| NEW HAMPSHIRE | |
| BUSINESS REVIEW | DECEMBER 4, 1997
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is making shampoo bars in Cornish barn. |
| NEW HAMPSHIRE | |
| BUSINESS REVIEW | DECEMBER 4, 1997
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is making shampoo bars in Cornish barn. |
| By Raymond Hughes Jim Liggett had it all - cushy pad in New York City, a couple of Clio Awards (the Oscar of advertising) on the wall of his office at the prestigious advertising firm of Ogilvy and Mather, tickets to the Met. Now the 49-year-old Nebraska native with a fine arts degree makes shampoo in a barn in Cornish. We are talking here about a man whose award winning advertising campaign "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge (as a centerpiece for its 1984 centennial celebration, that is), the art director who was the graphics half of the team who came up with the idea of using the Pink Panther to sell Owens Corning insulation, along with the package design for Pepperidge Farm's Fruit Cookies and Hershey's Solitaires. Today he makes shampoo by hand in a barn and not because his career crashed and his portfolio plummeted. For J.R. Liggett's Old Fashioned Bar Shampoo is no ordinary shampoo. First, it comes in a bar made with only natural oils and positively no harsh detergents. "Before World War 11 there were no detergents," says Liggett, who has been selling the shampoo for 10 years. Detergent, per se, was developed by the Navy in 1942 from petroleum based products to do one thing - strip oil. So when you use a liquid shampoo with detergent - and almost every one is detergent-based - you will, by definition, strip all the natural oils from your scalp."
Though possibly not as profitable, since Liggett insists you need no conditioner after his shampoo, a litany of letters in his files confirms he enjoys one of the most contented, conditioner-free customer bases going. One Alaskan with six daughters thanked him for the dramatic drop in shower time. A couple of minutes extra for each girl to condition adds up, the man said. "Since my shampoo contains no detergents, it removes only the excess oils and dirt and leaves the hair and scalp with enough natural oil to maintain health and vitality so you don't need to add anything back. Why strip the natural oils from your hair which keep the scalp healthy?" Liggett came across the New England recipe for the "hair soap" years ago on a hand written recipe card, loosely put into an old New England cookbook. 100% natural and biodegradable, it of course fits in the natural products arena, but designed as a bar as per recipe, it is unique even in a health food store. Almost as unique is the array of production pieces Jim made to mix, dry, cut, and cure the bars. "When I first started, absolutely everything was done by hand. One of my first priorities -and it was a huge step - was to get a wrapping machine to wrap the paper packaging over the bar. From 1989 to '93, all our bars were hand-wrapped by a woman in Claremont, but it took two weeks to wrap 3,000 by hand. No one could have kept that up. The machine, a '50s vintage that would cost a half-million new, which we got for a fraction of that, does 3,000 in two hours. We can now produce 25,000 to 30,000 a month. We're not there yet, but..." The "but" is the expectation that by next March Jim hopes to have patented a carrying case that will launch the bar shampoo into the travel world. Since the bar has to stay dry between uses so it doesn't deteriorate, for years he has struggled to develop a travel case that will literally mobilize his marketing force. The little wooden rack I designed to hold and dry the bar for the bath just couldn't be practically adapted to travel. With the new device, I'll open the door not only to travelers, but to the backpacking/camping sector like L.L. Bean - you can use my shampoo in a stream, and it would not hurt the fish. Another development was a recent QVC home shopping channel promotion Liggett did as part of "Naturally New Hampshire." He spent six minutes demonstrating his product on TV, sold 1600 bars and received a lather of letters praising his product. The shampoo is so starkly different and user-friendly, Liggett emphasizes, that even those with the worst of skin sensitivities can normally use it - some people even use it as a soap. Doctors, dentists, psoriasis patients - literally from almost every state and even countries as far away as Japan (a recent marketplace addition) have written to thank Liggett for his product.
No matter the type of store, Liggett's bars of shampoo are distributed in every state and over seas. Due to his exposure through a program of the N.H. Department of Resources and Economic Development, a Japanese distributor became interested in the product several years ago.
Though you can now find his shampoo in several department stores in Japan, Jim notes that it took more than a year to even get Japanese Government approval to market the product. "First, we had to submit our formula," said Liggett, adding that he did not give it so accurately that it could be duplicated. "Even after product approval, it was extremely difficult to get into stores. I believe we succeeded because, first, the packaging is very American looking second, being a bar, it is in a completely different form, so it is novel." True, the bars may be machine-wrapped (he did learn to operate the machine himself), but this shampoo is otherwise 100 percent hand-made, beginning with the meticulous measurements (1600 bars a batch) to the mixing, heating pouring and cutting. The trickiest part is drying it after it is cut into bars," said Liggett, looking over dozens of racks of the cream-colored cakes. "Then it has to be kept at the right temperature and the right humidity for several weeks. This shampoo is far more complicated and difficult to make than soap as the formula has different oils and the reaction is finicky. Anyone can make soap." "Don't get me wrong, I loved soap-making from the first when my Aunt Ann taught me in Nebraska when I was five. It was enticing, involving and when finished it could be used. Plus, you can incorporate different types of oils. There are thousands of different soaps you can make. Indeed, for years Jim made soaps, handing the bars out as presents. After he came across the 'hair soap" formula and found that it turned out 'incredible" he played with the proportions a little, making larger and larger batches while he gave it to more and more people each year as gifts.
"The answer was 'yes'. I also found out that normal people have two to four different shampoos lying around. What does that tell you about product satisfaction?" Jim adds modestly that now you only need one - and it comes with a money back guarantee, plus it is wrapped in paper, not a bulky, possibly non-recyclable container. And one $4.95 bar is the equivalent of 24 ounces of liquid shampoo. Still, giving up a brownstone in Brooklyn and a career to make shampoo in a barn? I'm from Nebraska, so my roots are rural," the six-foot-plus Cornhusker points out. "I had tasted New York, lived there for years, but there wasn't much mystery or magic left. The intrigue was gone, our two girls were about raised. I knew how to bring a product to life, and that along with a product I wanted to share, enabled me to move back rural and earn a livelihood. My wife - who actually came up with the name for the shampoo - and I were looking for a place where we would end up. We looked for years for a place up here, We wanted 25 acres or more, fresh water, something old yet commercially accessible.
Six months later, they were the owners of the oldest house in Cornish, NH with plenty of spring water, 50 acres and a dooryard right on Rt. 12-A. The product he now produces there has a turn-of-the-century look and feel, but he guarantees it will leave you with ultra modern hair.
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And that by definition is unnatural,
and it s all too natural that shampoo manufacturers will gladly sell you
a second product, a conditioner, to mellow the effects of their first
product.
At the same time, I wanted out of
advertising, so in the course of my work I made contacts and developed
my own market research specifically for shampoo. A question for those
I surveyed was whether or not they would buy a bar shampoo.
"We read of this one, and the day
we came up, in 1982, we were crossing the Connecticut River from Ascutney,
VT., into New Hampshire. I was looking at the map and knew about where
to look, I pointed upriver from the bridge and there was a seven-band
rainbow right over where the house was. Neither Diane or I had seen a
rainbow in years."