Ralph Bronner belongs to soap-making royalty, and he knows it. His father, Emanuel H. Bronner-better known as Dr. Bronner-escaped from Nazi Germany after becoming a master soap maker and in the late 1940s started an iconic company in the United States that endures today as a socially conscious, all-natural brand: Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps. During the period after World War II, Dr. Bronner tried to spread a message of peace by using the labels on his soap bottles to broadcast his most beloved sayings from various world religions and philosophies.

Today, 71-year-old Ralph continues the legacy by talking to (and hugging) almost everyone with whom he comes into contact. Blue Egg chatted with Ralph about this 60-year-old family business and how his father launched it with an idea that is finally getting the recognition it deserves.

Was it in your father's original vision to have the company be organic?
Yes. In the '50s, he stuck with natural when Dow Chemicals had an ad campaign whose slogan was "Better Things for Better Living...Through Chemistry." Everything became petroleum and artificial. When I speak on college campuses, I have heard young women gasp after I read them the ingredients list for a typical product-for example, a bottle of New Suave Sun-Ripened Red Raspberry Liquid Natural Body Wash. I haul out a fake million-dollar bill, offering it to any student-especially students of chemistry-that can read off the ingredients it contains. Usually, there's a gasp from a coed, who will say, "That was my favorite soap!" There are 22 chemicals in the product; five have never been pronounced by a human being. And I'll tell you this: Not one's a raspberry!

What's with the words on the label?
Dad was far ahead of his time on organic. But interestingly enough, he didn't really care about the soap. He had a quote that I love: "Ralph, you're a gentile. Everyone needs soap. But the soap is just the messenger." What he cared about were the results of putting 30,000 words from Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Mother Teresa, Chief Seattle, Mark Spitz, Thomas Paine, and Albert Einstein on the labels of the soap.

People read too much into it. I used to get asked, "Are you a cult? Are you a religion?" No, the label is a collection. Anyone reading this can do it. Just go out and spend a lifetime collecting what you think is beautiful, and call it the Moral ABC. One of my favorites, and why I enjoy talking to you and almost everyone I meet, goes, "God must've loved the common people of the Earth, he made so many of them." That's Abraham Lincoln. Doesn't that make you like Abraham Lincoln more? I think Bush's quote would be, "God must've loved the oilmen of the Earth, because they get so rich!"

So tell me about the company's philosophy? What makes Dr. Bronner's unique?
My father's two basic statements are, "You and I are brothers and sisters because of one eternal ever-loving father," and, "We should care for each other and this planet."

Our business philosophy is constructive capitalism and sharing with the workers. We're now a $20 million business. We have 35 workers. They start full-time with health care paid entirely by us, and generous bonuses. And this is the big shocker: I tell the people listening-executives, CEOs-"Share your money with the workers, especially if it's obscene." Through David [Dr. Bronner's grandson], we lowered our salary when we took over the business, and now we make five times the lowest-paid worker.

Now, here's what happens in this kind of capitalism: You are loved by everyone involved. The people we help all over the Earth are part of our family and love us; our workers love us. We just had our first retirement in our history-Aladia, at 70. Nobody has ever quit.

How did you become part of the business?
In the '90s, I got burnt out teaching English in the inner city, seventh and eighth grades. And I took the risk of early retirement and going to work for my father. I remember telling my family, "Either it'll work out or I'll be saying, 'Do you want fries with that?'"

Eighty-two percent of second-generation businesses fail because the children did not have the vision of the father. Think it through: They get handed a business; they sell it off and move to the Bahamas with their Jaguars. We're doing literally 100 times more than my father, because he was blind and operating out of a house in Escondido, CA, 20 miles inland from San Diego, with two secretaries, and originally neither my brother nor I could work for him because of his intensity.

My brother worked for another company, too, and we both slowly took over the business. God gave my father Parkinson's, and by that time, he finally was workable and appreciative. By the time he died, the business was completely in our hands, and there was nothing lost. If he had been hit by a truck, say, in 1990, the business would have collapsed. There was bankruptcy-he was not a good businessman. Most eccentric geniuses aren't. Everything was in his head. He knew how much he distributed in Ohio, and nobody else did. You know what I mean?

You spent your childhood in foster care and orphanages. How do you stay so loyal to your father if you weren't close with him when you were younger?
That's a really good question. My brother died sadly a year after my father died, but he was my father's favorite in the times when, as we were bounced around to 15 different homes, he did visit. So I didn't miss my father. And I love Shakespeare's "all's well that ends well." I would gladly take the first ten to 15 years being bad and the last 15 being wonderful rather than the other way around.

I feel honored that I'm carrying on my father's business. Someone asked last night at the movie [the documentary Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox], "Why am I not bitter? How could I ever forgive my father?" It's sort of odd. I didn't know I had a bad life. I once said (and I didn't know a reporter was in the class), talking to dropouts, truants, and delinquents, and they quoted this from me: "I've woken up on a chicken farm in Indiana, and in an orphanage in Chicago with giant rats. I didn't know it was supposed to ruin my life." I look back, and I had a happy life. I didn't know it was supposed to be miserable. I was on a chicken farm so poor that my big thrill was every Saturday we'd hop in the back of a beat-up ol' pickup truck-this was in the early '50s or late '40s-and went into town, where I got a Cracker Jack box. I looked forward all week to that Cracker Jack box. I still love looking for the prizes in Cracker Jack boxes.

