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One sunny morning not too long ago, a dozen or so new hires arrive at the headquarters of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps in Vista, California. They’ve shown up to a fairly standard-looking suburban office park to be initiated into their standard-sounding roles in -liquid-soap production, shipping, and regional sales. But the normalcy ends quickly on Planet Bronner. They park their cars in a sea of solar–powered electric-vehicle chargers and then walk past a company–tended garden, where fruits and vegetables are anyone’s for the taking. Inside, they are greeted warmly—and perhaps thrown off guard a bit—by the Dr. Bronner’s welcome wagon, a crew of impossibly upbeat humans who can best be described as vibey. These cultural ambassadors, when they are not planning their annual Burning Man pilgrimages, wear tie-dye mechanic coveralls and drive around Dr. Bronner’s HQ blasting disco from a psychedelically outfitted fire truck. They call themselves the Foamy Homies.
The new hires make their way to a conference room for their employee–onboarding session, where they have been prompted by the Foamy Homies to introduce themselves by showing off their preferred dance moves while a fog machine pumps vaporous clouds into the room. By the time this fresh crop of Dr. Bronner’s employees hears from the company’s CEO, David Bronner—who long ago revised the abbreviation to stand for Cosmic Engagement Officer—they have realized that this will not be a standard manufacturing gig at all.
“I’m on the All-One path,” announces David—who uses he/they pronouns—standing before the group, referring to the sweeping ideology coined by their eccentric grandfather, Emanuel Bronner. Emanuel, who possessed no advanced degree but was undeterred in adopting a physician’s title, founded Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps in the late 1940s, in large part because he wanted to broadcast his ideas about unifying the human race, and his All-One dicta are still printed on the brand’s soap-bottle labels. In the early years of the company, Dr. Bronner’s was a genuine grassroots operation—a cult-favorite brand passed, if not directly from the hands of Emanuel himself, among hippies camping out in vans at places like Woodstock. Emanuel would distribute his product by promising a free bottle of soap to anyone who would show up to listen to him proselytize the All-One message.
Two generations later, Dr. Bronner’s has vastly outgrown its quirky, humble origins and become the top-selling natural soap brand in North America. 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. Today, the iconography of its labels—and Emanuel’s far-out messaging—is imprinted firmly in the psyche of the American consumer. And yet, even as so many Americans have come to possess a fondness for the soap, the raw numbers around the success of Dr. Bronner’s—over $170 million in revenue in 2022—are still kind of staggering. 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. Emanuel’s grandsons David and Michael now preside over an empire in which a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap is sold every two seconds or so.
But perhaps more notable than the company’s sheer growth is the durability of Emanuel’s founding ethos, the All-One ideology that the family still suffuses into every element of the business. All-One—and its attendant Moral ABC—is the quasi-religious doctrine that was the very reason for the existence of Dr. Bronner’s original soap bottles, which served as vessels for his beliefs. If you are ever bored in the shower, you can give yourself an extensive education in the chaotic, zealous, AND EXCLAMATION POINT–FILLED! All-One philosophy via the tiny text on the labels. Boiled down to its essence, All-One has a pretty unimpeachable and evergreen mandate: “In all we do, let us be generous, fair & loving to Spaceship Earth and all its inhabitants,” Emanuel wrote. “For we’re ALL-ONE OR NONE!”
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. Most 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. 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 liquid soaps.
David Bronner, at 50, is lanky, lumbering, and low-talking, but has a brain that moves quickly. David is eager to talk about their spirituality and makes reference to “that mystical Christian” deep inside. 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.
Dr. 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. 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. And in the corner sits the matriarch, the company’s long-running CFO, Trudy Bronner, Michael and David’s 79-year-old mother. A Christian and a conservative, Trudy married into the family—and, eventually, the business—when she wed Emanuel’s late son Jim in 1968. Today she gazes upon the scene with a faintly absent look that indicates she has grown desensitized to the idiosyncrasies of her eldest child. David is now talking about their spiritual journey and the idea of the divine. “When you’re ready,” David tells the group, “the divine is going to meet you.”
The other topics David covers include, but are not limited to: their grandfather’s failings as a father. Their Christian-Reaganite upbringing. The philosophical awakenings they experienced as a student at Harvard in the ’90s. The hypocrisy of the criminal justice system. The promise of regenerative organic agriculture. The prolonged legal battle that Dr. Bronner’s waged against the DEA after the company reformulated its liquid soap to include hemp seed oil in 1999. The production of olive oil in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The trip they took to Amsterdam after college, and, perhaps most crucially, the spiritual rebirth experienced there by way of psychedelics.
