SKINCARE:NEVER HEARD OF Bryan Meehan? I hadn't either until I found myself in an austerely stylish, wood-panelled suite in Dublin's Clarence Hotel, talking to the Irish eco-entrepreneur about his latest venture, a natural skincare range called Nude, on which he is collaborating with Bono's wife, Ali Hewson.
When I arrive, Hewson, pale-and-black beautiful, is about to be interviewed about the range for the QVC shopping channel in the US. While she chats to the camera at one end of the room, her business partner and I talk and test squidges of the sleekly packaged, sweetly scented creams on the backs of our hands.
Meehan is best known in the UK as the co-founder of Fresh and Wild, a chain of cool, clean organic food shops that arrived at just the right time – the late 1990s. He is personable, photogenic but generally rather media-shy. Magazine profiles frequently describe him as “the man who made organic food sexy”.
The first Fresh and Wild was in the just-becoming-fashionable Notting Hill, but soon the business expanded to 10 stores and annual sales of £22 million. Meehan and his US partner eventually sold it to the US company Whole Foods for $38 million.
Meehan, now 40, was not a natural candidate for green business success. Having graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1991, the Dubliner went to work for Guinness in Scotland and rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming brand manager. It was while working there that he met his wife, Tara, who greened him up.
“She is the daughter of a Swiss woman, very environmentally aware,” he explains. “They had been buying organic food and recycling long before it became trendy. Up to then I was a meat-and-two-veg guy – I didn’t know what an aubergine was – and I was a complete mother’s boy, couldn’t iron a shirt.”
He did know, however, that he didn’t want to spend his life working for Guinness, and, encouraged by his wife, he applied to and was accepted by Harvard to do an MBA. “That was a life-changing experience. It was in 1996, just after we got married. And Tara was already leading this really environmentally conscious life, recycling and buying organic food.
“When I came back from Harvard, instead of going for interviews with Goldman Sachs, I got 10 investors to give me money to buy a business.”
It was while attempting to buy an existing whole food shop, Wild Oats, that Meehan met his Fresh and Wild partner, Hass Hassan, who was looking for a project in the UK. The pair decided to pool resources and experience.
During his Fresh and Wild years, Meehan noticed that while organic food had hit the mainstream – as his ringing tills testified – natural skincare was lagging behind. “At Fresh and Wild I served 35,000 customers a day and they’d be at the gym and doing yoga and they’d be quite neurotic about what their children would eat, watching this and watching that, but they were going to Space NK and Selfridges and buying Crème de la Mer for their skin. So I began talking to women in the shop and asking ‘Well why do you spend £100 on a cream?’ And I remember asking this American woman, and she looked at all the natural skincare products we had and then looked and me and said: ‘Honey, that stuff ain’t gonna lift my lines’.”
After Fresh and Wild was sold, Meehan was still thinking about a new project when a mutual friend introduced him to Bono and Ali, and he mentioned the natural skincare idea to them. Ali was enthusiastic and after several meetings, they decided to launch Nude, their range of skincare products.
In Ireland, of course, we associate the name with the restaurant chain. “At the time,” clarifies Meehan, “Bono, through his brother Norman, had the brand name from the restaurants. But Bono and Ali had this vision that Nude, as a word, could be applied to more than a juice bar chain. So we went back and forth about it for about six months and just got to know each other better, and we’d have lunch and dinner and talk and then we all just one day said: ‘Let’s do it.’ ”
Ali brought her impeccable contact list – Christy Turlington and Helena Christensen were both involved in early tests of the products – and gives presents of the products when she goes to meet the kind of people she gets to meet.
Meehan went on what he calls “a bit of a roadshow” to research the line, before deciding on a manufacturer in Paris. Nude is designed to look, feel, and deliver results like conventional products, but using 99 per cent natural ingredients (the other 1 per cent is preservatives). The ingredients include natural milk peptides, hyaluronic acid, prebiotics and probiotics.
The packaging is subtle and contemporary – and made from 60 per cent recycled plastic with biodegradable labels and no boxes. It has the environmental chops but crucially, also, the “here comes the science” factor. It is ethically manufactured, is perfectly designed for its target market and it will probably be huge – despite the recession. All this Notting Hill yumminess could be a tad overwhelming were it not for Meehan’s down-to-earth streak – which probably comes from the fact that his early life was not one of unadulterated privilege. He gets his ambition, he says, from his parents.
“My father is an orphan and my mother left home at 12. My mum is from Tinahely and my father is from Cork. So they were very driven to give their children the opportunities they never had. They sent me to St Gerard’s although they never really had any money.
“They had both gone to London to work and they met in Kilburn I think . . . typical story. They came back to Ireland and my father was in the rag trade, had a shop on Wicklow Street, but in 1979 the business went bust. We lost our house – my mother will be mortified now that I’m telling you this,” he smiles. “But the point is, they had come from nothing and had always worked hard. But that was the pre-Celtic Tiger mentality – it was basically about hard graft.Eventually my father got back on his feet and got another house and became quite successful in the motor trade, but I never forgot that.”
Meehan now has fingers in several pies – he is involved in property restoration and, along with a number of other eco-capitalists, in Greenmont, a green venture capital firm based in Colorado.
“But I only spend 5 per cent of my time on that because the idea is to back already existing companies, so I go to board meetings and things,” says Meehan. “Nude is my passion and I do other things to sort of generate an income and pay for school fees and things.”
In August he, Tara and their three daughters are leaving London for San Francisco. “Our biggest customer now is in San Francisco, but part of Nude’s development is also in Asia and we are doing very well in the US. My colleague, Anna, runs the company in London so that I can live in San Francisco and look after things on that side – Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, places like that.”
This practicality extends to his environmentalism, too: “At home, I’m pretty green, but I’m not obsessive. People ask me what kind of car I drive. And I don’t really think much about it. When I bought my car it was second-hand and that was five years ago and the car is now 10 years old. And I’d rather not change it. I could buy a Prius, but I drive so little in London, I’d rather just keep the second-hand car. There’s a lot of what I call ‘ethical patting on the back’ that goes on. Unfortunately, I do have to travel, I am in airplanes, but otherwise everything in my life has an eco-bent to it. I am slightly alternative in what I do but I don’t want to wear it as a brand.”
Nude is available at Space NK in Harvey Nichols, Dundrum, and through www.nudeskincare.com