So I looked at my life as wonderful, and the worst part of it was getting burnt out as a teacher.

But you're not an executive at the company anymore. So who runs Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps?
This is wonderful. I'm 71, and I'm really the spokesman now for the family. The others are doing the daily work. And I wish they would get the appreciation. Slowly, I'm having less and less to do with the running, and more and more to do with the spectacular things that my nephews Michael and David and their mother, Trudy, accomplished. Going to Palestine, for example, to set up fair-trade organic olive oil is incredible.

I'm blessed with a family of five and my bro's family of five-and not one, not one weak link fell through when my father was dying. We were offered millions by corporate America, and they tried every weaselly way possible. They usually hit me up and said, "We love your father's words on the label," which is bull, because the words don't say, "Get rich and screw the Earth."

Could you talk a little bit more about how your products don't screw the Earth?
Well, right off the bat, the soap doesn't rely on petroleum-based products, so it was always natural. And under David, it got even better. For example, hemp oil wasn't available in my father's time. And hemp oil is better-more natural and soothing to the body-than jojoba. And the soap is so natural that rangers give it away; it can wash away in lakes and rivers, and it doesn't harm the fish and so on.

We've won every green award I've ever heard of, including the first green award in San Francisco. Really, any book coming out with green products or natural products lists Dr. Bronner's. So in a way, I think we're one of the most holistic companies on the planet. What we have is a wonderful, natural soap, produced by a company that gives its employees every break possible. So I don't think there's a missing link. I'm proud of that also.

What about the fair-trade olive oil that's being used in some of the soaps now?
Fair trade is just in the past two or three years. With fair trade, you set up in the country you're getting your raw materials from-our coconut oil, our olive oil, our jojoba oil. You set up with the farmers a fair group, like a co-op. You're not dealing with the corporations that give you as little as they can and, getting back to that original premise, try to make as much as they can. So almost immediately, the farmers are making two to three times as much money for the same crop. So all of this helps the Earth. Organic means that the farmers aren't harvesting and planting with the dust and pollution of pesticides and fertilizers.

So all in all, with fair trade and organics and a fair company, somebody could ask, "Why aren't we going bankrupt?" We're a $20 million company, selling $18 million of products, but we're giving away 50 to 70 percent of our profit, and we're paying unbelievably.

You want to know why we aren't bankrupt? Anyone reading this could do what we're doing by creating products that don't take a fortune to market. Schick spent over $100 million during the Super Bowl and other times marketing their five-blade razor over their four-blade razor. Couldn't $100 million have some other use? Is there that much difference between a five-blade razor and a four-blade? We have never had an ad or a salesman for our soaps. Our soaps are that good.

It's true that I've never seen an advertisement. So how do you spread the word?
Well, for example, Bobbi Brown, who's considered the top guru for cosmetics and dermatology, on the Oprah Winfrey show three years ago-she never even told us-held up a bottle of our soap in her palatial estate in New Jersey and said, "This is Dr. Bronner's soap. It is probably the finest soap in the universe. I'm obsessed with it. I can't get enough of it." I just dropped a case off two days ago at Bobbi Brown's headquarters. They love it. I still haven't met her, though. In the summer 2007 Chicago magazine, she lists ten things that she must have, and there's somebody's cashmere and somebody's jewelry and a view of Lake Michigan, and there's Dr. Bronner's soap.

We've been written up in Allure, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Real Simple-almost every magazine has written us up as wonderful, organic, natural. It's different than ads; you can pay somebody to say you're wonderful, natural, but that doesn't mean that it's true. So the money we save on marketing, that helps us.

Are you doing better business now that green is so popular?
Oh! Our sales, with almost no marketing, were up 30 percent last year. We're not riding the bandwagon-we're leading it. I mean, in the '50s and '60s, Dad was a voice in the wild and considered one of the crackpots like Gayelord Hauser, Dr. Jenkins, and others who were way ahead of their time trying to tell America that your health, what we put in food and water and the air, is important. They were dismissed. Now, it's the way to go.

So what is one easy thing that we should tell everyone to do to help the environment?
I love Gandhi's quote, "Be the very change that you want to see in the world." So right off the bat, it would be the small things that I see listed: Don't let the water run while brushing your teeth, try not to use pesticides on the lawns. It isn't one big thing, 'cause you can't tell a person to go out and speak about the environment or join the Peace Corps. It's the little things that would help: Carpool, don't use plastic bags.

So be the very change you want to see in the world. That'd be my answer.

You know, the soap is not the messenger-you are the messenger! I really think so!
Well, you know what I told my wife? On my grave or urn-I probably want to be cremated-it'll say, "Yes, he finally stopped talking." 'Cause I've driven the family nuts.

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