Flamingo Estate takes a luxury approach to the natural world

0:03This is Business of Home. I'm your host, Dennis Scully. Every week I'll be speaking with leaders and innovators from all corners of the home industry. My guest this week is Richard Christensen, the founder of Flamingo Estate. Richard started the company as a COVID experiment, selling local produce out of his bookstore's parking lot. It quickly became something much more, a multifaceted brand that brings a luxury approach to the natural world, selling everything from beauty products to boxes of avocados. Along the way, both celebrity and design have played a key role. Richard has collaborated with everyone from LeBron James to Kelly Wurstler, and his home, a refurbished 1940s Spanish-style house in L.A.'s Highland Park, has been a main character in the Flamingo Estate story.

1:00I spoke with Richard about learning to love saying no, why customers need to be tricked into embracing sustainability, and how he struggles between the pressure to get big and the need to stay small.

1:21This podcast is sponsored by Ernesta. Lay the foundation to a beautiful home with Ernesta's high-quality custom-size rugs. Featuring an array of refined colors and patterns, Ernesta's custom-size rugs are made to fit every space and arrive in only two to four weeks. And with Ernesta's exclusive trade member benefits, you can get dedicated support, free unlimited 12x12 samples, and exclusive discounts to help achieve your client's design goals. To learn more about Ernesta's trade program, visit ernesta.com slash boh. This podcast is also sponsored by Harpen & Forbes, a family-owned company that for nearly three decades has delighted the design community with its versatile collections of hand-woven natural window coverings.

2:18Committed to sustainability, Harpen & Forbes utilizes natural fibers, meticulously hand-weaving each piece to the exact dimensions of your windows for a perfect fit. Beyond window coverings, they also design an exquisite range of statement wall coverings and Belgian linens. Planning a visit to High Point for Spring Market? Be sure to experience the latest Spring-Summer 2025 creations from Harpen & Forbes at the Wesley Hall Showroom including a new collaboration with renowned designer Barbara Berry. Or visit HartmanForbes.com to find a luxury showroom near you. And now, on with the show. Let's go back before we even get into Flamingo Estate and all that it has become.

3:09Let's talk about an earlier time in your life, Richard. I'm sorry, a stressful, a much more stressful time in your life, perhaps when you're jetting all over the place, your Jet Blues customer of the year. And you really did your homework. Wow. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you were once running yourself ragged. So let's let's talk about what you were doing and what was going on for you. Well, maybe the more interesting part of that is what got me to there before that, because I grew up in Australia and very, very rural Australia. My mom and dad are farmers. And my brother and I have a twin brother.

3:50We were very remote and we would spend our days sort of watching American television. And I like Dynasty and all that sort of stuff. And I was like, oh, my God, America, it's so glamorous. And so I really couldn't wait to run as fast as I could out of rural Australia. But I really understood the grunt and grind of farming. I understood the margins. I understood my parents worked backbreakingly hard. And as all farmers do, I really understood the nonstop stress of it. But sort of as a reaction to that, ran to Europe to go to university and then to Italy and then to Sweden. And then just like really was determined to, I don't know, work in luxury, really work in design, work in beautiful things.

4:31I didn't really have that upbringing, you know, and so I was just chasing that. And that got me to Benetton, where I was working in my 20s, when Olivier Toscani was there. As a 20-something-year-old, let's say 22-year-old working there, getting this education, working directly for him. It's such a powerful brand. He was such a force of nature. And to work under him was amazing. And then that got me to America. And long story short, sort of jumped around and started my agency, my advertising agency when I was 28. And so Chandelier was my business. Sorry to back up. My agency was called Chandelier.

5:13You know, just haunted by the idea of having to go back to rural Australia, just like worked and worked and worked and just didn't really have much of a personal life. I had just built an office and bigger office and got more people and by usual metrics, was doing really well, was earning much more than my parents probably had. And how dare I complain, but I was on the inside, I just was so unhappy, but I couldn't put my finger on it. And so I had an office in Hong Kong, built just different offices around the place, a lot of staff. And I was sort of the quarterback. I was pitching and I was running the business.

5:52now it's the creative director of all that stuff and got to work with all these giant brands that as a kid i craved to work with you know hermets and cartier and all these brands i just like ate ate to work with and um got what i wanted you know and i was so unhappy kind of thinking that was what success felt like actually and um so like equal parts happy and then equal parts just like oh my god what am I doing and uh so kind of a little bit on autopilot but yet working my just working all the time and I spent I say a lot that I spent more time in the four walls of that office in New York than I did anywhere else in the world and I was the first day and I was the last out I've worked every weekend and that went on until you know all the way through my 30s and into my 40s and um until it all ended spectacularly well and and as you say I mean And you were working with these incredible luxury brands that you had only dreamed about as a young person, right?

6:52I mean, and you thought this was the brass ring. You thought this was what success looked like. Yeah. But here you were totally miserable and you're thinking, this is what success is? Secretly miserable. But also, I was an outsider to fashion. I didn't go to art school. I never studied design. I was always had a bit of imposter syndrome. And so the one thing I took away from all those years, people would come and they would ask us, they have projects for us, they have different briefs, big, very big companies, very, you know, interesting companies. And I think but I think at the end of the day, they all had the same question, which was, can you help us act small again?

7:35Not can you help us be small, but can you help us act small? Because they had grown too big to be funny or vulnerable or take risks or listen, but really understood that no matter what the brief was, in hindsight, they just all wanted to be small again. And I really think about that a lot. It keeps me up at night in terms of what we're doing now, the pressure to be big, but the need to be small. So after Chandelier and you tell me, I mean, COVID, if I understand, COVID comes, right? Yeah, so COVID came and I was really sort of the, this sort of all starts to get interesting when COVID hits. I was here in Los Angeles.

8:15I had already bought the house, which is obviously Flamingo State is my home. I live there and was called that before it was ever remotely thought of as a brand. So I was here at the house. I also opened a bookshop in Los Angeles because there was no good bookstores near me. And I really wanted to read European magazines. and I couldn't find any. So I just was like, fuck it, we'll just open a bookstore. So we opened a very big bookstore and I used to work the bookstore on the weekends. And I remember this woman walked in and she said, oh, you know, what's going on with this COVID thing? And I kind of was like, oh, the Americans are overreacting.

8:53And then like that, you know, a week later, the New York team said they're going to, we have to shut down the office. And then one by one, sort of our clients all started to pull back budgets. And then we got, I remember we were on a very big Hermes project and they kind of slowed that down. And it had been a long time coming, this project. And I was like, oh, wow. And then just like client by client by client, I got the calls that they were pulling back their spending. And, you know, an agency is a service business, you know, so we really made a markup on production and that sort of stuff. I could feel this wave of enormous anxiety that the company would start to buckle under the weight of payroll.

9:32and these dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of people who I had spent my 20s with and my 30s with, who now had kids, who now are married, who had been loyal to me as an employer and a friend, that I had to tell them they all had to leave their jobs. And so it was just like my worst fear. And I think because my entire self-esteem and image and idea of self-worth was tied to that job. It was just my greatest fear was that I'd have to lose the lease of our beautiful office in New York. And anyway, and so this thing that took 16 years to build just came to a grinding halt in about six days. It was crazy.

10:13And then maybe the beginning starts where I learned about this farmer who I sort of knew who said she was going to lose her farm because her vegetables went to restaurants and the restaurants had all closed. And I said, oh, you know, we know how to sell stuff. Bring your vegetables to the bookstore and we'll sell them. And that was sort of where it starts. That very first Friday of COVID, we sold boxes in the back of the store. And that just created a bit of what you now know is this incredible momentum around vegetables. And for those first few weeks, it was just wild and beautiful because I was working on something creative at a time when there was nothing else going on.

11:05I was also, oh my God, how am I going to keep the team excited? How are we going to stay in business? Are we not? This was sort of a fun distraction. We just put our head down and sold veggies. I, for the first time, was at home with my dogs. And I was not on the phone to New York and wasn't worried about these clients who I was so exhausted from sucking up to. And I started to cook and I started to take long hot showers. and I got a bicycle and I was like sort of slowly getting back in touch with my body. I was like, I just wanted to feel sexy again. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to not feel exhausted.

11:46I just, and it sort of began with just being in the garden and taking and eating again. And I never really enjoyed food. I always, you know, I worked in fashion, so I always thought I was fat. And so So I never really enjoyed food so much. And I was cooking, which I never had time to do. I was sleeping and I was really for a brief moment, early COVID, so happy that I had a minute. And I was trying to figure it all out in my head. This is the worst time of my life. I've just financially lost a ton of stuff. But also I was feeling quite, I don't know, something was changing. and I actually had gone to New York not long after that because we had to move out of our big office and one of the things in that office that many people remember we had an enormous library but we couldn't take them with us no one no one wanted to come out to the streets no one wanted to come to collect them so we were just we're going to either drop them at schools or deliver them to people we knew so anyway I was in the office in the building we had to get you know permission to get inside because the office building had closed.

12:54And I walked in, and I know this sounds very B 'nai Brown, but I walked in and there was a book open that said, with a quote, something like, now my barn has burned down, I can see the moon. And I remember thinking, oh, how appropriate. My barn has burned down. And I just remember it so clearly walking in that day and thinking, this is probably the last time I'll see this office after being in here for 16 years and packed up our stuff and left and came back home. And I really felt the sense of like one door was closing and another door was opening. Right. You come back home, you come back to the house.

13:29And as you say, you're cooking and you're just kind of getting back in touch with yourself, right? And the same sort of week in that same period, that first week of COVID, I met Harvey, who has become my partner in work and in life. And so we met someone new. He's a wildly creative director. It was also sort of a fun adventure. We both started working on this funny thing, these vegetable things. And then, you know, just like, you know, I remember so vividly that time, it was so wonderful. And also like COVID gave everyone such a protective bubble to do things a bit differently. So the health department shut us down for selling vegetables in a store and I, getting the notice from then, I went home, I ordered some food and some wine on Uber Eats or something and or Seamless or something and it got delivered to the front gate of the property.

14:26And I thought, oh wow, that's what we should do. We should just deliver stuff. If we can't have people come, we can just take it there. So we put a, there's a marquee above our, there was a marquee above my bookstore, which is now the Flamingo store. But at the time, the marquee, I just put the letters on there that said drivers wanted cash work or something. And we had grandmas and nurses and dads and anyone that had a car. I remember no one had a job. Remember, everyone was like, freaking out. And so we had, in a month, we had 50 drivers and the phone would pick on Wednesdays, pack on Thursdays and we deliver on Fridays.

15:07And we got another warehouse, a much bigger warehouse. We kept getting bigger warehouses because we just had the volume of produce coming in to do these vegetable boxes. And one farm which then became two, which then became three, which today there's 128 in the Flamingo network. But at that time, maybe it was a dozen farms. And it was so much fun to be in the weeds of people doing interesting things. And we were just like up early drinking coffee, sorting vegetables. There was a real joy to this work, which I hadn't felt for a long time. And really just like there was a cause and effect and a real like, oh, we're delivering something that people really need and they really love.

15:50And so that just continued the growth of that. And we were very lucky that people Instagrammed the boxes and were on the doorstep of Hollywood. So we had a lot of people with good followings start to post for us. And Chrissy Teigen was one early person with 34 million followers or something. And then it rippled through many, many other celebrity circles of people who were very grateful posted. And then you sort of had some friends who were... Most of my friends were photographers who were not working. And so I said, you know, come over to the house. I know you normally shoot fashion, but just come over to the house and just shoot some vegetables.

16:28Shoot some vegetables. I mean, right? You know, and I think that's why from the very get go, we were born on Instagram. Like we were such an Instagram brand because we were showing up in a way that no one had in farming, in vegetables. You know, it felt really differentiated. And I think now I know we had put everything we learned for 16 years, or me at least, about luxury goods, and we put that lens onto the garden, which no one had really done before. When you think about farming or vegetables or the earth, it gets so agrarian, it gets so earnest. And we were not that at all. We were very polished and we were very sexy.

17:08And then on top of that, I would get the box on Fridays and I'd be like, oh my God, there's this giant box of vegetables. what I cook with it. And I didn't really know. But I also had friends who were chefs who were also not working. And I said, well, come over to the house on Thursdays. Let's do a video about what's in the box and what we can cook. And then we'll put that out on Fridays and we'll also include the recipes in the box. And that also had an enormous effect. People were so enalmed by the videos, I think, at a time when people just wanted comfort. They wanted good food. And so So I think a combination of that Instagram ability of that early period and that content, which was just fooling around in the kitchen with vegetables, was a rocket ship.

17:55And we got off to this crazy start. Yeah, and then I had honey there. I had bees. So honey sort of came soon. And then what was interesting, maybe, I don't know, maybe a year in, the timeline's sort of a bit wobbly, but a year in, I was like, oh my God, we've got a real business here. This is wild. And made, just made so much stuff, started to make stuff at home. This guy, Martin Brocius came in who had an olive oil farm in Northern California. And he was really sweet. He walked into the house and he said, can you sell my olive oil? I heard you're helping farmers out. And I said, I don't think we can, I don't think we need it." And he was walking out and I was like, oh, actually, maybe we could make soap from it.

18:43And that's how we got into the beauty industry. And that changed everything. Today, that's most of what we do. Not to get ahead of myself, but I think this is one of the most interesting things about Flamingo State as a project was that we didn't know what we were doing. People would come to us and say, I've got an idea. I've got 50 acres of this, or I've got seven acres of bat. I've got sage. There was this great biodynamic herb farmer in South Carolina who had the most amazing herbs. And we're like, well, let's make tea from it or let's make steams from it, where you put herbs in hot water and inhale them.

19:25So we just had these, I think we made 150 products in the first year and a half or something. I'm just like, let's try something. How hard can that be? And I think about that now, I think just in terms of product dev for most businesses, that's just insanity. But we just had all these people join us, just had farmers come and join us and people all making stuff. And it was beautiful, help them out and make sure that they didn't run out of money. My parents had lost their farm when I was a kid. So I know how rough it is if you're growing stuff. And I've learned so much about all sorts of things farming related that I didn't know.

20:00But I think the one thing I did know was what farmers need is consistency more than anything else. And so If we can now say to a farmer, we will take all of your sage for the next four years and we will guarantee the price and we're not going to bargain you down. That's real security for people and it's really important. So anyway, that's sort of what we started to do. Sorry, I lost track. What I was going to say a second ago was that I think the not knowing how to do stuff, we're like, well, how hard can that be? Let's make hand soap. Let's make body wash. How hard can it possibly be? and because I think we'd never done it before it was almost the upside down way of starting a business you would otherwise say like oh I want to start a bath and body business what do I need to go source for us it was like oh I've got all these ingredients what are we going to make it was the other way of thinking and so you know we just started making stuff the old-fashioned way you know it wasn't until much later when we became a proper business that people were like hmm, why are you not using palm oil?

20:59Why are you not using a contract manufacturer? Why are you not using synthetic ingredients? Like this stuff, which was never a choice. We just like simply didn't know that was even an option, you know? And so, and we were so far into it by the point that that became an option. And, you know, I think the thing that we, that I'm maybe like the most proud of and the most worried about is that we can continue to source things the right way, that we can work directly with people on the ground, that we can build a giant, very profitable business, not sourcing or making things the way most large bath body or beauty businesses do.

21:40and I can turn around to Estee Lauder and L 'Oreal and all those big conglomerates and say, see, someone can do it. No one has ever scaled a business working this way. No one's ever scaled it working like on and on with people on the ground, with regenerative farmers and with people who treat soil well and the planet well. No one's ever, ever scaled a business like that. And I'm going to do it. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. We were reminiscing about the early days, but that's how we started. It was very much vegetables. And then how can we take food grade ingredients and do other things with them?

22:21We're taking a quick break to remind you about Hartman and Forbes. This spring, Hartman and Forbes unveiled a new collaboration with internationally renowned designer Barbara Berry, celebrating the artistry of light, texture, and the timeless beauty of nature in a collection of hand-woven window coverings and natural wall coverings. If you're attending High Point Spring Market, experience this collection in person, along with their latest Spring-Summer 2025 designs at the Wesley Hall Showroom. To discover other unique collaborations by Hartman and Forbes and register for your trade account, visit hartmanforbes.com.

