Richard Christiansen Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe Magazine.
Today's guest is Richard Christiansen, the founder of Flamingo Estate. Flamingo Estate is a lifestyle brand of sorts known for their bath and body products, but there's so much more to them than that. Richard was a top creative director in the fashion world when he decided it was time to get off the work treadmill he found himself on. He bought a dilapidated, old property in Los Angeles and set about restoring the gardens. In the process, he changed his entire life and outlook. Richard tells the story in his new book, “Flamingo Estate, The Guide To Becoming Alive.” He joins me in just a minute to talk about his mentors, including Jane Goodall, Martha Stewart, and Alice Waters and why we all need to get in touch with ourselves and nature. Stay tuned.
Today's episode is presented by Kerrygold. Have you noticed that butter is having a moment? I've seen handbags sculpted out of butter, little couches made from butter pats, tiny butter cherubs, even butter-colored nail polish and fashion. The world is butter obsessed, but you know who loves butter More than most? The folks at Kerrygold. They've been perfecting their craft for decades using milk from Irish grass-fed cows to create their famously rich, creamy golden butter. There's a reason Kerrygold is beloved by everyone from home cooks to the world's top culinary creatives. It's just better butter. Kerrygold salted pure Irish butter has a butterfat content of 80%. While the unsalted version has a butterfat content of 82%. And that beautiful yellow color, it's thanks to beta carotene found naturally in milk from grass-fed cows. Want to get in on the fun? Get yourself some Kerrygold and whip up some flavored compound butter, fill some fancy butter molds or sculpt one of those gorgeous butter mounds for your next dinner party or get together. Visit KerrygoldUSA.com to learn more, get recipes and find a stockist near you.
If you are looking for a great holiday gift, we have lots of options for you at cherrybombe.com. There's the Cherry Bombe membership, which comes with lots of perks. Our C-Sweet membership for the power babe in your life. Subscriptions to our print magazine, yes, we have a print magazine and it is gorgeous. And tickets to our upcoming Jubilee conference taking place April 12th in New York City. Jubilee is one of, if not the largest gathering of women and culinary creatives in the food and drink space, and it is always a great day. Tell someone you love that they are the Bombe. Visit cherrybombe.com for all of this and more.
Now let's check in with today's guest. Richard Christiansen. Welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Richard Christiansen:
Oh my god, thank you so much. This is a bucket list for me.
Kerry Diamond:
You might not know this, but it's a bucket list for me. You have been on my list for a really long time. I'm a big fan and admire what you do.
Richard Christiansen:
Ditto. Thank you. I'm very grateful to be here.
Kerry Diamond:
I have so many questions for you. I hope we're going to be able to squeeze them all in. You are very busy. You're here this week to celebrate the launch of your book. Congratulations.
Richard Christiansen:
Thank you. I'm very excited.
Kerry Diamond:
It is a beautiful book. Everything you do is so beautiful, but this book is really beautiful and I also didn't have any idea what to expect from it because the title is very provocative and you're not sure what you're going to get. So I want to ask you about the title, “The Guide To Becoming Alive.” We're all alive, or are we?
Richard Christiansen:
Well, maybe we all are. I mean, this is funny. Some people know Flamingo Estate's my Home. It also during COVID became accidentally became a brand, but really at the same time was a very selfish project for me to wake myself up again after living in New York for almost 20 years and working and working and running myself ragged and then feeling like I was sleepwalking through life and this job I didn't love. I just wasn't healthy. I wasn't happy. I was really out of alignment. Some of it was because I had just lost the ability to taste things. I was just out of my body. So at the beginning of Flamingo, which was about food and vegetables and then soap and candles, it was more just like, how do I wake my body up again? How do I feel sexy again? How do I feel sexual again?
It really started with a hot shower and a really, really, really good meal. So it was sort of just my definition of not just being alive, but actually my definition of success. All of your senses fully engaged, especially tasting and smelling things. The real truth of it was everyone in the book I spoke to were, for me, just examples of people who were living life at full volume, who were experiencing life through all their senses. I think Jane Goodall, perhaps one of the interviews, I think it's Jane that said, "We have lost our senses" in the sense that we are experiencing life through a phone. We're in love with our telephones. We are not engaging in the world, so we're becoming very shallow. Becoming alive is just let's get some depth and let's enjoy.
Kerry Diamond:
So you said you were sleepwalking through life. How does one realize they are sleepwalking through life?
Richard Christiansen:
Well, I knew there was something wrong. I really wanted to sell my business. I wanted to get out of-
Kerry Diamond:
That was Chandelier.