The trip was so mind-blowing that David has since made it their life mission—and eventually the company’s—to drive efforts in the United States to legalize psychedelics, and more broadly, end the drug war. And they have succeeded, in spite of any skepticism and unease that some colleagues might have toward this trippy streak. In 2021 the company spent over $4.4 million on drug and psychedelics policy reform efforts, part of which helped pass a Colorado ballot measure last year to decriminalize certain psychedelics.
By the time David starts talking about metaphorical ego death and coming face-to-face with Jesus while under the influence of psychedelics, everyone in the room has become pretty inured to the far-out nature of the spiel. “All of a sudden I’m talking to God, and I’m like, Wait a minute. If this love is real, and this is true, then why does it suck so bad? Why are there people being murdered and raped, and all of the worst stuff? Seeing the allness of it all…” David trails off. “And then seeing Jesus stepping in, just calm and compassionate. Not trying to explain, not trying to complain, just stepping in.
“I was like, Wow, I want to be like that,” they continue. “That’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to serve. We’re part of the divine that can activate the divine, and stop that aggression and oppression and make peace on earth.”
Can a soap company activate the divine? Dr. Bronner’s has succeeded at realizing so many seemingly unfeasible visions over the last quarter century that it is not outside of the realm of possibility. Three decades ago, when Dr. Bronner’s was a super-minty soap brand remembered fondly by washed-up hippies, all of this highfalutin talk was mostly still just talk. But in the years since Emanuel Bronner’s progeny took over the business, Dr. Bronner’s has quietly but self–assuredly evolved beyond its humble origins to become a legitimate titan of the beauty and cleaning industries as well as a household staple. The brand no longer relies on hippies passing Bronner’s bottles between VW vans, seeing as how Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan Markle openly profess their love for the lavender soap.
Growth is one thing, but Dr. Bronner’s has managed to become a major player in its market while painstakingly encoding its ethics into every step of the production process. In fact, it could be argued that Emanuel Bronner predicted the current era of ethically minded business, and certainly ethically minded marketing. And now the humble soap brand finds itself at the vanguard of every philosophical and logistical question that American entrepreneurs are grappling with right now. All of its good deeds—from rigorously engineered fair trade supply chains to charitable donations and environmentally minded manufacturing—are thoroughly cataloged in the Dr. Bronner’s annual public accountability report card, the All-One! Report.
These ideals are built into the complex corporate architecture of Dr. Bronner’s—a certified Benefit Corporation as of 2015—and an agreement between David and Michael ensures that the business won’t be sold off to a global conglomerate anytime soon. It’s a fate that’s befallen so many household-name natural health and food brands, many of which began to flourish in the same era following the late-’60s counterculture revolution that Dr. Bronner’s did. It may seem easier than ever to stock your cabinets with granola-y, righteously sourced products, but that’s only because they’ve been subsumed into the old corporate model: Tom’s of Maine is now Colgate-Palmolive. Burt’s Bees is Clorox. Trader Joe’s is operated by the Albrechts, the family behind Aldi. And Bragg—of apple cider vinegar fame—was recently acquired by an investor group that included Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom. Perhaps the only other business similar in scale and ethical ambition is Patagonia, the company so steadfastly resistant to the conventional corporate model that its founder and his family transferred the company’s ownership into a trust and nonprofit organization last year to insulate it from the forces of capitalism.
“Most brands and companies our size sell out to some soulless conglomerate that has not a lot of ethics in the world,” David reminds the group. “We get to rock it how we want here. Soap, work hard, rock that product, and then…joy. Drop the joy in there, make sure we’re having fun while doing good in the world and making good products.”
In this obscenely scam-ridden day and age, it is reasonable to assume that anyone sermonizing like this in the realm of business is one false step away from being exposed as a charlatan. But the Bronners genuinely do seem to, in the parlance of thought-leadership conferences, walk the walk. The combination of Christian clemency and drug–induced ego surrender is potent. The executives, despite ranging from the conservative to the progressive, have all agreed to cap their own executive salaries at five times the lowest-paid fully vested Dr. Bronner’s employees, which means they cannot earn more than about $300,000 per year. It’s a policy that frees up funds for a waterfall of annual charitable donations and, more importantly, an enviable company culture for its over 300 workers. Dr. Bronner’s boasts the sort of employee benefits that would make Bezos shudder, including a health-insurance policy with company-paid premiums, bonuses, free daily vegan lunches prepared by the Foamy Homies, access to therapy, and, as of 2022, coverage of ketamine-assisted mental health treatment.
