Jan 25, 2021 · 1h 33m · how-i-built-this
Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of NPR's How I Built This, Seventh Generation co-founders Jeffrey Hollender and Alan Newman reunite to recount the pioneering rise, painful partnership rift, and corporate transformations behind their multimillion-dollar sustainable household products brand.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 32.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 3.8 Guest teaching 3.3 Guest disagreement 1.8 Guy pushing back 1.9
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 47:19 Alan Newman's raw anger over ouster
Newman forcefully expresses his enduring resentment at having his company taken away without a single conversation, stating he was 'ripshit' that his friend stole his baby.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 1:06:27 Guy Raz challenges eco-product greenwashingRaz refuses the standard eco-brand narrative, directly pushing Hollender on whether products like disposable diapers and non-recyclable spray bottles just soothe consumer guilt rather than solving environmental harm.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 59:24 Hollender educates on retail shelf real estate economicsHollender explains that retailers cared little about green values and instead bought Seventh Generation based on hard revenue and profit margins per square foot.
Guy holds their own ▶ 1:00:05 Raz compares positioning against Method foundersRaz invokes his interview with the founders of Method to contrast product efficacy marketing strategies with Seventh Generation's health and safety framing.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jeffrey Hollender's Early Career and 'How to Marry Money' | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Guy Raz traces Jeffrey Hollender's unusual path through alternative education and the 'How to Marry Money' course. Hollender openly shares his early regret and public humiliation on Phil Donahue without defensiveness. | |
| Alan Newman's Path to Vermont and Acquiring Renew America | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Alan Newman corrects Raz regarding his founder status at Garden Way and explains how he unexpectedly inherited the failing Renew America catalog. Newman emphasizes how early and unproven the green market was at the time. | |
| Birth and Early Success of the Seventh Generation Catalog | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Newman explains how he cut catalog production costs and pivoted copy to focus on consumer economic benefit rather than purely environmental messaging. | |
| Jeffrey's Audio Business Sale and Redemptive Book Project | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Hollender recounts the lucrative sale of his audio rights business to Warner Publishing and his subsequent motivation to write a book on corporate social responsibility. | |
| Forming the Partnership and Raising Seed Capital | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Newman and Hollender describe uniting their complementary skills—Newman's operations and catalog know-how with Hollender's fundraising network and capital access. | |
| Cultivating Culture and Early Product Hits | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | The co-founders reflect fondly on their unconventional office culture, celebrating employee mistakes, and the unexpected viral demand for French string bags. | |
| Explosive Growth and Earth Day Publicity Wave | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Hollender details how the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990 catalyzed national media attention and propelled revenue from $1M to $7M. | |
| The 1991 Recession, Gulf War, and Mass Layoffs | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Newman and Hollender detail the severe impact of the 1991 recession and the Gulf War distraction on catalog order volume, leading to painful 50% staff cuts. | |
| Alan's Sabbatical and Sudden Ouster | 4 | 5 | 7 | 3 | The conversation turns tense as both men revisit Alan's sabbatical and subsequent firing. Newman candidly expresses his fury at having his 'baby stolen without even a discussion.' | |
| Stock Buyout, Lingering Bitterness, and Cold Encounters | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Newman explains demanding a full buyout ahead of the IPO, and both founders share humorous, awkward recollections of running into each other around Burlington. | |
| Pivoting from Mail Order to Retail Wholesale | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Hollender explains the calculated risk of divesting the mail-order catalog—80% of current revenue—to bet entirely on wholesale retail distribution. | |
| Retail Expansion, Whole Foods Validation, and Strike Solidarity | 5 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Hollender explains how retail buyers care about revenue per square foot over green ideals, and shares how the company donated profits from Albertsons to striking grocery workers. | |
| Going Private and the Dilemma of 'Less Bad' Consumerism | 6 | 4 | 1 | 5 | Raz challenges Hollender on whether eco-branded consumer goods merely offer an illusion of environmental virtue while still creating waste. Hollender agrees, distinguishing 'less bad' from genuinely 'good.' | |
| Mounting Board Tensions and Jeffrey's Firing | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Hollender candidly reflects on losing alignment with his board over activism, employee equity expansion, and executive hires, resulting in his abrupt 2010 firing. | |
| Shared Lessons on Board Management and Unilever Acquisition | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Newman notes the poetic justice in Hollender's firing while acknowledging shared hard-won lessons in managing board relations. Newman also praises the Unilever sale. | |
| Alan Newman's Magic Hat Brewing Adventure | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Newman describes building Magic Hat Brewing Company as a music lifestyle brand rather than a traditional craft brewery, utilizing lessons learned from past supply bottlenecks. | |
| Dissecting Founder Ego and Partnership Pitfalls | 5 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Raz presses Newman on his stubbornness. Newman openly acknowledges needing to be the sole boss, citing a Bobbi Brown interview on How I Built This as an epiphany about his own founder personality. | |
| Returning to the Board and the Nature of Luck | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | In the standard closing reflection, Hollender and Newman analyze the interplay between resilience, persistent action, and serendipitous luck. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Hollender: Skills Exchange of Toronto reached 30,000 registrations in year two
“I think the second year we had 30,000 people register for these courses.”