Richard Christiansen:
Chandelier. I grew up on a farm. My mom and dad are farmers. I left Australia, ran here to New York. Who's to complain when you're making money and you're living in New York and all that stuff. I felt very self-conscious about even complaining about it, but I knew deep in my heart I was just really unhappy, but I couldn't pinpoint the thing. COVID handed me a giant slap in the face and my old business came to a grinding halt. That for me was, I'm going to talk about this a little bit in the book, is my entire self-esteem was attached to that job and to that business and those offices under the penthouse office in Soho that so proud of and that was all of my self-worth. But I spent more time in the four walls of that office and anywhere in the world every weekend until 10 o'clock every night.
Oh my God. I was so terrified of losing it, and so then when that day came and we had to move out the office because COVID really crumbled the business, I was like, "Well, I've been set free." There's a funny moment in the book. It almost sounds too good to be true and it's a little cliched, but I flew to New York during COVID to shut that office down. I used to have a huge library of books, and actually I don't know where they are now because no one would come to pick them up because it was early and everyone was terrified of everything. So we gave them to people. We put them on the street outside on Broadway, but I walked into the office anyway to pick up a book and there was a book there and the cover was open and there was that famous quote, "My barn has burned down, so now I can see the moon." It was really true. I was like, I got the moon now. It was great. So it all crumbled and it fell apart and it came back together quite nicely.
Kerry Diamond:
Were you living in Los Angeles?
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah, I found the house.
Kerry Diamond:
Were you living in both cities?
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah, I was sort of living nowhere. At that time I was very proudly the number one frequent flyer of an airline.
Kerry Diamond:
You lived on a plane?
Richard Christiansen:
I lived on a plane. I was jetting between the offices. And I think in retrospect now just running, so I didn't need to stop and think, but I had bought this house in Los Angeles, which is Flamingo Estate, and I had started renovating it and planting. My mom and dad came from Australia and we started planting the garden.
Kerry Diamond:
You have to go back a step though. You found this property that was somewhat dilapidated, was someone living in it at the time?
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah. He was a hoarder. He was late eighties I think, and had this house that it was a teardown essentially.
Kerry Diamond:
So it was dilapidated.
Richard Christiansen:
Okay, yeah. Actually the before and after photos were in the book, but this amazing garden, this incredible garden that you could see someone once loved. It wasn't beautiful then, but you could tell once upon a time it was amazing. So it was the garden and when I found it years earlier, I'd made it my screen saver and I looked at it every day and I was like, one day I'm going to live in that place. Anyway, so dreams did come true. I got the house very cheaply.
Kerry Diamond:
We’ll be right back with today's guest.
This episode is presented by Meridian Printing, the family-owned printing company based in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Meridian has printed Cherry Bombe magazine for the past several years and it's always a pleasure working with the team at Meridian. They are meticulous and professional and care more than any other printer we've ever worked with. They are amazing partners. When I wanted to print three covers of our icons issue, they said “No problem.” When I wanted to put a Molly Baz poster and every copy of our Molly issue, they said “We got it.” And they were amazing about helping us get the pink shade just right for our new Ina Garten issue. If you have an idea for a magazine or a zine or maybe you want to do books on demand, you should talk to the team at Meridian Printing. Visit meridianprinting.com for more information.
Cherry Bombe's next Jubilee conference is taking place in New York City on April 12th. Early bird tickets are on sale right now at cherrybombe.com. If you're an official Bombesquad member, be sure to check your inbox for special member pricing. Jubilee is a conference we started in 2014 as a way to bring women together for networking, conversation and community. It's a beautiful day filled with friends, new and old, great talks and panels and amazing things to eat and drink. This year's Jubilee will be our biggest and our best one yet. Visit cherrybombe.com for early bird tickets. Prices will go up January 1st. The link is in our show notes.
Did you know you had a green thumb?
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. Grew up on a farm and we used to-
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, let's talk about that. So your parents were farmers, very hardworking farmers. What kind of farm was it?
Richard Christiansen:
It moved around a bit. My granddad and extended family come from cattle. I was raised mainly on an avocado farm, sugarcane and then a few sheep. And then more recently my mom and dad started making honey. We're always big honey people. And then by the time this story starts with early COVID, I think they were the largest honey makers in Australia. I really love my mom and dad. They're very resourceful. You give them a task and they're in it.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell me why you left Australia.
Richard Christiansen:
I lived in a rural area. I dreamed of, dreamed of just going to America and I think I watched too much Dynasty as a kid and I dreamed of going to America. So anyway, I didn't know what I was going to do and mom was like, "you got to be a doctor or a lawyer," and I wish I had a role model. I didn't have any role models, I didn't know what else to do. I started law school and I ended up going to London to finish it. And I was working in a bar in London and I was so broke and I was working every night in this bar, a bit of a seedy bar and this one guy always would come in and at one point he's like, "Oh, you're really good at dealing with difficult people. You've always got a story, great to multitask. You should work in advertising."