This bouquet of life-changing employee benefits is probably why, on the day of their initiation, the new employees of Dr. Bronner’s seem rapt by David’s pontification. They gamely participate in the celebratory session and erupt with applause when David wraps up their spiel.
“We just get to live the dream here,” David says. “Thanks for joining the team. Right on.”
There is one person present who can bring everyone down to earth a bit and remind the crowd that this, after all, is a job. This reminder arrives when David’s mother, Trudy, takes the lectern. “We do a lot of good, and we think we treat you right. And we expect you to work hard,” she says. She points to a cluster of six core principles of Dr. Bronner’s that have been printed onto the wall behind her. “Every time I give a tour to little kids, it’s like, What’s the first thing you have to do to be a successful person, really? That’s the work hard.”
“We are an unusual company,” she adds, speaking almost as if she is addressing her sons as much as these new employees. “Not every day will you have an experience like you had today.”
“I don’t like to be joint–interviewed with my brother,” Michael explains with a grin after the onboarding session, as we sit down at a picnic table outside. “I love my brother, and we can rap back and forth, but when he’s telling the story and I’m waiting for my chance to interject, he pivots to psychedelics. Like, no, we’re not talking about the 1960s!”
Michael is 48 and, in spite of the tie-dye T-shirt he’s wearing today, is more buttoned up than David. He says they are “85 percent the same,” but the differences are meaningful. Warm, thoughtful, and possessed by so much nervous energy that he’s capable of pacing seven miles over the course of a day while taking phone calls, Michael tells me that he’s just started watching Succession. He cannot help but laugh at the family business of it all. (“It’s exactly what I don’t want to be,” he says.) There are, of course, imperfect parallels to be spotted between the two families, chiefly the trio of siblings grappling with the future of their family business. (Michael and David’s sister, Lisa, will arrive at headquarters later today.) Michael has a lightly adversarial relationship with his older sibling that mostly manifests as Michael affectionately trying to get a word in edgewise. But now, alone, he holds the floor, and he has plenty worthwhile to say.
We are ostensibly here to discuss his role as president of the company, but any discussion of Dr. Bronner’s inevitably turns into a remembrance of family lore. “I grew up with my grandfather being the man on the mountain,” Michael tells me. “It wasn’t until I could literally understand Shakespeare that I could understand the depths of what he was talking about.”
Dr. Emanuel Bronner loved aphorisms and slogans. The sermonizing soap bottles were so endemic to the Bronner brand that David eventually figured out how to create labels that wouldn’t disintegrate in the shower. Today, the fine print of the label has become so iconic that it is often used in memes by people who want to signify that a rant is taking place.
Bronner—who adopted the “Dr.” title in his 30s—had good reason to fight for unity. Born into a family of Jewish soap-makers, he immigrated to the US from Germany in his early 20s, just over a decade before his own parents were killed in the Holocaust. As a young man, he began sharing his grandiose ambitions to unify the human race, preaching a little too vehemently for some people’s liking. He was committed to Elgin State Insane Asylum, from which he eventually escaped. Once he settled in Southern California, he got in the habit of lecturing in LA’s Pershing Square and doling out bottles of soap to his audience. When he realized some in his crowds were grabbing his soap without actually listening to his disquisitions, he began printing the Moral ABC on the label.
Decades later, after he’d gradually gone blind—a development he attributed to electroshock therapy he’d received as a young man—Emanuel was still single-mindedly fixated on the Moral ABC. When his small grandchildren came to visit him, he’d quiz them on these principles. “He would basically lecture us with our feet dangling off the couch as if we were PhDs in comparative religion,” says Michael. “We’d be looking at the cracks in the ceiling, and he’d ask us, ‘What’s the 13th?’ ‘All-One, Grandpa!’ ”
That the company would stay in the family was hardly a foregone conclusion. Emanuel’s wife died young, and his sons, Jim and Ralph, were relegated to the foster system while Emanuel fervently promoted his All-One message. Jim remained semi-estranged from his father for most of his life. It was only when his sons and Trudy began to handle the Dr. Bronner’s company that Emanuel’s ambitious vision could be translated into a formidable business model. Even without his father’s consistent physical presence, Jim inherited a passion for charity and a sense of feverish ingenuity. When he and Trudy took over the company—which had been in financial disrepair—they set about eventually transferring about a third of the business’s worth over to the Boys and Girls Club of Escondido in the form of a large plot of land.