Hollender: Royal Mounties jailed me for starting a company without papers
“In Canada, and I had a pretty high profile because of this successful startup, and one day the Royal Mounties showed up in the office, handcuffed me, and threw me in jail because I was an illegal alien. I was working in Canada without working papers.”
Newman: A nonprofit gave me their mail-order catalog business for free
“Finally, I got a call from them one day, and they said, we're done. So either we're gonna ship everything to you, and it's your business to do whatever you want, or we're gonna throw it all in the garbage can.”
Newman: Eco-friendly products must sell on personal benefit, not just environment
“And this is really where I personally learned that you really need to sell from benefit, not feature. You know, the feature that you're saving the environment, yeah, that was nice, but it was only good after you passed the what's in it for me.”
Hollender: Prior business delivered a 10x return to investors
“For every dollar they put into the company, they got 10 dollars back.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation's first $850K came entirely from past investors
“The vast majority of the investors were those investors from the prior business. And they put up 850,000 dollars in 1989.”
Newman: Creating a culture where employees share fears makes businesses more productive
“What I learned was that the greatest obstacle to success was fear, fear of people that they didn't know what they were doing and somebody was going to find out. And so what I discovered was that if I could get people To share their fears and realize that we're…”
Hollender: Seventh Generation gave a weekly prize for the biggest employee mistake
“One of my fondest memories is that in our staff meetings, we would actually give a prize out to the person who made the biggest mistake that week, and they would get a coupon to go out to dinner with their friend or their wife.”
Newman: The Gulf War crashed our daily orders from 1,500 to 100
“When the Gulf war started, everybody turned on their television and was glued to the television. And our, we went from, I seem to remember 12 to 1500 orders a day down to less than a hundred.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation Laid Off 50% of Its 120 Employees in 1991
“My recollection is we had about a 120 people, and we had to lay off half of them, almost 60 people, 50%.”
Newman: My co-founder fired me by letter while I was on sabbatical
“I didn't know until I sent an email or a letter or however we communicated in those days
Saying, okay, getting ready to come back, why don't we get together and let me talk about some of the ideas that I have put together that I'd love to start implementing, a…”
Hollender: Seventh Generation never put Newman's sabbatical terms in writing
“One of the things we could have done that we didn't do is put things in writing when Alan left. So,
A written document that says Alan's taking six months off, and he will return at the end of six months and fulfill the position he had before.
I mean, that wasn…”
Newman: I held up the IPO until Seventh Generation bought out my shares
“If you really want to solve this problem, you need to buy me out. And that's when that's when I got paid out.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation co-founders saw a counselor to reconcile differences
“We went to see a third party to try to reconcile our differences. And we had a series of meetings with a sort of marriage counselor type person to see if we could mend the relationship, which I don't think happened very successfully.”
Hollender: Why Seventh Generation killed its catalog to bet on wholesale retail
“We had raised about five million dollars of additional capital, and the board and I came to the conclusion that we had two very different businesses, and they both demanded lots of money, and we decided that we should do something that appeared highly risky an…”
Hollender: Getting into Whole Foods grew our revenue from $12M to $50M
“Yes, it was huge, and it basically unleashed growth that would propel us from, you know, 10, twelve million dollars to five years later, almost fifty million dollars.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation products tested at 90-95% of mainstream effectiveness
“Well, every product we sold, we sent to an independent lab and tested our performance against Lysol, Tide, or Bounty, and we had pretty good test results. We were 90 or 95% as effective. We weren't a hundred percent as effective or more effective, but we felt …”
Hollender: Diapers added about a third to Seventh Generation's sales
“I mean, when we got into the diaper business, I was Traveling in Europe, and I saw these brown diapers, I said, wow, unbleached diapers made from, ah, non-chlorine bleached pulp, and I said, I gotta have these, we gotta sell these, and they were a success from…”
Hollender: We donated our Albertsons profits to their striking grocery workers
“And we debated, and the whole company sat down in a meeting together, and some brilliant young man whose name I can't remember came up with this idea that we should take all the profits we generated from selling in Albertsons and donated to the Workers Strike …”
Hollender: Eco-friendly products are just "less bad," not actually good
“To be quite honest, it's often about being less bad rather than good, and I think we've gotten the two things confused. I think that when you're buying a seventh generation diaper, you're causing landfills to fill up, you're causing increased climate change. Y…”
Hollender: My board hated that I kept getting arrested with Greenpeace
“I was a board member of Greenpeace for 13 years. I was getting arrested for standing up for things that we believed in, and my board was definitely not comfortable with a CEO who was getting thrown in jail.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation achieved 20% employee ownership
“We had built ourselves up to having a company where the ownership of 20% of the company was Resting in the hands of the employees.”
Hollender: My board fired me by phone on a Saturday and locked me out
“Done in a somewhat brutal fashion because not only was I let go, but I was let go over the telephone on a Saturday morning and told that I wasn't even allowed to go back into the office ever again.”
Hollender: Firing stemmed from failure to keep board aligned
“I was very headstrong. I was impatient, and I was too focused on doing what I was passionate about doing, and not focused enough on ensuring that I had brought the board along with me.”
Newman: Hollender was brilliant in turning Seventh Generation around
“I think what Jeffrey did with the business after I left was in many ways, brilliant, you know, certainly deserves a lot of credit for taking this concept and this fledgling business who was really down on its luck and finding the way”