And so he gave me a job and so I finished my law degree and I started working for him. And then I went to live, and this maybe is more interesting. Sort of lucky coincidence, got a job in Italy at Benetton when Benetton was still a very hot brand. Italy taught me how to eat and how to drink and how to really, how to love life, how to dress, just how to engage in the world. I feel like I grew up there even though I was only there a few years.
Kerry Diamond:
Was that the era of the Colors magazine?
Richard Christiansen:
I ran Colors. I was the editor-in-chief.
Kerry Diamond:
Folks might not know what that is. It was this very interesting and I think impactful magazine that the Benetton family did.
Richard Christiansen:
Also, how brave. I keep thinking about that today. Benetton at the time, some people will remember the magazine, but then there was the HIV campaign and there was the immigration campaign and there was death row and there was-
Kerry Diamond:
Issues the fashion industry did not go near back then. Still don't.
Richard Christiansen:
I mean that's my point, that social media, before social media. We would work on these giant campaigns that were social issues and show no product. Oliviero Toscani was the sort of the mastermind behind all that stuff. He would have a sign that would say, "is it immoral?" And if it was immoral, he would love it. I remember being there one day and someone had thrown a brick through the windows of the stores because they were so horrified. It's something that he said about the Catholic Church. He was so happy. He said, "This is exactly, we need to get people riled up. This is success."
And so he was wild and Italy was amazing. We lived Benetton's just in Treviso, which is just outside Venice. So what an amazing place to be when you're 22, and it was a wonderful, wonderful education.
Kerry Diamond:
So you were only 22. That's incredible.
Richard Christiansen:
I was so young.
Kerry Diamond:
I can kind of see how that impacted what you're doing today.
Richard Christiansen:
It really does. Italy's all those things. Heritage, it's beauty, it's all that stuff. So I remember so well, it was so frowned upon to eat lunch at your desk. Everyone would leave the office. We'd go to the Benetton cafeteria, which was beautiful and we'd have a giant pasta lunch and we'd probably drink red wine and we would have an amazing existence at work. And then of course I moved to New York not long after and everyone's hunched over their computers eating a sandwich. The ceremony around food was something special, which really I took with me and was great.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you know Asma Khan? She has the Darjeeling restaurant in London.
Richard Christiansen:
Oh, I know the restaurant.
Kerry Diamond:
And she has an all-female kitchen. She's incredible. I interviewed her in L.A. and she was talking about how everyone's so desperate now, and I'll include myself in this to take pictures of our food. And I was just thinking, gosh, she's so right. Even if you do want to take pictures, because sometimes that's fun and you know the chef or want to celebrate the food, whatever it is, but even just taking a second to just reflect on what's in front of you and the people who made it and grew it and all those things.
Richard Christiansen:
That's why St. John in London is my favorite restaurant. Have you been there?
Kerry Diamond:
Uh-uh.
Richard Christiansen:
No music, no artwork. They want you to focus on the food. No distractions, which I love. Not a single piece of artwork and no music.
Kerry Diamond:
But you would love Asma.
Richard Christiansen:
I would. She would love this interview. In my book with David Leon, who's a big food advocate. He's an amazing guy. Used to run Farmer's Footprint lives in Hawaii. He and a bunch of other people have taken Monsanto to court many times to get rid of Roundup and that sort of stuff. Giant hero of mine, and we talk in the book a little bit about technology being the death of intimacy because everything has got faster, faster, faster. We used to think that technology, and people say this about AI as well now, will give you more time to do the things that you love it. It doesn't. It gives you more time to scroll more.
And he said something which I haven't forgotten, which was so powerful, which was the other thing that technology has killed is ceremony. And we as humans need ceremony. It's why we go to church, it's why we have social groups. It's why we say Grace. This moment to connect together. We've stopped doing that. Then so I ask him, what's the solution to that? And he's like, "We need to sit and make a meal for each other and set a table."
Alice Waters in the book talks about that. And I'm sure you've read her books and she talks so much about the importance of that. I think the question I asked her was how do we fix things? And she's like, "We just have a meal with someone."
Kerry Diamond:
You and I are both big believers in-person gatherings.
Richard Christiansen:
Yes. I love hospitality. The real definition of that word.
Kerry Diamond:
Flamingo Estate. Where did the name come from? Such a great name.
Richard Christiansen:
Oh, I wish I'd never called up Flamingo Estate.
Kerry Diamond:
You do? Well, I know you got in trouble so many times.
Richard Christiansen:
It's a pink house on top of a hill, but I never thought it was going to become a brand. Never. And so I was so allergic to the idea of creating another business. It was the last thing I wanted to do and here we are.
Kerry Diamond:
Today flamingo Estate is a multifaceted brand. You work with 125 plus farms and partners around the world, which Richard, congratulations. That is just amazing. Tell us in your own words, what is Flamingo Estate today?
