'It takes someone coming from the outside to do natural skincare well, otherwise you end up with the same as everyone else'
Say the name Bryan Meehan in West London, and everyone starts scratching their head. Even before I met the 40-year-old Irishman in a café a year ago, I knew he had something to do with organic produce or schools or architecture or music. I knew I knew him, I just didn’t know how. This ‘I know I know him’ echoed across so many circles that I began to wonder whether he existed at all.
A few phone calls later, I discovered that the low-key, rather dishy co-founder of Fresh and Wild is considered hot property and a major player in the vastly profitable green business world. He has several new products out on the market, a stake in a $100 million green fund and friends in high places. He is famously press shy. When asked why he employs a PR agency, he grins ‘To keep me away from people like you.’ There was a serious amount of George Clooney in the grin, and now that I do know who Meehan is, I wonder why we haven’t heard more about him. We will soon.
Locals in my neighbourhood recognise his face because for years he packed their groceries at Fresh and Wild on Westbourne Grove, which he founded with American organic entrepreneur Hass Hassan, when the shop closed, the neighbourhood was up in arms, gobbled up with six other Fresh and Wild stores for £21 million by the American giant Whole Foods Market in 2004, Meehan was the bad guy for a short time.
“I never thought they would shut their most profitable store,” he says. “At one point I ran a clinic for concerned mothers and I reassured them that Whole Foods would be OK and that someone like Daylesford would take the space.”
This matters now because, having made a fortune in organic foods (he had a 15 per cent stake in Fresh and Wild), Meehan has resurfaced in Whole Foods with Nude. This is his new baby: a natural beauty line that promises to fight ageing and comes in biodegradable tubes (there is no box and no leaflet – only the 50 per cent re-cycled bottles). The same fashionable women in Birkenstocks who ogled him at the till are no his prime beauty targets.
Meehan was born in England but raised in Ireland by ambitious parents (his father an entrepreneur himself, left school at 13). Bryan is one of four children, most of whom have done extremely well in business (His brother Paul is senior partner at the management consultancy Bain & Company). He says “We were poor, but my mother was very ambitious and my father very hard-working. At the time Ireland was a seriously Third World country.”
Meehan went to private school in Ireland, then studied in Trinity college in Dublin. He went to work for Guinness in 1991, quickly becoming their youngest senior manager at 25. They offered him a job as a country manager, but Meehan says, “I didn’t want to be a corporate man, selling whisky.” He applied to Harvard Business School. Meanwhile, he met his wife Tara Lloyd, the half-Swiss daughter of a property banker at HSBC, who was raised in Notting Hill.
Harvard was a turning point. “They don’t teach you how to sell things. They give you the tools,” he says. One of those tools was a start-up package for budding entrepreneurs in which ten investors each give $25K and the young graduate sets off in search of a business (the money covers expenses). Should the investors want in, they can reinvest, or they get their money back.
The only advise I had was to pick an industry where there aren’t a 100 other Harvard graduates,” Meehan says. He looked at ceramics, steel, IT, but wrote them all off as boring. The idea of green came through Tara, who was already recycling and eating organic.
Meehan’s first attempt at a buy-out was Planet Organic, but he soon found that the owners were in dispute with each other which, as any entrepreneur knows, is the kiss of death. He then tried his hand at buying Wild Oats, but they said they were talking to a Colorado-based green grocer, Hass Hassan. Rather than compete, the two joined forces and bought Wild Oats and another company called Freshlands, with a lot of £9 million, and founded Fresh and Wild in 1998. “It was my first venture and I did it with private equity,” he says, “so we didn’t control the company.” Lesson number two of Harvard Business School is control the company, so when Whole Foods came knocking, Meehan had to sell. “In so many words, they said “Sell to us or we will be forced to compete with you,” he says.
Whole Foods is under fire in the UK but he is a staunch defender. “People don’t like them because they subscrbe to the American motto that says its OK to say how great you are. In the UK, they knock you down for that. Whole Foods says it as it is, and it pisses people off.” But they can boast as much as they like because, according to Meehan, they are the most profitable food store in the world. “Yes, they’re bigger even than Tesco because Tesco own all its real estate, so they don’t factor in for rent. In terms of profitability, Whole Foods is bigger. They make six per cent cash for every dollar paid.’
Sometime during Meehan’s Fresh and Wild stint, Bono of U2 heard that there was an Irish-man making a noise in organic London, and called him. This started a relationship that eventually turned professional when Meehan started talking about his beauty range idea. ‘Ali Hewson [Bono’s wife] and I were discussing her ethical clothing range Edun, when I told her I wanted to get into natural skincare, she suggested using the name Nude [Edun in nude backwards]. She and Bono are now my investors. Between us we have committed £5 million to the business to get it into profit, which will take three to five years,’ says Meehan. Add the model Christy Turlington (‘a chum’) to the mix: she happily poses for him in magazines, gushing about the product. He says he’s laying off the advertising to let Nude sell itself, but with those contact who needs advertising?
