[B]RATTLEBORO — When Paul and Barbi Schulick sold their Brattleboro-based New Chapter organic vitamin and supplement business to Procter & Gamble — the world’s second largest consumer products company — in 2012, they hoped it would help their Vermont vision go global.
“Procter & Gamble has the ability to turbocharge our mission,” Paul Schulick told employees at the time, “while sustainably delivering the wisdom of nature to people and the planet in ways we never even imagined.”
Six years later, the couple has a new worldview. The Schulicks, citing “essential differences in vision and strategy,” are parting ways with the nearly $100 million business they launched some four decades ago.
“Our cultural values were informed by what we put in the bottle — a promise of healing and transparency,” Barbi Schulick said this week. “Our name, New Chapter, arose from our vow to always make an optimal and truly innovative contribution to the marketplace.”
But P&G, which entered the vitamin market with its acquisition of the 225-employee Vermont business, has faced sluggish sales growth for such household brands as Ivory and Tide. That, in turn, has forced subsidiaries like New Chapter to consider cutting costs to make more money.
“We have empathy for the pressures on P&G,” Barbi Schulick said, “but New Chapter has always been about delivering optimal healing, and we’re intractable about some things. We could see the climate changing.”
The Schulicks, in choosing not to renew their consulting contracts as of July 1, are aiming to walk a tightrope. On the one hand, they express gratitude to the Cincinnati, Ohio-based consumer goods titan for providing “strong scientific support” for product creation, quality control and effectiveness studies.
“We have deep affection for a great number of dear friends at New Chapter,” Barbi Schulick said. “We’re still buying the product, and we very much want the company to do well.”
But the Schulicks also want people to know they’re leaving what they founded out of concern over “financial pressures to accelerate profits.”
The two were meditation teachers some four decades ago when they began to make and market herbal extracts in their garage. Botanicals may have benefits, but consumers weren’t buying them by the bushel. People, however, would purchase vitamins, spurring the couple to package them together.
“When you combine them,” he said, “the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”
“It was a new chapter in the category of vitamins and minerals,” she said.
Setting up shop in Brattleboro in 1986, the Schulicks befriended Dr. Andrew Weil, who appeared on CNN and recommended New Chapter’s “inflammation response” product Zyflamend.
“Literally the next day and week,” Paul Schulick said, “we had $1 million in sales.”
By 2012, New Chapter was producing 80 products, leading a majority of its investors to decide to sell the company for an undisclosed sum to P&G. The Schulicks, hearing many townspeople lament the loss of local control, hoped the sale would benefit the business.
“For us it’s always about reaching more lives,” she said at Brattleboro’s Slow Living Summit in 2016.
“Every day P&G touches 3 billion people,” he said.
But the Schulicks, recently becoming aware of a shift in strategy, now worry about the potential impact on the Vermont subsidiary.
“The need for cost savings and accelerated profits could influence formulation practices and ultimately undermine the mission,” she said. “That process is what we’d be concerned about.”
In response, P&G says it remains committed to New Chapter, its products and its place in the Green Mountain State.
“I can confirm that New Chapter remains an important part of the P&G personal health care portfolio and we will continue delivering quality products our consumers expect and enjoy,” P&G spokesperson Heather Huff said. “We’ll continue to operate the business in Brattleboro, capitalizing on the strong talents, culture and passion of the New Chapter employees.”
The Schulicks, who expect to announce a new venture this fall, hope that happens.
“We want them to prove us wrong,” he said, “and come up with innovations that are consistent with our strategy. Our commitment to purity and healing is as strong as it was 35 years ago.”
“We’d love them to be successful, but the real sadness would be if they do that without upholding the New Chapter mission,” she added. “We hope consumers speak up and appeal to them to keep the products as they are and find new ones that are worthy. We want voices to hold them to the New Chapter standard.”