Richard Christiansen:
It's my home. It's so funny. This question trips me up. We've been fundraising recently, bros around the table, "What's your brand? Are you a beauty brand? Are you a bath and body brand?"
Kerry Diamond:
And what's your exit? They all want to know what your exit is.
Richard Christiansen:
Oh my God, it's so annoying that this.
Kerry Diamond:
You can't say I want to run the company until I drop dead.
Richard Christiansen:
No, and I always say, why are we talking about the end of the race when we barely started running? Let's enjoy the race. Fresh flowers and food and olive oil and honey and soaps and gosh, all sorts of stuff. So what I say is we're a sourcing brand. We are about the earth. We're about one farm became two, became 10, became 128 farms. The sort of red thread from all of us as people with their hands in the soil growing good stuff. It's not an easy answer that people want to hear. And we get such headwinds to narrow, the investment guys are like, whenever we were in those meetings, they were like, "Kill the food stuff. The margins are lower. You got to be a beauty brand. Margins are higher. Everyone said that, but no, no.
Kerry Diamond:
It's so interesting that you said hands in soil because I wanted to ask you, I noticed in your bio you referred to yourself first as a gardener, second as an entrepreneur, but I wanted to know, because I guess I'm asking this for myself and lots of the people in our community, our listeners out there, how have you avoided turning Flamingo Estate into another Chandelier where you're so involved in the running of it, you don't have your hands in the dirt anymore?
Richard Christiansen:
Do you know, it's something I think about a lot now that we've almost doubled every year in growth. It's different. It's just a different energy. I do love it. I'm not making up stories for people I don't respect. I'm not making up fake narratives for brands to sell jeans. Talking about real things and I'm in the garden a lot. I'm at home a lot. I don't leave. I'm really not very social, so it's just real.
Kerry Diamond:
But you are raising money. How was the process?
Richard Christiansen:
It was much harder than I ever thought it was going to be. I'd never done that before.
Kerry Diamond:
Had you been self-funded all this time?
Richard Christiansen:
Yes. In the beginning we were. Then we had a little bit of some money from some family and friends and things like that. But just to keep up demand and international, we needed more working capital. I think it took 160 meetings. I learned a lot. I have great respect now for anyone that's done that.
But also whenever you take someone else's money, the conversation is immediately going to become about margins. I remember being in a meeting with a finance group and this person was across the table and she said, "Well, what's your margin on hand soap?" And I told her it's a very respectable number and she's like, "Oh, you're wasting my time. Don't come back here until it's 90%." Nine zero. And I said, "No, no, no. We'll never come back here and say it's 90% because then we couldn't source this way. We'd have to use palm oil and bring all the ingredients in from a contract manufacturer and the farmers will get fucked. That's the whole reason we want to do this is to support people like my mom and dad. And so that will never happen."
The other subtext of the entire book is about just changing the way we think about the things we use. I could talk about that in the food industry a lot, but I could talk about it in the beauty industry more. This idea of there's so much out there and we've way too much stuff. Even when people talk about, I get very frustrated with very, very frustrated with the copycat brands. You know who you are. And they give themselves a pat on the back for one essential oil or we're in recycled plastic or whatever the thing is.
Kerry Diamond:
We are very much in a copycat culture.
Richard Christiansen:
But the pat on the back for this marginal step, it's still comes from the point of view of consumption. Oh, it's okay to buy this because it's got one essential oil in it, or it's okay to buy this because it's cruelty free, whatever the thing is. We don't need to buy more stuff. What we need to do is make much less stuff and buy less stuff and just buy better.
Kerry Diamond:
How did you learn that side of the business? I mean, you came to this from Chandelier where you learned so many things, but you had to figure out packaging, shipping, recipe and product development.
Richard Christiansen:
We just kept stumbling and found our way, just crooked branches just in a straight line. I don't know. We were very lucky. We kept making mistakes and we got a couple of people who were wonderful and then a few more who were wonderful and slowly we figured it out. But I think the naivety was part of the brilliance of it. We had made soap because the water from my bath runs into the garden and my roses were dying from all of the body wash from another brand that had a lot of chemicals in it.
And so I was like, "Oh, I'm going to make a soap for my bath." Why would I put it on my skin if I can't put it on my roses? And so long time before we were selling it, we were making some. That was sort of it. And then interesting because you skip forward a couple of years when we started having investment conversations and people were like, "Oh, why aren't you doing it this way? Why aren't you doing it that way?"
We just had no idea there was another way to do it. Maybe we weren't smart enough. We were just doing stuff the old fashioned way. And I say to people now, "Please don't come and work for us if you are seeking innovation, there's nothing innovative going on here. We're just doing stuff the old fashioned way that everyone maybe forgot how to do."
