Latest news with #RichardChristiansen
CNBC
6 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
Luxury brand exec left world of Hermes for life on farm. It's now a $50 million home business, and growing
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.
CNBC
6 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
How Flamingo Estate, celebrity-endorsed farming-to-consumer startup, raises money the right way
Richard Christiansen, founder of Flamingo Estate, on how he turned a mission to save one vegetable farmer's business during Covid into a $50 million business spanning food, beauty and household goods, and major celebrity partnerships.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Our Favorite Gardens
A boxwood parterre with topiary and roses, bordered by lemon trees, in front of the manor house of Condes de Santar e Magalhães in central Portugal. Read more here. In the gardens of the creative director Richard Christiansen's Los Angeles home, Flamingo Estate, a fountain filled with Cara Cara oranges from the organic fruit farm Ken's Top Notch Produce. Read more here. A view of the peony beds in the garden of the English floral designer Milli Proust's 17th-century home in the Sussex countryside. The fencing is made from coppiced chestnut and hazel. Read more here. The photographer Bill Henson turned the former parking lot next door to his studio in the Northcote suburb of Melbourne, Australia, into a botanical garden. Read more here. Allium, foxglove, chives, alchemilla and roses grow in the designer Jasper Conran's tangled garden in Dorset, England. Read more here. A view of the Atlantic Ocean from the writer and horticulturist Umberto Pasti's garden, Rohuna, an hour's drive south of Tangier. Read more here. A rooftop garden on Paris's Rue Vieille du Temple that the landscape architect Arnaud Casaus designed, featuring narrow-leaved mock privet, African lily, rosemary, Mediterranean spurge and Verbena bonariensis, among other plants. The Willy Guhl chairs are vintage. Read more here. At the end of a walking path near the actress Julianne Moore and the filmmaker Bart Freundlich's house in Montauk, N.Y., a stone bench by the artist Robert Gurr. Read more here. Standard trained white wisteria, climbing roses and Oriental poppies in the rose border of the writer Olivia Laing's home in Suffolk, England. Read more here. In the Brazilian landscape architect Isabel Duprat's Jardim Botânico in São Paulo, a low-lying cover of grama-amendoim is fringed by monarch ferns, St. Christopher's lily and purple taro, and shaded by towering Brazilian cedar. A sculpture by Franz Weissmann is visible, back right. Read more here. Louis Benech, France's most revered landscape designer, created the gardens at Mas Sainte-Anne, the home of François and Maryvonne Pinault outside St.-Tropez. More than 20 years later, the area is lush with lavender, Helichrysum petiolare and olive trees. Read more here. The cutting garden at Robin Hill, the art dealer Susan Sheehan and the rug trader John O'Callaghan's neo-Georgian mansion in Norfolk, Conn., is situated in a woodland clearing and includes a seasonally changing selection of perennials used for arrangements in the house. Read more here. The view from Robin Standefer's ceramics studio on the Montauk, N.Y., property she shares with her husband and design partner, Stephen Alesch, includes a large Tardiva hydrangea, Queen Anne's lace, cosmos and white yarrow. Read more here. The landscape designer Dan Pearson's expansive Somerset estate celebrates the English countryside. Here, an ornamental garden transitions seamlessly to a wildflower meadow, where Pearson and his longtime romantic partner and collaborator, Huw Morgan, walk along the mowed path. Read more here. More than 150 varieties of cactus, cultivated since the 1960s by the Thiemann family, grow on 17 desert acres outside of Marrakesh. Read more here. In the hills of southwest England, the writer Ian McEwan and his wife, the novelist Annalena McAfee, have added a joyfully unruly bed of foxglove, lady's mantle, iris, allium and meadow rue to one of the yew-hedge rooms on their nine-acre Cotswolds property. Read more here.
