooks, I think not doing that set us up well,” he now says. “There are lots of entry points into the brand,” he added.
That leads Christiansen to say the one piece of advice he has for all business owners is to find the right partners, and in his experience, that meant people who have already built their own businesses, “people who know what it’s like to be in the thick of things,” he said. “They’ve made the best partners,” he added.