Maybe the other interesting part was that when any of us decide to start a business, we say, "Okay, I'm going to make this thing, now let me go find the ingredients. What do I need to do to make it?" It never happened that way. We had farmers come to us and say, "Hey, we got 50 acres of sage. It's COVID. We're going to lose our farm. What can you make with it?"
Or I've got a hundred acres of olives, what can you make with it? Or I've got 30 acres of lavender, what can you make with it? That first sprint that year and a bit, I think we made 150 products, 150. I tell that to people now and they're like, "Oh, their product roadmap is one product a year." We made 150 different products. It was just farmers knocking on the door and saying, "I've got stuff. I heard you're helping farmers."
Kerry Diamond:
I love how honest you are in the book you wrote that you got sued for using the word flamingo, which you mentioned team members poached by a copycat brand, ran out of money twice and you almost lost the business. I didn't know that.
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Everything you do is so beautiful. It's easy to look at Flamingo Estate and just think, "You guys have it all figured out."
Richard Christiansen:
None of us have it figured out. And I think that's the other thing about the book that I really love. As you know, I set out to talk to my heroes, so there's some good people in there, Jane Fonda and Jane Goodall.
Kerry Diamond:
Martha.
Richard Christiansen:
And Martha Stewart, of course. Kelly Wearstler. After I was done with it, 600 pages later, I was like, "Oh wow, none of these people have figured it out." We're all growing, we're all still in it. Every one of us is still trying to figure it out, which really put a pin in my own anxiety around trying to figure it out because it's okay if we haven't. That's the one surprising takeaway I got from writing the whole thing.
Kerry Diamond:
How did you almost lose the business? I was surprised to read that.
Richard Christiansen:
I think it was three times not, but maybe we almost lost it again since I finished the book. I don't know. Again, it was sort of just growing pains of a business that was expanding too quickly.
Kerry Diamond:
You did learn that from the fashion business. That's what kills most of them.
Richard Christiansen:
We just are growing too fast. We couldn't keep up, and so we overcapitalized on things. We spent too much money. It was never about not selling enough. We always sold out of everything. We just couldn't keep up. And so then we, okay, you're spotty with wholesalers. You're not in the store all the time, you're running out, that sort of stuff. So it was just learning how to scale a business. There's so many funny, crazy examples of how this business got to here.
Kerry Diamond:
I hope you write a proper business book because I can speak for myself and our listeners. I think we all love someone who does it the unconventional way.
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah, I'd actually would love to write a book about scaling a business. The investment part of it actually, I really, really would. I wish I knew what I know now three years ago.
Kerry Diamond:
There aren't enough books like that. They're the Patagonia books.
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah, exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
Some others.
Richard Christiansen:
I was just going to say that. The Patagonia one and then there's not a lot of other stuff.
Kerry Diamond:
I look forward to reading yours one day. Let's talk about this book because I absolutely love it and you have so many good nuggets in it. Your chapter headings are brilliant, so much wisdom. One thing you wrote is, "My goal in this life is to ripen or a peach." What do you mean?
Richard Christiansen:
Ripen is my favorite word. I love it. I don't want to get old. I want to ripen, and I don't mind if my skin gets wrinkled and my flesh gets soft. I want to get sweet on the inside and juicy on the inside as I get older. So that's what I mean. There's some chapters in the book that talk about real liberation for me, meaning tasting the world and seeing the world and experiencing it only happened when I told everyone else to fuck off. For me that's what needed to happen. I needed to stop comparing myself to everyone else and not look left or right. My favorite quote, it's on the inside of the book, it's on the inside of most of our packaging, is that a flower doesn't blossom for the bee, it blossoms and the bee comes. This idea of just work on yourself and it will come to you. I believe that full-heartedly.
Kerry Diamond:
Another thing you wrote, "Reader, please note, none of your senses are common."
Richard Christiansen:
And that's why we have to please them so vigilantly. Absolutely. I think there's nothing sexy about restriction, but I do feel as though really our senses being fully engaged, meaning smell, taste, touch, feel, fully engaged is luxury. And so I don't know why we are so good at minimizing our senses and cutting ourselves off.
Kerry Diamond:
I was reading your book this morning at my table and I have this new tablecloth and it's a little textured, and when you were talking about your senses, I was like, "What can I do right this second to engage my senses?" And I ran my fingers across the tablecloth and got goosebumps. So what is something our listeners could do right now to further engage their senses?
Richard Christiansen:
Run your fingers across a leaf, even if it's on the street, crush it up in your hand and smell it.
Kerry Diamond:
So all of you, I want you to do that today.
Richard Christiansen:
I went for a walk this morning before we came here to Central Park, and I did that. I lived here 20 years and I never did that. I never just walked through Central Park ever. I was too busy. What a joy. It's at our fingertips here.
