![]() ![]() “I launched the first men’s grooming brand for L’Oreal Paris, and then after a couple of years, I started begging them to transfer me back to the U.S.,” he says. Joining L’Oreal, he worked on men’s grooming. Growing up in Paris, he’d longed to move to New York since watching Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing.” After college at McGill University in Montreal, he worked briefly in the city, then went to back to Europe to do an MBA at Insead. His cofounder and co-CEO, Bernet, 44, is a native Parisian who’d also spent years at L’Oreal. “How do I take it to the next level to really impact manufacturing?” “I figured this was my proof of concept,” he says. While Guilbert stepped back from operations in 2016, he remains co-chairperson of the board and holds a stake in the business that he terms “not symbolic.” The success left him itching to do something else. Today, Harmless counts Danone’s venture arm as a significant backer and is one of the country’s top coconut water brands, sold in some 70,000 stores. “I tend to be overly confident in my abilities, which has allowed me to move forward whistling in the wind,” he says. “It kicked ass, and a lot of people took notice.” By 2016, the company had surpassed $100 million in sales. “We built our factory in the middle of farmland in Thailand to create healthcare programs for social good,” he says. Harmless, which was both organic and naturally pink because of its minimal processing, soon launched in Whole Foods. He left in 2008, and two years later started coconut water company Harmless Harvest with a friend. “The whole design of Battalion is to create a community where people forget they are testers.” “We were creating these narratives that we would monetize with products.” “The reality I saw was that R&D in manufacturing was serving marketing,” he says. After an early failed startup, he went to work for L’Oreal, running marketing campaigns for Maybelline and Garnier. He started his career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York, and hated it so much he quit in just a few months. It’s why you’re doing it and how you’re doing it,’” he says. He always had these very interesting mantras I would learn from as a kid, ‘Getting rich is great, but once you’re there, there’s nothing interesting. “He was, for me, as close as you could get to a social entrepreneur today. His grandfather, John Becker, was a World War II Navy lieutenant who founded Eurpac Service to distribute brands to the military and served as chairman of the USO. Guilbert, 43, grew up in Paris – his mom is American, his dad French – an expat overseas. “The more we can find ways to work with tech entrepreneurs, we want to do that.” Army Combat Capabilities Development Command. “All the way up to the Army Futures Command, there’s a lot of interest in doing things like this,” says Christopher McGroarty, chief engineer of advanced simulation at the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Center, which is looking at how it can capture user feedback on Battalion as it works to create a synthetic training environment. And it has a cooperative research and development agreement, or Crada, with the U.S. It’s also working on wound care and Covid-19 safety and hygiene products in conjunction with researchers at NYU Langone Health those products are expected to launch next spring. Guilbert says the company has signed agreements with major consumer-products companies, which he declines to name, to use Battalion to develop new products. “We’re essentially trying to rethink collaborative manufacturing that is community driven,” Guilbert says, “and not just pie-in-the-sky community.”īravo Sierra's products are modestly priced yet free of unhealthy ingredients Courtesy of Bravo Sierra Through their recently launched parent company, New York City-based Rhizome, they are starting to work with the Department of Defense and consumer-products companies, as well as incubating their own brands, including a new nutrition brand called Echelon. ![]() The founders discovered that the same proprietary software and community testing, called Battalion, that they’d used to design the products for Bravo Sierra could also help the government and other companies do their own research and development with less risk. More interesting, though, is what’s happened since the launch. “I tend to be overly confident in my abilities, which has allowed me to move forward whistling in the wind.” That performance helped the company land on Forbes’ Survivors and Thrivers list of 25 small-business standouts that outperformed during the pandemic. Despite Covid-19, the startup is expected to reach some $6 million in sales for 2020, its first full year of operation, and the Bravo Sierra brand is slated to roll out at Target in 2021. With the help of Charles Kim, a former Army Ranger who became the third cofounder, the brand launched with eight products in August 2019. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |