The Ledger
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PowerBar sued Clif Bar over ads, inadvertently creating industry buzz
“Our insurance picked up the tab, and we ended up settling with Power Bar, but it created this buzz in the bicycle industry where people said, hey, have you heard of Cliff Bar?”
Quaker Oats offered $120M for Clif Bar on $40M in sales
“We got a deal, we got an offer for a hundred and twenty million dollars on forty million dollars in sales.”
Erickson took on $60M in debt to buy out his co-owner
“Secondly, my partner wanted out, so I had to negotiate a deal, and so that was seven months of negotiation, and third was I had to go out as, Our attorney says, dialing for dollars. I had to go find sixty million dollars.”
Erickson: Clif Bar grew revenue every single year for 30 years
“We just, we never did not grow for 30 years.”
Erickson: PowerBar sued Clif Bar five days after a comparative print ad
“So we did some print ads and we did a print ad called It's Your Body, You Decide. And it was going directly after Power Bar. And in five days, we had a lawsuit against Power Bar.”
Erickson: Clif Bar added 700 retail accounts months after PowerBar lawsuit
“And we had 700 accounts in like months. And our goal Sounds very aggressive, but we're, our goal is to put them out of business, and for the first 10 to 15 years, our people were like, we are going to just go after their market share everywhere we could”
Erickson: Clif Bar never took outside investment in 30 years
“Kit and I never took,
A dime from anybody over our 30 years of running Clif Bar,
, we never brought on an equity partner.”
Clif Bar reached $700,000 in sales by the end of 1992
“By the end of 1992, we sold 700,000 dollars of Clif Bars.”
Clif Bar nearly doubled sales annually for eight consecutive years
“We almost doubled sales for the next eight years in a row.”
An early handshake deal led to an ownership lawsuit against Clif Bar
“So I did a handshake deal with a distributor in, you know, early nineties where it ended up biting me because they weren't performing. And so I canceled their quote contract and they came back and sued me for ownership.”
Clif Bar was the last major independent after PowerBar sold
“Power Bar was already, already sold, and Balance Bar was sold, so it was just, it was kind of just us as the third.”
It took Clif Bar nine years to pay off its $60M debt
“And it took us nine years to pay off that thing.”
Erickson: PowerBar was the dominant cyclist energy bar in 1990
“The only energy bar really that was on the market at that time that so many cyclists were eating... It was Power Bar. And they were also from Berkeley, coincidentally.”
Doug Gilmore designed Clif Bar's iconic rock climber packaging
“A real good friend that I was working with named Doug Gilmore, you know, we, I helped him out with some of the advertising for the bicycle company, and I knew that he was very, very creative person. I said, you need to design the package for me, and he came up…”
Clif Bar was named after Gary Erickson's father, Clifford
“So we named it Cliff Bar after my dad. My dad's name is Clifford Erickson.”
Erickson bootstrapped Clif Bar via outsourced baking and deferred payments
“So we tried to make it in our bakery, we just didn't have the equipment to do it. So I found a bakery down the street that agreed to help me produce it, like a, like almost like a cookie bakery. And we leveraged the packaging companies and said, We'll pay you.…”