Kerry Diamond:
Another chapter titled Find Your Banana. I had no idea what you meant by that. I had to read it.
Richard Christiansen:
Should I tell you what it means?
Kerry Diamond:
Tell everybody.
Richard Christiansen:
When you put a banana in a paper bag with an avocado, the banana will help the avocado ripen much faster. And so I say in that chapter, that chapter is about sort of work and finding your purpose.
Kerry Diamond:
And you come from avocado farmers.
Richard Christiansen:
I do. I know that.
Kerry Diamond:
When you speak.
Richard Christiansen:
So really, like I say that my partner Harvey really was my banana and Flamingo was the paper bag that wrapped us both up. And I exponentially ripened in the four years since that happened.
Kerry Diamond:
That's beautiful. You also get to interview lots of your heroes/mentors in this book. Jane Goodall is one. We mentioned her earlier, the famous anthropologist. When did she first come into your life?
Richard Christiansen:
Someone handed me a copy of her book when I was heading up Mount Everest, and I had it in my backpack and I read it and it, and that trip was awful. It was just awful. And I thought I was going to die. I was just uncomfortable. And anyway, getting into my sleeping bag and reading Jane's book was amazing. And I said, when I get down back to Kathmandu, I'm going to call her and I'm going to find a way to work for her. And I did. I did work for her. Pro bono. And then she had said, why don't you take everything you learned and do something good with it? And so she was one of the tipping points for why Flamingo started. She's great. She's amazing. And she's funny. She's great.
Kerry Diamond:
Another one of your heroes, Martha Stewart.
Richard Christiansen:
Martha.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you watch the documentary?
Richard Christiansen:
I did. Isn't it good? My favorite thing in the documentary is where she says, "You want to be happy for a year, get married. You want to be happy for 10 years, get a dog if you want to be happy for life, have a garden." So true.
Kerry Diamond:
I know you've got a garden and you've got dogs. You dedicated the book to your dogs.
Richard Christiansen:
I did, yes. Martha's amazing. That interview is my favorite one actually. She's so funny. That actually was the first one I wrote. And that sort of set the construct for the whole book. Each chapter's essentially about a plant or something like that in the garden and what it can teach us about life. And then we link it to a person. So that chapter's called Work like Wisteria. My mom had planted wisteria on the outside of the Goat Shed, which is where I wrote my book. It's taken over the entire place and wisteria just grows and grows and grows, and you can put it in sandy soil and it grows. You put it in terrible soil, it'll grow.
Kerry Diamond:
In my neighborhood. It grows along the elevated subway tracks.
Richard Christiansen:
Oh my God. Beautiful. Yeah, it's amazing.
Kerry Diamond:
It proves your point about wisteria.
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah. And I thought, okay, who else do I know that has that kind of work ethic? And I was like, oh, it's Martha. So I called Martha and I said, can we have a chat? And she was amazing.
Kerry Diamond:
I won't tell the story because I want people to read the book and enjoy all these stories, but her story about her dad with the hammer and the wisteria was very funny.
Richard Christiansen:
So funny, right?
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Not the ending you expect. Okay, Alice Waters.
Richard Christiansen:
This was a new friend. I was a huge fan, obviously. We sort of loosely crossed paths before, and then just had this wonderful conversation around food and this simple joy of food. It's a beautiful conversation. I love that interview.
Kerry Diamond:
Alice is amazing. And you included one of her books. You did the most interesting book project.
Richard Christiansen:
Oh yeah. A while ago. And I still want to continue that. I'm obsessed with gardening, as you know. I feel like in book world there's old lady gardening and then there's David Attenborough, the world is ending, but there's nothing in the middle. But there are so many stories of co-creation and of creativity. And so I started this thing called Flamingo Editions, which was at that seven books I loved that we were kindly given permission to reprint and redesign, even though that's not a gardening book. I love that book because it does talk about growing vegetables and plants. So that book and the Farmer's Almanac. Anyway, some great books and my dream really would be to sort of have a hundred books and everyone would green thumbs and middle fingers need to read.
Kerry Diamond:
A hundred books like Martha.
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah. Oh my God. I don't know a hundred, right?
Kerry Diamond:
Do you have your own imprint to publish this book?
Richard Christiansen:
No, this was done by Chronicle. But the other books that I just mentioned, we did ourselves. It's interesting that story though. I had a cookbook as well before this book, and every Friday we sell vegetables, which is how we started. Early COVID these vegetables would show up on people's doorsteps, thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And we would not know what to cook every week. So we asked chefs who were also out of work because the COVID to give us recipes. So after a year, obviously we had hundreds and hundreds of great recipes.
