The Farm Childhood That Built a Creative Empire

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0:14This beautiful idea of what just carried us through, I think, of putting culture into horticulture. I'm Casey Finey, and this is Creative Control. Each month, I'll be interviewing your favorite celebrities and creators to unpack what's at the intersection of creativity, business, and brand building. In this episode, a conversation with founder of Flamingo Estate, Richard Christensen. For nearly two decades, Richard Christensen made a career helping some of the world's biggest brands move faster and capture more attention. Now, he's built a business around a very different idea, slowing down. Richard is a founder of Flamingo Estate, a Los Angeles-based company spanning home goods, beauty, farm-grown food, and so much more.

0:58but its real product may be its philosophy of reconnecting with the natural world. In our conversation, Richard explains how burnout led him to starting Flamingo Estate, why Mother Nature may be the last great luxury house, and how our obsession with speed and optimization is actually making us less creative. All right, Richard, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it, and I'm very excited to talk to you. On this podcast, I always love to start from the beginning with people. And, you know, this is a podcast all about creativity. And I know that, you know, in your career, you had a bit of a pivot, which we'll get into in a minute.

1:37But I'm curious, like, what would you say was like the first creative spark that set your career into motion? Like, what would you say is that one thing that you can remember that really laid the groundwork for the career that you have now? I think creatively, I grew up in a very rural Australia. And so I think living on a farm with my mum and dad, my brother, was the most sort of joyful creative place to grow up. Always building, always making, always with the colours of Australia. And my parents are big garden people, they're big horticulturalists. And so just always out, always like sort of in the world.

2:20I honestly think that was it. And, you know, anyone that's been to Australia knows there's this blue sky optimism in most Aussies. There's a real curiosity from most of them. I honestly credit so much of it to that. And my mom and dad are, they're farmers, but they are the most creative people I've ever met. You know, they were always hustling. They were always thinking about how we could, you know, turn our farm into a business, how we could bring people to visit it. If people were not buying crops, what else they could grow. They were always pivoting. They always had a different idea. My dad was a real vaudeville family.

2:51in a way we were just always hustling. I remember we had to, you know, we would bring busloads of Japanese tourists to the farm to have an Aussie experience. And, you know, we'd put on these like shows for them. We'd shear sheep and we'd, I don't know, we'd have like, my mom built a steam train by hand and we'd, you know, travel people. Oh, wow. Stuff like that. So just this real like Disney-esque childhood from my mom and dad, not out of any kind of creative ambition, but more just, they're just trying to get the farm, just trying to keep the farm, you know, so to speak. So I think that, and then I didn't really have any creative role models as a kid.

3:30And the idea of being creative was, you know, not something I had learned about. You kind of were a farmer or a doctor or a lawyer. And so I went to law school and always sort of knew it didn't work, but didn't really know. I didn't know what else to do. And I wanted to get out of Sleepy Australia. I went to London eventually and finished my law degree. And I was all set to become a barrister in London, but I was very poor. I was very broke in London. I was like 21. And 21, you're all set to be a lawyer. That's impressive. I mean, I lost track through law school. I got done early. I was a good kid, a good student, but I was in London and I was broke.

4:09I was working in some kind of seedy bars, serving beers to people. And every night I would work after work. And this one night, this guy came up to me who was a regular customer and a big tipper. And so I knew his name because I always was living on my tips. And he said, you know, you're very good at this. You always have a story for someone and you know how to deal with assholes and you're always good on your feet. You should work in advertising. And I didn't know at the time. You know how to work with assholes you should work in advertising anyone works in advertising knows that is from god's mouth to your ears and so that um and you know so he took me under his wing and i started working um at his agency and and he was one of you know prolific kind of agency guy in england at the time and so that was one of the i think one of the big pivots i guess the other one maybe happened i worked i was lucky enough to then move to italy and i worked with oliviero toscani who I worked under him at Benetton and made, I was the editor of Colors, the quite controversial magazine that Benetton did at the height of Benetton.