He’s already nabbed a central spot in Harvey Nichols and moves into Barneys in New York in the autumn. Nude vitamins (made by US giant New Chapter) arrive alter this summer. A cosmetics range will follow, amounting I’m sure to a huge beauty empire in the future. If natural beauty products can do what Meehan says they can (stave off wrinkles, while not filling the body with pollutants), then we should all watch this space. He promises he won’t do a Jo Malone or a Crème de la Mer – start small then sell out to a multinational for $50 million. But maybe Harvard Business School lesson number three is: if they want you badly enough, then all the more reason not to sell.
I went to the Nude press launch at Claridge’s with my mind firmly shut. My bathroom cabinets are lined with the latest £50 wrinkle-erasing creams, which, according to Meehan, are packed with nothing short of Agent Orange, ‘Propylene glycol – the stuff you find in antifreeze – they use that to make creams which wont’ fall off your face', he says, ‘I mean they have to wear protective clothing in the labs where they make the stuff.’
His theory – which comes with the help of the best lab in Paris – is that we have to protect the skin acid mantle on the face. This is fragile and easily stripped away by our lifestyles. ‘All the stuff we do – flying, going to parties and getting hammered – breaks down the acid mantle,’ he says ‘In a child it comes back after six hours; in a woman it takes two days.’ So within the formula of all our Nude products are prebiotics and probiotics (the same supplements nutritionists are constantly telling us to eat) mixed with all kinds of exotica including cupuaçu, manketti, baobab and avellana, sourced from trees in Brazil, which provide essential fatty acids.
As soon as unpronounceable magic ingredients come up, my mind starts wandering. Were Meehan a normal salesman, I would have walked off, but Bryan is foremost a businessman, and that’s the difference. He’s had to be converted himself ‘It takes someone coming from the “outside” to do natural skincare well, otherwise you end up with the same as everyone else,’ he says. ‘so I was able to look at better formulations, new ideas (milk peptides and a whole host of active ingredients that are not usually in natural skincare products) and finally packaging issues such as biodegradable, recycled materials. Anyone who knew how hard it was to do this would not have tired.’ After the success of the Boots anti-ageing serum, the question was inevitable. All the claims you make? Prove it. And sure enough, he’s just got some very positive results back from the clinical tests. Moisture Balance, one of the favourites in the range, has been proven to increase moisture by 86.2 per cent in one hour. Meehan assures me he would have been happy with ‘just 20 per cent’.
Nude’s claims are pretty straightforward: the 25 products for the face and body are not organic be are 99 per cent free of anything synthetic or artificial (the synthetic preservative make up just one per cent of the content). They’re as close as you get without, in his words, going down the path whereby although they do absolutely nothing to smooth wrinkles they are harmless. By then why bother? Meehan has to please the purists and the sceptics at the same time. There were many false starts along the way. ‘We’d got really far down the line and then we found that the start we wanted to use for the packaging was GM-modified. It took us nine months to find a biodegradable version.’ He says.
But as far as the medical profession goes, beauty promises are just talk, ‘Most of these creams are expensive for nothing,’ says Dr Daniel Sister, an anti-ageing specialist with Beauty Works West. ‘There is some evidence that certain nutrients taken internally can produce results, but anything put directly on to the skin stay on the surface. The results last only as long as you keep taking the product.’ In other words, nothing comes close to the big guns such as Botox or Retin-A yet.
Nude is a gamble but Meehan has contingency plans. He has made some property investments. He and several other green venture capitalists are raising $100 million for green fund Greenmont Capital Partners, investing in environmentally progressive companies. Already they have sold off Izze, the natural American soda, to Pepsi for $70 million. And finally, he is pretty green himself, ‘I drive a second-hand car, and mostly I use the Tube,’ he says. The house he lives in with his wife and three daughters – Olivia, eight, Eve, Five and Orla, two – was designed by David Cameron’s architect, Alex Michaelis, with a wormery and natural sourced wood.
The Meehans are squeaky clean, goody-goody citizens of West London. The man is charming when talking alfalfa spouts or probiotics, but this is where the Clooney comparison ends. You won’t see him propping up a bar. If there’s one thing Meehan has learned from Whole Foods it is to keep focused, never give anything away and always talk everything up. And, when no one is watching, to admit you think you’re pretty good.