Burt’s Bees Co-Founder Burt Shavitz Dies At 80

Quimby claims that she gave him $4 million and Clorox paid him to serve as brand ambassador.

Shavitz, who died Sunday at his home in rural Maine, and that hitchhiker would eventually become business partners.

Shavitz in the Sixties worked as a photojournalist in New York, training his lens on civil rights leaders, beat poets, artists and images key to the growing environmental movement. Shavitz, who sold honey on the side of the road, joined forces with Quimby to make candles using beeswax from his hives. She said that Burt Shavitz was an enigma and at the same time her mentor and muse, according to The Washington Post. “They made $200 at their first craft fair”, said Burt’s Bees.

Burt Shavitz, the Burt behind Burt’s Bees who co-founded the natural cosmetics company before it sold to Clorox, has died.

Shavitz has said that he was forced out of the company because he had an affair with an employee.

Mr Shavitz received an undisclosed settlement – and 37 acres in remote corner of Maine. But no matter – Shavitz continued to work as a sort of brand ambassador for the company, according to the Daily Beast, and otherwise live as simple as it gets, with no hot water, Internet or television. “I am deeply saddened”, Ms. Quimby said in an e-mailed statement to The Associated Press.

Shavitz’ mantra from his life for all to remember is to “never lose sight of our relationship with nature”.

Despite the heartfelt message, the Maine-based personal care company, known for creating natural products, had a complicated relationship with Shavitz, who was the subject of a 2013 documentary. They moved the company headquarters from Maine to North Carolina in 1994, and Quimby bought out Shavitz in the late 1990s, not without controversy and for a sum of less than $1 million, reportedly. He was described as a free-spirited, wild beard, wisecracking, Golden Retriever-loving, beekeeper from Maine. And you can see in the video below – a clip filmed in Taiwan from Burt’s Buzz, a documentary about Shavitz’s business and unconventional life – he even had a certain global rock-star quality to him.

“I realized if I stayed there long enough, I’d end up in the same boat, which is nothing I wanted to do”, he said then. He discovered photography while traveling the world, and his work appeared in Life and Time magazines.