5:17And those, maybe those of us who are a certain age, remember Benetton was quite remarkable. You know, those campaigns of, they dealt with race and they dealt with AIDS, they dealt with immigration, they dealt with all sorts of really hot topics. And Oliveira was radical at the time. I think it was social media before social media. His definition of success was if he rattled the cage. There was a sign on the back of his office that said, is it immoral? And if it was immoral, he would want to do it. And so when he would get stories of people throwing bricks through the windows of Benetton stores, he would be so excited, get so happy, got a reaction from them.

5:58So there was a couple of like real pivots. That was definitely one. And, you know, this is a long time before I moved to America, but that experience at Benetton was kind of remarkable. And so lucky to experience it as someone in my early 20s and then kind of just bite off more than I could chew and get into it. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's I'm curious to hear about the start of Chandelier Creative, because this is the creative agency that you started in 2005 in New York City. So how do you connect those dots between kind of being taken under the wing in Europe and then coming to the U.S.

6:34and starting your own creative agency? Well, I got a job in New York at a magazine and was there. Time Inc. had bought Essence Group. They'd started a new magazine together. I was the creative director there and very grateful to be there. And it's sort of maybe the last gasp of the magazine's golden era. You know, when people were still making magazines and we're investing in them and working with great photographers. It was a real dream, dream job. I was really unhappy with the way Timex sort of publishing team was working. They were selling ads. We were getting the really bad ones. InStyle was getting the good ones.

7:13And I was quite shy at that point, but I forced myself to go to sales meetings and go with them to sell the ads for the magazine. I got used to this rhythm of like, how do you sell the ads? I'd go walk into Calvin Klein, you walk into wherever. And I would just, I slowly learned how to sell it. And I thought no one else could sell it better than me because I made it, you know. And so I was in the room standing up for the work we did trying to get money to get the ads in. And anyway, Time Inc. eventually closed the magazine, not because it was not doing well for all sorts of other reasons. It's a whole other podcast.

7:46So what's interesting about Chandelier is we were, I built this beautiful team of people at the magazine. But I spent all of our money on photography. I think I spent the first whole year's budget in the first issue. You know, we were really like, I was. Oh my God. And I remember having to go up to the Timing building with all my receipts. And there was this one particular person who worked there whose name haunts me still, who she would, she'd said, you're so outrageous, Richard. You would put a, if you had to shoot a football player, you'd rent a chandelier to hang there for the photo shoot.

8:20You're so indulgent. And so then more as an insult, every time I walked up to that floor, the executive floor, she'd be like, oh, here's the chandelier guy again. Here's the chandelier guy. And it became this like real sort of like mean spirited jab. And everyone on my team was like the chandelier people. And so the magazine closed and I said, listen, maybe we could start an agency. There's no one. I just I'm so bored with stuff I'm seeing. And I've met all these people now. So I had bought a small apartment in New York. I sold it and used the money to pay everyone's salary. We moved into my apartment.

8:57And I said, you know, what should we call our agency? And one of the first, my first colleagues, she said, why don't we call it chandelier? Because I've always called you the chandelier guy. And so that's sort of how that started. And then, you know, the original genesis of the magazine, of the agency, we really just didn't know what we were doing. And we were trying so hard. I was running out of money. And then we got the chance to pitch Nordstrom. And at the time, it was all the money in the world. We pitched the job. We got the job. And they said, you know, we want to make sure that you guys are big enough to handle the account.

9:36we're going to come to New York and see your office. And we didn't have an office. You were working in my dining room table. But there was a building across the street that had an empty floor. And I went and rented it. And I said to the landlord, give it to me for a week. We need to make it look like a busy office. I went to the flea market that used to be in New York on 23rd Street, put all these tables. Went to Texter and rented all these computers. Got on Craigslist and got all these fake colleagues. So we had people at every desk and it was busy. and it was someone outside ringing the one working phone constantly so that it looked like...

