Written by Kaihan Krippendorff and Nazanin Homayoun Jam
At the very beginning of a business, there’s a moment that matters more than the product itself. It’s the moment when a founder realizes they can’t build it alone. An idea only becomes real when others are willing to believe in it, invest their energy in it, and help carry it forward. That act of belief—getting people to see what doesn’t yet exist and choose to build it with you—is one of the hardest and most important challenges in entrepreneurship.
That idea came into sharp focus during my recent conversation with Brent Ridge, co-founder of the beauty brand, Beekman 1802, on the Outthinker podcast. Over and over, Brent has shown a rare ability to bring people along—not by convincing them, but by shaping ideas others can recognize themselves in, and then building a brand and identity strong enough to carry that belief as the company grows.
Make the Idea Bigger Than You
Early in his career at Mount Sinai Hospital, Brent set out to create a center focused on aging and vitality. He didn’t treat it as a fundraising challenge. He treated it as an invitation challenge: how do you make the right people see themselves in the mission?
So, he wrote to I. M. Pei, one of the most influential architects of the modern era, just as he was turning 80, and framed the project as a living proof point: that age can still mean creativity, productivity, and cultural contribution. The response came quickly: “I love this idea.”
He took the same approach with Martha Stewart, not simply as a financier, but as a cultural figure whose brand had always been about living well across life’s stages. Brent sent her a detailed proposal outlining how a new chapter of work could focus on vitality, purpose, and aging with intention. Weeks later, the reply came back through her team: “Martha read your proposal, and she is very interested.”
That’s the pattern: Brent doesn’t ask people to back him. It was about the opportunity he saw for them. As he put it, strategy for him has always been about “a small step forward for me if I can make a big step forward for someone else.”
Make Hay While the Sun Shines
For founders driven by curiosity, downturns don’t stop the work—they sharpen it. When the 2008 recession disrupted careers and closed familiar paths, Brent kept building, guided less by circumstance than by questions.
On a farm in upstate New York, where he and his partner had taken in a neighbor’s goats as a simple act of kindness, they began the kind of inventory entrepreneurs turn to when options narrow. What assets are actually here? What kind of product could we offer? And who already has the context to want it?
Goat milk soap became the entry point, though not the ambition. Brent built the business by paying close attention to context—where the product could live, which retailers were ready for it, and how to tell the story so it felt both human and credible. When momentum appeared, he moved with it, shifting quickly from a small online site to introducing the product to the luxury sector. It’s what Brent calls “make hay while the sun shines”—not as hustle for its own sake, but as good judgment: recognizing momentum and acting on it.
Anchor Growth in What You Stand For
From the beginning, the brand was built around kindness—not as marketing, but as a design choice and central to its culture.
They rejected conventional beauty narratives and defined themselves instead as Beekman 1802, grounded in science and skin health. They treated skin as both physical and emotional—recognizing that mental health and well-being, and the psychological effect of kindness, show up on the body.
He said, “We still list kindness as an ingredient on our ingredient list on every single product to remind people that kindness has health benefits too. It’s not just about what you’re putting on your skin. It’s about what you’re putting in your mind and how you see yourself.”
In doing so, they fueled a trend that didn’t exist before. They named it and became pioneers.
The identity of the brand reinforced that philosophy. The yellow choice of the packaging, the goat icon with a big head and eyes that remind you of cute little animals and babies, were all intentional choices in designing the brand. In other words, brand design isn’t decoration. It’s emotional engineering in service of the promise: if skin reflects what’s happening inside, then the brand experience itself should improve what’s happening inside.
Design What Needs to Last at Scale
Later on, as the company scaled, that culture didn’t get diluted—it got operationalized. Kindness became part of onboarding, setting a clear expectation for how people work with one another from day one.
That thinking was then formalized through specific programs. The Kindness Curriculum was designed to translate the company’s values into practical behaviors, giving teams a shared language and set of practices around empathy, collaboration, and respect. Kindness.ai took that a step further, using technology to prompt small, intentional acts of kindness at scale, helping reinforce those behaviors consistently rather than leaving them to chance.
The effort wasn’t limited to the inside of the company. Beekman extended the same commitment outward, backing scientific research to better understand the impact of kindness on health and well-being, and launching initiatives like the Kindness Crew. Through that program, individuals were encouraged—and incentivized—to take concrete actions that spread kindness in their own communities, turning customers into participants rather than just buyers.
As Brent liked to put it: “The true measure of authenticity is longevity.”
In that sense, scale wasn’t about preserving a feeling from the early days. It was about building systems that allowed the culture to endure—and still mean something—as the company grew.
So here’s the question we would like to leave you with:
As you grow, what belief are you asking others to carry with you—and have you invested enough in your people, culture, and systems to make them want to stay and keep building it?