The promise of regenerative organic agriculture. The hypocrisy of the criminal justice system. The philosophical awakenings they experienced as a student at Harvard in the ’90s. The other topics David covers include, but are not limited to: their grandfather’s failings as a father. “When you’re ready,” David tells the group, “the divine is going to meet you.” David is now talking about their spiritual journey and the idea of the divine. Today she gazes upon the scene with a faintly absent look that indicates she has grown desensitized to the idiosyncrasies of her eldest child. A Christian and a conservative, Trudy married into the family-and, eventually, the business-when she wed Emanuel’s late son Jim in 1968. And in the corner sits the matriarch, the company’s long-running CFO, Trudy Bronner, Michael and David’s 79-year-old mother. On the periphery of the room is their brother-in-law Michael Milam, the company’s COO, a brainy and straitlaced numbers guy with degrees in business and theology. Bronner’s has always been a family company, and present among the new employees and the Foamy Homies is David’s younger brother and the company’s president, Michael Bronner. Michael, left, and David Bronner, who now run the soap business founded by their grandfather, at work in the company’s Southern California headquarters.ĭr. Within a few minutes of taking the microphone at employee orientation, David will discuss more existentially heavy topics with this group of strangers than most people will address with their spouses over the course of a lifetime. David is eager to talk about their spirituality and makes reference to “that mystical Christian” deep inside. Bronner’s liquid soaps.ĭavid Bronner, at 50, is lanky, lumbering, and low-talking, but has a brain that moves quickly. Just around the bend from the new-employee onboarding session sits a group of massive industrial tanks filled with the coconut, olive, and palm kernel oils used for Dr. Bronner’s products are produced and packaged at the company’s headquarters in Southern California, which is home to factory space filled with refinery equipment and high-tech bottling devices. It’s this messaging that has helped gird the family with an ethical framework to weather the forces-globalization, rapid growth, incessant corporate buyout offers-that have perennially threatened to undermine its mission. Bronner’s soap is sold every two seconds or so. Emanuel’s grandsons David and Michael now preside over an empire in which a bottle of Dr. Especially staggering, maybe, to the customers who’ve been affectionately buying its signature minty formula since the days of the natural-product boom of the ’60s and ’70s. Bronner’s-over $170 million in revenue in 2022-are still kind of staggering. And yet, even as so many Americans have come to possess a fondness for the soap, the raw numbers around the success of Dr. Today, the iconography of its labels-and Emanuel’s far-out messaging-is imprinted firmly in the psyche of the American consumer. The company now sells not only its liquid soap but highly successful lines of balms, toothpastes, coconut oil, and hand sanitizers, in addition to newly launched chocolates that were immediately hailed by gourmands as a premium product. Bronner’s has vastly outgrown its quirky, humble origins and become the top-selling natural soap brand in North America.
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