10:09Oh, my God. And the Nordstrom people came in and they were like, you know, they were like, they thought it was great. We didn't have enough power sockets, so we turned the monitors towards the wall. So people were typing on computers that didn't work. Like the whole thing really looked as good. Anyway. That is the perfect embodiment of make it till you make it. We got the Nordstrom job. And then I recounted the story many, many years later somewhere. And I got a call from Nordstrom. And I said, I'm so sorry. I don't, I hope, you know, I apologize. I don't, I'm sorry I lied to you. And the person on the phone said, we knew you were lying, but we knew you wanted it so badly.

10:52We gave it to you. And so that really sums up the rest of the next 16 years at Chandelier. It's actually quite lovely. There's a lesson to be learned in sort of in there. You have to dig through some of the immorality of like lying, but it's fine. You got the job. You know what else? I was actually thinking about this. This is maybe an interesting side note. I was thinking about this recently. The other reason why I was so hungry and just absolutely focused on that business succeeding and in London and in Italy and all these places was I was always chasing a visa. I never had papers. And so I was always having to punch way above my weight to get into a visa category to stay where I was.

11:38And so, you know, came to America without papers, hustled until I got someone to sponsor it, then hustled again to get my green card. And there was this like upward hustle that was very much about, I want to stay here. And it was the same thing I felt in England. I didn't, I ran out of my visa there. So I moved to Italy. I ran out of my visa there. I moved to America. I was like, I'm not going to let that happen again. And there was this real, absolute, ferocious focus on getting qualified enough to get my visa to stay in the country. And so that sort of a little bit of the fire in my belly came from that.

12:14Yeah, that's very interesting. So I guess I can understand that as, you know, sort of like a young creative wanting to just leave where you came from and like go to have larger opportunities in bigger cities and whatnot. But I guess what is the source of that for you? I mean, was it that? Like, were you, I guess, like, why so hungry for that, knowing that, you know, you can be creative wherever. And in fact, you know, there could be less competition in smaller markets. I guess, like, what was the hunger? When you grow up in rural Australia and you watch American TV and all you want to do is go to New York and do that.

12:46And that, you know, very much dovetails into Flamingo State because that complete workaholism and obsession on that and the stress of running an agency that was, you know, quite large before I left. was, you know, with multiple offices and, you know, somewhere near 100 employees, this like massive drive, you know, almost killed me. And this like 16 years of working in that office in New York every weekend till 11 o 'clock every night, you know, being the quarterback, pitching the jobs, managing the money, figuring out the stuff, you know, just really like go, go, go. And I was at the end of that 16 years, I was just exhausted.

13:29I was completely out of alignment. I was so unhappy. I was very lonely. I was so unhappy. And you know, didn't really know a way out. And we'll hear how Richard found his way out after this quick break.

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14:13And we're back with Richard Christensen, founder of Flamingo Estate. So we just heard from him how after 16 years of working at his creative agency, he started to feel this immense sense of burnout. Pair that feeling of burnout with the pandemic, and soon Richard found himself at a crossroads. There's a couple of different truths with that moment. And they're all true, but they're all different. The agency, I was in Los Angeles to go wind. I also owned a bookshop in Los Angeles. I was working the bookshop on the weekend. I used to love just being there to look at, read the books and stuff. And so photography and art bookshop.

14:50And anyway, someone came in and said, oh, you know, there's a virus. They're shutting the businesses down in New York. And then my team in New York called and said, we have to close the office. I thought this was dramatic. You know, I obviously didn't have all the information at the time. But, you know, my whole, maybe the most important thing to take away from that moment was my whole self-esteem and my entire identity was tied to that business. And that idea of losing our fancy penthouse in Soho was the most terrifying thing for me. The idea of not making rent there kept me awake at night for 16 years.

15:28So this collision of nightmares that maybe if we hit a downturn or something like that would happen slowly, the idea that this would unravel in a matter of weeks, that I could feel the company buckling under the pressure of payroll. all of our clients stopped making tv ads and stopped making campaigns so we and we made a markup on production so the money dried up and then the savings dried up and then so it was this perfect storm of uh of things starting to unravel so i was like really just like oh my god and in some way as you said like the absolute my worst nightmare come true because my whole identity was you know, I was this, the guy there was in Los Angeles.