22:59And now, back to the show.

23:06And as you were describing earlier, this remarkable customer base that you had because you were delivering these boxes in the early days to the doorsteps of these Hollywood homes and the photography and the images. You were putting this luxury branding around farming and vegetables. And so, right. And so, because I was trying to think why so many people in the design world came to you and it resonated so much for people and everyone who follows you is just so engaged by the presentation and the product. And then underneath it, all of the messaging around slowing down and this conflict that it sounds like you're wrestling with right now about, as you were saying at the beginning of the conversation that so many companies were coming to you in your early days, how do we get small again?

24:07Yeah. Right? And as you've talked about before, yes, act small again. Be a big company. But one of the things that you said to me last time you and I spoke that really resonated with me was they lose their ability to just even have a sense of humor. Yeah. Right? And they take themselves too seriously or they can't sort of get out of this corporate mindset, right? Yeah. And I saw it again and again and again over the two decades I was working in creative. Yeah, for sure. And so I'm obviously worried about that for us as we grow. And it gets more complicated when you take on investment, which I know we'll talk about.

24:49The question about the design thing is interesting. I think just before that happened, I remember we had an event at the bookstore. But the bookstore was interesting because we're in Highland Park. It's Highland Park. It's not Hollywood. It's the other side of town. And I remember someone saying, you're crazy doing a bookstore here. But we had Juergen Teller come and launch his book. And then, you know, and Brad Pitt came to that party, I remember, in the bookstore. And then we'd often have these sort of large book releases at the store. The Missoni family came to do something. And we, for example, and then we'd take everyone up the hill to the house and we'd have dinner.

25:25And so the house started to get in the view of people in design because the bookstore was about design for that. So, you know, people would be up there. People would take photos. It was the very last event we did before COVID hit. The weekend before was Kelly Worsler's book, her book that she launched. And I remember sort of having every sort of like design person in Los Angeles at this party. And then I went up to the house and we sort of leveraged, you know, took everyone on the story with us where we started to talk about vegetables instead. And it's interesting how those communities collided and how they continue to collide.

26:05and this idea of, I'm more articulate about it now, but this idea of putting culture back into horticulture, which is something I think we are trying to do all the time. I think that's why now that my love is really the environment and our impact and what we're doing, whenever we talk about that, whenever we talk about that engagement falls to the floor, people don't really care. They're sick of being told about it. And I don't blame it. there's enough to worry about and there's enough stuff. I think people are sick of feeling bad about stuff but we notice it very clearly when we talk about the environment or the money we give back or the stuff we're doing.

26:42No one really gives it any attention when we photograph the house and we put a candle in that people go nuts for it. So there is this little bit of a flamingo is a very honest endeavor on my part but it's also very dishonest in a sense that we now know that a little bit of my job is dog whistle marketing. We want people to think it's a cool happening brand. We want people to love it just because it's that. And under the hood, if you dare look under the hood, you'll see that there's a lot of good stuff going on, but we're not really talking about it that often because we need to trick people into spending the right way.

27:18And that's what I mean by dishonest. We sort of need to trick people into doing the right thing without realizing they're doing the right thing. And so when I think about putting the culture into horticulture, from like you know the um we tried hard to do a bunch of really unusual collaborations like lebron james did a honey and you know kelly wurstler did a honey and um tiffany haddish and julianne moore and um we did an olive oil with laura dern and we did a thing with the dalai llama and the sesame street came over to and we did a collaboration with porsche and like so much stuff that doesn't really belong in the sort of prism of like regenerative farming.

27:59And it doesn't really make sense. But because of that, it kind of, it needed that tension to work, you know? And I think we talk about this a lot now because AI obviously has made copying us very easy and we see it often. But what you don't, what AI can't really do for us is come up with that conceptual lens of like, okay, I'm going to take an artist. I'm going to take Ai Weiwei or Ed Ruscha, two people we did products with, and I'm going to make them make a product with Mother Nature. And that tension is really interesting. It's going to keep us, I hope, current and aware of what's going on in pop culture.