Years later, Jim’s child David traveled their own circuitous path to the soap business. In 1997, in the aftermath of their Amsterdam awakening, David became a parent and moved back to California. They were toying with an idea that had once seemed preposterous: joining the family company. A year later, Jim died of lung cancer and David found themself in charge of Dr. Bronner’s, which was still operating out of Jim and Trudy’s home. Michael joined two years later. When the two set out to acquire a line of lip balms, they knew they needed someone a bit more logistically oriented to helm operations. They called Michael Milam, husband of youngest Bronner sibling, Lisa, and recruited him to move across the country and run production. Today he remains a key executive and a sensible counterweight to David and Michael. “I’m here because they trust me, and because I don’t think like them. They needed someone who…who knows how to close a drawer, I’ll just say it that simply,” Milam tells me wryly. “The Bronner blood needs to marry into people who can close drawers.”
Back when Jim married Trudy, he was partnering with someone who could close a drawer. It was Trudy, a former math teacher, who became the company’s de facto bookkeeper in the late ’80s, sorting out the haphazard finances and logistics. “There were just boxes of stuff, randomly thrown together,” she remembers. “There was no oversight, no direction.… I’m not an accountant or a CPA, but since I was good with numbers, that was how I became the CFO.”
Anyone who knew Trudy in those days would not have predicted her gradual warming to the drug-reform movement. Trudy had long treated her son’s crusade for psychedelics with a healthy skepticism. You won’t find her dropping acid anytime soon. (Trudy puts it bluntly: “This is not my thing.”) And yet she was able to open herself up to ideas about criminal justice reform and psychedelic therapy when David showed her a fresh angle on the topic. They told the family: “Look, I know you think I just want to go to Burning Man and take psychedelics, but this is really helping veterans,” David remembers. “Pretty early on, they understood that this is actually life-saving medicine. It’s not just so David can go party.” David might be the psychedelic guru of the bunch, but it was Michael who pushed his mother even further ideologically. It was deep into COVID, and even though Dr. Bronner’s was doing more sales than ever—everyone wanted soap—Michael found himself in a depressive hole that couldn’t be fully treated by antidepressants. David suggested he try ketamine–assisted therapy, and it worked. When he passed that information along to his mother, he says she took on a new understanding of psychedelic therapy.
“I want to see decriminalization too,” Michael says. “But for David, it could be assumed that there’s an ulterior agenda for him. He wants a lot of these things to be legalized because he wants to be able to do them freely.”
Michael was able to get his mother’s blessing on rolling out the ketamine benefits to their employees. During this process, she was tuned even closer to David’s frequency. “She even surprised me,” David says. “She was like, ‘Yeah, we gotta end the drug war.’ ”
When I ask Trudy about psychedelics later, I expect her to bristle, but she doesn’t. “If it can help people, then more power to it. I’m willing to listen,” she says. Then she hearkens back to a story she told me earlier about sports coaches describing David as the most “coachable” athlete they’d ever worked with. “Maybe I’m coachable too,” she says.
At one point, I ask David how the company’s new factory workers tend to feel about all the woo-woo of the business. They tell me a story. When they arrived at the company, David says, they came in with big ideas. They were on fire, ready to hire a workforce composed of activists. Their father quickly disabused them of the notion. “He was like, ‘You need to humble yourself,’ ” David says. “It’s a Mexican American and Catholic workforce.” Then Jim asked his child what the most important part of the company was. David responded: The soap, the causes, the customers? Jim rebuffed them. “He was like, No. No. No. It’s the employees.”