16:12And anyway, there's a couple of things. Flamingo started really because it has been well documented. Someone came, I met someone through one of my colleagues who was going to lose her farm because her vegetables went to restaurants and restaurants had closed. She asked whether we could sell her vegetables. And so, and we did. And one farm became 10, became 50. Now there's, you know, 160 farms that we work with. My parents are farmers. I knew the grunt and the grind of farming. So, you know, I sort of understood both sides of the coin. This was also a collision of my childhood and a collision of all the things I learned in New York kind of compounding together.

16:50Most farmers don't know how to market themselves. We don't know how to scale themselves. We don't know how to take all those ingredients and make something else with it. I had sort of armored myself with all this knowledge and I was sort of full circle coming back to sort of my parents, people like my parents, and saying, let's make things. And so there was this very earnest desire to make stuff. We were selling vegetables for the first period. And, you know, that first Friday of COVID, I think we sold, I don't know, 50 boxes. We sold double that the next week and double that the following weeks.

17:26There was, you know, before we knew it, we had 50 delivery vehicles across LA. So this thing blossomed. I think the very much design driven, we made beautiful boxes. We photographed everything very well. My friends that were photographers were not working in fashion. I said, come over to their house. Let's shoot some tomatoes. So this beautiful idea of, which has carried us through, I think, of putting culture into horticulture. This idea of treating all this stuff like we used to treat luxury brands. You know, Hermes was one of our biggest clients. This idea of taking the nuance and the care of Hermes and putting it onto vegetables was something that I think people maybe hadn't done before.

18:07And so I think at its heart, there's a real, real earnestness to what we're doing here, what we started doing here. It's an expression of something that was really going on. I was at home. I was completely out of alignment. I was so out of touch with my body. this meant good meals hot baths good showers eating well deleting the stuff that didn't work in my life um and so it's just it was and you know everyone you need to remember flamingo is my home it's where i live it's a real place real people you know it's not it was not created in a boardroom we don't even have a traditional marketing department you know this was always just an expression of what we were doing in the kitchen or in the garden and so somewhere where amongst all of that, this brand appeared, you know, and often people sort of talk about, oh, you know, you got into the garden, you sold vegetables, and then you made candles, and then this, that, the other, and now it's a, you know, a big brand.

19:03But also, you got to remember, I was training for this for 16 years in New York, I had gone to thousands of meetings, and given people solutions for brands, and had them many times not listen. And I got so frustrated that I was being asked to go to big brands, big, big brands and solve the problems that they were not talented enough to solve themselves and then have them not take my advice or have them not listen to the team or not take the strategy. And so I've seen it again and again. And I would often sort of come out of those meetings just like, for fuck's sake, if only I had my own brand, I would know exactly what to do with it.

19:42And so there was this real like latent desire to just not so much to have a brand in a greedy way to have a brand just so I could sort of flex the muscles I wanted to in a way that I knew not to. And so it was a bit of that. And the thing I've said a lot is that in all those years at Chandelier, people came to us with hundreds of problems. But at the end of the day, I think they were all asking us the same question, which was, how do we act small? Not be small, but act small. Too big to be vulnerable. We've got too big to be emotional. I got too big to be funny. I got too big to be political, you know, all this stuff.

20:22And then not, not, not in any way about being small, but that idea of intimacy in a brand, which just gets lost. Let's get lost. It gets lost. Scale is the enemy of intimacy. And I think as any brand grows, that's a big problem. And we saw it just again and again and again. And so that really what carried me through, you know, the first few years of Flamingo, definitely that idea of smallness of intimacy of that one-on-one connection someone i'm curious like how would you describe what flamingo estate is because i see people call it a luxury brand but it's not luxury in the way that we've come to know it and people have called it a wellness brand but that doesn't feel quite right to me so i feel like how it because wellness i mean itself has become such a loaded term so how would you describe what flamingo estate is because you know it's there's so many there's so many elements to what you do so i'm just curious as the founder how would you describe it it's true you know we're running kind of five businesses we're running a we're running a bath and body business and this year fragrance business there's a food delivery service a flower delivery service um there's a whole pantry business there's all these different verticals i think the the answer really is depends on who's in front of me if you met me on a plane i would tell you i'm a vegetable salesman.

