traditional retail, hoping he can persuade the public to pay a premium for
American-made, when the average
consumer expects low prices.
Chappell might be an expert when
it comes to personal care products and American-made supply
chains, but in fashion and retail, he’s still learning. Recently,
while meeting with a prospective Ramblers Way investor, the
septuagenarian was reminded that he may be running out of
time to get it right. “What I liked about you at Tom’s of Maine is
you were very deliberate about everything, and you did it all
very well,” the investor told Chappell. “But right now,” he said,
“you’re a man in a hurry.”
IN 1966, TOM CHAPPELL DISCOVERED he was a natural at selling life
insurance. Fresh out of Trinity College with an English degree,
he got a job at Aetna. He quickly outperformed his entire class
of nationwide recruits, earning an $800 raise. Then he found
out the worst performer was given $600. “Not my idea of difer-entiating top performance,” Chappell says. Realizing a talent
for persuasion could generate him some wealth, he decided the
corporate structure was impossibly constraining. “I wanted to
break out, be myself, and do my own thing,” he says.
Two years later, Chappell moved from Philadelphia to
Kennebunk to help his father start a company. George Chappell
had spent his career managing textile mills in New England,
many of which were shuttering by the 1960s as the industry
migrated to Asia. After a failed attempt at starting a wool-
manufacturing business, George decided to create low-impact
cleaning products that would serve the remaining textile and
tanning factories, as well as a treatment for industrial waste-
water. “Forty-fve million gallons of pulp paper waste were
going into the Androscoggin River every day. It was a sewer,”
Chappell says. “The governance of those corporations felt they
couldn’t compete with something that was made with dirt-
cheap prices in manufacturing facilities that paid no heed to
environmental controls.” All of this began to shape Chappell’s
view of what kind of entrepreneur he wanted to be. “There
was nothing wrong with business itself,” he says. “It was just
the moral agents who were the problem.”
By the late 1960s, Tom and Kate had thrown themselves
into organic gardening and started an alternative school. “We
weren’t hippies or free-love types,” says Kate, but the couple
shared the era’s concern over modern methods of farming,
manufacturing, and education. Chappell, using what he’d
learned about formulation chemistry in his father’s business,
got the idea to make natural cleaning products. Their frst,
Ecolo-Out, was a phosphate-free compound for disinfecting
dairy equipment. A consumer version, ClearLake—a bio-
degradable laundry detergent—came in a plastic container
along with a shipping label so that customers could mail it back
to Kennebunk for reuse. Tom’s of Maine soon branched of into
personal care, developing the product that would eventually
make the company famous—toothpaste.
Through the Erewhon Trading Company, a natural-foods
wholesaler co-founded by environmentalist Paul Hawken, the
Chappells’ products found their way into specialty health-food
stores. Their folksy messaging (“Dear friends, write us back
INNOVATE
•
LOCALLY GROWN
Almost all Ramblers
Way manufacturing—
including sewing—is
done within 300 miles of
Kennebunk, Maine.
•
REROUTE TO RETAIL
After years as a
wholesaler, Ramblers
Way recently pivoted to
retail, with its third
ne w store—this one in
Portsmouth, Ne w
Hampshire—and 14 more
in the pipeline.