I said, "Okay, there's a cookbook here." And so I flew to New York in COVID, saw a publisher and said, "I have an idea for a cookbook." And he laughed me out of the office. It's like, "You are not a celebrity, you're not a chef. You're never going to make this work. You're wasting my time." And nothing makes me more excited than someone saying that. So I was like, "Okay, I'm going to show you." And I was like, I actually don't need to give you half of my money. I have enough customers and a full distribution network of my own that I can sell this book without having to get you involved at all. Which I did. We've reprinted it three times.
Kerry Diamond:
Congratulations. And it's on sale on the Flamingo website.
Richard Christiansen:
It is.
Kerry Diamond:
You've got so many beautiful products and I've been very fortunate to try a lot of them over the years. For folks who are new to your brand, what's the one product that they should try?
Richard Christiansen:
Well, firstly I use everything. No, it's a very selfish brand. We only make stuff we want to use ourselves. Can I do one food in one bath and body or beauty? So one food, one would be the salsa macha, chili oil. The chilies are grown in the islands of Mexico and the Aquino family is the family, the farm that we found. And they used to smoke the chilies with applewood in a sort of beautiful oven that the family built. It was amazing. And the farm is beautiful. There was no irrigation. It was fully irrigated from just the rolling fog from the Gulf of Mexico. So anyway, it's amazing. I put it on everything. Put an avocado toast. You can put it on something you're baking. It's my one go-to for everything.
So the chili oil and then the rest of the business, the bath side and beauty side. We have a peppermint soap that's big. It's a brick of peppermint. And I'm not a morning person, but I get up very early and so it's like a slap in the face in the morning. It's great. Actually, do I have time to tell you a funny story about?
Kerry Diamond:
Sure.
Richard Christiansen:
We make about a hundred at a time. I put them on Instagram and say, "Oh, we've got this new thing in." Someone came and bought all of them in one purchase after I put them on Instagram and people have been selling our soap on eBay. And so I was so angry. I was like, oh, they're reselling it. So I got the number of this customer from Shopify and I call her and she's in Texas, and I said, "Hey, I know you don't know me. I'm Richard. I know you just bought my soap. You're obviously reselling it. I'll pay you back more than you paid. I understand you want to make some money, that's fine, but I want them back. I want to control it." And she's like, "Honey, I'm not selling your soaps." And I'm like, "What are you doing with it?" And she's like, I'm using them as doorstops" because they're big and they smell great. And she said, "They make the room smell so good. I'm using them as doorstops." And I was like, "Wait, you have a hundred doors in your house?" She said, "Yeah, honey, I live in Texas."
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh, that's so funny. So it is a multi-purpose product. That's what you're telling us. There's something you believe in called radical inconsistency. What's that all about?
Richard Christiansen:
I've learned that if something is made from a farm, every season it's different. The flowers are different, the oil is different. Everything should be different because its about the time capsules, it's about a moment in time with rain and sunshine and all that stuff. We expect that from maybe wine, but why don't we expect it from hand soap or body wash or face cream? So boring to get the same thing all the time. It should always be really good, but it should never be the same. And so that idea really informed seasonality for us. Things are seasonal drops.
We have a few core products that are always in, but I'm obsessed with seasonal drops and then making sure they're all very different from each other, which is a bit of a logistic nightmare, especially for international. But this idea of radical inconsistency, not just in the products you use but also in your own life. We should be radically inconsistent with how we talk to our partners and our friends and we should surprise each other. There's nothing wrong with that.
Kerry Diamond:
I love that. It's so interesting listening to you because you talked about a red thread that goes through things that you do. I've interviewed a lot of people recently and I think so many of you are like-minded and I'm so happy that your numbers are increasing. I just interviewed April Gargiulo from Vintner's Daughter and she even did a fragrance that she doesn't do every year because it has so many naturals.
Richard Christiansen:
She's great.
Kerry Diamond:
She thinks about it like wine. Camilla Marcus, Brita Lundberg, who has Lundberg Family Farms, the rice company, big regenerative brand. But I'm just so happy to be hearing about more and more of you who sort of have the same core beliefs about things.
Richard Christiansen:
There's an interview in the book with Gonzalo. He has a 900 acre piece of property in the Gulf of Mexico. The thickest jungle I've ever seen. In the middle is a in twenty-ish acre, naturally cleared section where he's growing rare and endangered vegetables. I went to see him to start working with him, and he's living in the middle of this giant Disney jungle. I didn't really think about it, I'm like, "Why are you here?" And he's like, "Well, because the jungle is so thick on every side that it's too far for a bee that may have touched any pesticides to reach the middle."
And here he's growing the weirdest vegetables you've ever seen and really educated me that so much of this stuff disappeared because we needed hard-skinned vegetables to be able to ship them around the world and around the country. Anything with soft skin has slowly disappeared from our palette, which is so interesting to think about. Logistics became the death of taste. So he's trying hard to bring that back. It's kind of remarkable.