21:42That's a little too humble. But what we're doing is quite humble work, you know, so it's that I think at the end of the day, I would often say we're an ingredient brand, you know, I think we have permission to make anything as long as it comes from the garden. And I think the, you know, whether that's, and then you think about how we started, it was farmers coming here saying, hey, I got 17 acres of sage, what can you make from it? Or I've got 50 acres of lavender. What can you make from it? Hey, I heard you're helping out farmers. I've got an olive oil grove that my dad gave me with the best trees.

22:16How could you want olive oil? So this, this like constant rotation during COVID of people coming here, and it's the complete opposite way of doing a business. You know, most people would be like, okay, I want to make a thing. Here's how I, here's the things I need to get to make it. It was completely upside down. People will come here and say, I've got this stuff. What can you make from it? Which is why I think is in that first year, I think we made like 150 products or something. It was just like, go, go, go, go, go. How hard can it be? Oh, it must be easy to make hand soap. Let's figure that out.

22:45You know, we would just like figure it out. And, and understood that protective bubble of COVID, where everyone was sort of collaborating in different ways. And everyone was looking for work. We were really lucky that we were able to have access to great people to make formulas and great people to make food and shampoo and body wash and whatever it was. And so, but this idea of starting from the ground up, like start with the ingredient and then let's, what can we do from it? Was it radical, radical accident? And sort of set the template really for how we've worked ever since. And so, but sorry to answer your question more directly.

23:23If I'm in front of a finance bro of which I've sat through many of those meetings. I'm so sorry. Yeah. Let's talk about that. The, you know, we're a consumer goods business, we're a beauty business, whatever it was, you know. And it's so interesting. I would like to do a whole podcast on creative people raising money because my creative friends started businesses who have gone through the fucking agony of raising money, as I did, we're all very ill-prepared for that. And all of us have been ill-prepared for it. And I wish I knew what I knew now. I wish I knew that four years ago because we, you know, the businesses kept doubling.

24:04It just doubles and doubles and doubles. And we just kept running out of money because the volume, you know, the amount of bottles we need, the amount of glass we need. There's 110 people on payroll now. Like this sort of expansion needed capital. And I wasn't aware of that. And those meetings were really tough on me because you'd have these guys who would be like, you know, what do you want to sell for? and what's your like, get rid of the food part of your business because the beauty is where the multiple is. What about your margin here and just focus on fine fragrance, forget about it. Everyone has an idea, you know, everyone has a solution.

24:42And what was interesting is that so many of those finance bros in the early days, especially were like, here's a playbook you can follow. And it was like, let, you know, you want to be the next, insert whichever brand here. And we didn't want to do that. We had no intention of doing that. And I didn't want to have conversations about the end of the race when we barely started running, you know? And so what do I want to, do I want to sell? I don't know. Do I want to be a quiet? I don't know. I also don't care. You know, there was these like real, it came, the business itself, the mechanics of the business came from a very naive place as well.

25:16Yeah. But, you know, but luckily, you know, luckily did well. And now it's interesting now that we are doing very well and that we're profitable and that we're global. So many of those people have come back. There's so many of those people that say, oh, kill your pantry business, or kill your food business, or you're making too many things, or you're doing too much stuff, all that stuff, have come back again. I'm happy for them to go away. I'm curious, in all of that, because a lot of this is, you know, it seems like you've built Flamingo State somewhat. I mean, you obviously had a wealth of experience in, you know, working from a creative agency and having that deep insight into brands and understanding what people want, how to sell things.