Then David returns to another parable. “Someone asked a janitor at NASA, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m helping put a man on the moon.’ ”
People love to grouse that we don’t make anything in America anymore. Instead, we rely on grandiose ideas, clever marketing, and unorthodox CEOs to lather up excitement toward whatever speculative vision is in fashion at any given moment. This is part of the reason why American entrepreneurship has fallen into its current identity crisis: We are so detached from the reality of making things that we’re relegated to the fantasy-lands of founders. We are so susceptible to being hoodwinked by charismatic entrepreneurs peddling unfulfillable promises that even the richest and most powerful elites can be swindled by a 30-year-old cryptocurrency idealist. There’s an entire genre of streaming television dedicated to scammer CEOs. In the company’s formative years, Emanuel openly admitted that the soap was merely a vessel for his All-One message. But a bit like the mythology- and marketing-minded founders of today, Emanuel Bronner didn’t always live up to the virtuous ideals he promoted: In 1988, his son and daughter-in-law cleaned up a massive tax mess he’d left that had put him in bankruptcy. Later, when Emanuel’s grandchildren took over the company, they discovered that the soap was not as natural as the label had advertised. Fixing his shortcomings was a massive undertaking. But it meant that the Bronner children and grandchildren learned some serious lessons about how to make good on ethical business promises—-lessons that many corporations and investors are having to grapple with these days. “First and foremost, we needed to make sure the myth of my grandfather matched the actual product,” Michael Bronner remembers. They launched a yearslong process of removing artificial coloring and certifying their soaps as organic.
Given the virtuosic advertising sensibility that the Bronners have in their DNA, it would be easy to assume that marketing is a major expense in their business. And yet, they have historically spent very little on conventional advertising. They don’t need to: David knows the value of a good stunt. Whether it’s caging themself with hemp plants in front of the White House or helping fund a hotline for people to call when they’re having bad trips, David understands the inherent value of messaging. David’s title may be Cosmic Engagement Officer, but they also double as de facto marketing guru, working to benefit the company as well as causes David believes in.
And yet, behind all the generous charitable donations and the employees’ interest in Burning Man, Dr. Bronner’s remains at its core a company that manufactures a product that people love. Every step in the supply chain and assembly line has been painstakingly optimized to ensure that the soap is the cleanest, most ethical, and efficacious version it can possibly be. And all of the Bronner children, through the enthusiasms of their patrilineage and the decades of work experience they’ve had at the company, are intimately acquainted with every minute detail of their soapy birthright.
One afternoon, I tour the factory spaces with Michael Bronner and his sister, Lisa. Lisa is Michael Milam’s wife, and perhaps the most straight-and-narrow of the siblings. She runs Going Green, the company’s educational blog, where she advises readers on how to best clean stainless steel or wash a dog with Dr. Bronner’s products. Together, the pair reminisce about the days when their father used to show up unsolicited and offer to help put out forest fires or contain fumes from chemical spills with the magic foam he’d invented. “Area Man shows up to fight forest fire with foam,” Michael says, still amused and in awe of his father’s antics.
Jim’s kooky ingenuity is still deep in the blood of the Bronners, who like to geek out over the subject of soap. As we walk into the main production building, Lisa explains the factory’s soap reactors, which, thanks to expanding sales, keep being upsized. The new reactor, at 7,000 gallons, is so massive that the family had to cut a hole in the ceiling of the factory space and crane it into the building. “Soap is such a simple, simple reaction,” Lisa says. “You could totally do this in your kitchen.”
“My brother was in a science fair in third grade, and he made soap out of cigarette ashes and butter. The poor judges had to wash with it. It does wash, but it leaves a really nasty smell,” Michael explains. “Cooking over a fire was when the first soaps were made. The fat from the meat would drip into the ashes.”
Michael and Lisa bring me through the bar-soap manufacturing area. “Ohhh, they’re doing almond today!” Lisa exclaims, inhaling deeply. “I love the almond.”
We head toward the bar-soap mills, where extra-long bricks are pumped out and then guillotined into smaller portions. “Smells and looks just like marzipan,” Michael says.
“With a cheese grater, you grate a bar of soap and it looks exactly like mozzarella,” Lisa says. For a few moments, it’s as if the two have been transformed into children invited to Willy Wonka’s factory, delighting in each sensory detail of the complex machinery and the magical products they manufacture in front of their very eyes.
Lisa tells us about an article she read recently about a woman who’d been buried in highly alkaline soil two centuries ago. “They exhumed her, and her body had turned into soap,” on account of a reaction with fats in the human body.
“That,” Michael says, “is how I want to go.”
Carrie Battan is a writer in New York.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2023 issue of GQ with the title “Hippie Soap Opera”