And then we have an interesting conversation about why we should not be buying any produce that is shipped across the country. And Alice talks about this and David Leon talks about this and everyone in the book that has food in their world talks about the importance of growing your own vegetables or buying it locally from the farmer's market. And that will be a complete shift in the way, and I believe the same thing for beauty products as well. Why are we shipping them across the world?
Kerry Diamond:
Logistics became the death of taste. That's pretty profound. I just have to tell you before we go to the speed round, you have been such a big influence on me.
Richard Christiansen:
Oh my God, that's so nice.
Kerry Diamond:
And what you've done with Flamingo and it's very hard to resist that siren call of like do more, make more product into the world. You've got to have merch, you've got to have this, and you've done it so intentionally. I appreciate that.
Richard Christiansen:
Thank you. That's kind. I think the thing, if I've done anything, I hope we've tried to put the culture into horticulture. I care deeply, deeply, deeply about the environment. People drop off. People don't listen to that. Engagement goes down whenever we talk about it, so that's why we did a honey with LeBron James. It's why we did a collaboration with Kelly Wearstler. That's why we keep finding people in culture to work with because I just think if we can treat Mother Nature like a luxury brand, and Mother Nature is the last great luxury brand we can save here.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, since you're doing marketing for Mother Nature, so there you go.
Richard Christiansen:
I'm trying. Thank you so much.
Kerry Diamond:
All right, let's do a quick speed round. What beverage do you start the morning with?
Richard Christiansen:
My coffee that I make. Yeah, and it's interesting because the coffee wasn't selected because it tastes good. Although it does. It's because it smells good. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
What do you put in it? Anything?
Richard Christiansen:
Just some milk, whole milk.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. What's always in your fridge?
Richard Christiansen:
Butter.
Kerry Diamond:
What was your favorite food as a child?
Richard Christiansen:
My grandmother's lasagna. I still cook it when I'm feeling down.
Kerry Diamond:
The recipe is not in your cookbook?
Richard Christiansen:
It is actually.
Kerry Diamond:
Is it?
Richard Christiansen:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, good. Okay.
Richard Christiansen:
It's the only recipe in the cookbook with meat in it.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Another reason to get the book. What's your favorite snack food today?
Richard Christiansen:
Oh, I don't really snack. I'm trying to think of what it is. We always have chocolate in the office. Always, always, always. Because we have some chocolate people we work with, so maybe that's my guilty snack. Chocolate.
Kerry Diamond:
What are you streaming right now?
Richard Christiansen:
I have been watching on repeat “The Taste of Things,” the Juliette Binoche movie. I'm obsessed with it.
Kerry Diamond:
She was on the show earlier this year.
Richard Christiansen:
Oh no, really? Oh my God. That movie has moved me so deeply. Actually, we don't have a television at home and we don't have a microwave. I want intentionally to be very analog, and so I don't watch a lot of television. Really very little, but that movie. Wow. These long sweeping scenes with no dialogue and you're just watching people cook. It's beautiful. It's amazing.
Kerry Diamond:
Dream travel destination?
Richard Christiansen:
The book talks about the importance of travel. I've been to the South Pole and I've been to the North Pole and I've been to Everest and I've done these interesting places. This is going to sound so cheesy. The reason I don't travel now very much is because the hardest trip for me is to travel inside myself. I really want to be still and I want to sit with myself and I want to spend time in my garden, but if you really had to push me, I'd say actually I want to go back to Rome and have some good Italian food. There's a house in Pantelleria, that island in Italy. My friend has a little property there and they grow the most amazing giant capers. There's a little property next door that's for lease, and I was like, "Oh, should I just get it for a year and grow capers?" Maybe.
Kerry Diamond:
Sounds lovely. Okay, last question. I have a feeling who you're going to answer, but not entirely sure. If you had to pick one food celebrity to be trapped on a desert island with, who would it be and why?
Richard Christiansen:
I mean, it would have to be Martha, right? I was going to say that, right? Because we're going to be fine. We get everything done. We're going to build a beautiful house and eat really well and have a fun time.
Kerry Diamond:
You might never want to leave the island.
Richard Christiansen:
No, actually, that was exactly what would happen. We would monetize it.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh. Well, Richard, you are wonderful. Congratulations on the book.
Richard Christiansen:
Thank you. That means so much. Thank you so much.
Kerry Diamond:
I hope a lot of people pick it up because I think it's one of those books that will stay with you for a long time and maybe even change your life.
Richard Christiansen:
I hope so. I changed mine.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. I would love for you to subscribe to Radio Cherry Bombe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave a rating and a review. Anyone you want to hear on an upcoming episode, let me know. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Joseph Hazan is a studio engineer for Newsstand Studios. Our producers are Catherine Baker and Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial coordinator is Sophie Kies. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.