In Taos, a kitchen experiment became one of America’s fastest-growing brands

TAOS — No one working at Humble Brands had childhood ambitions to one day produce and sell natural deodorant for a living, not even the company’s founder, Jeff Shardell.

Yet, in a rural community where steady work and a living wage are notoriously difficult to come by, many Humble employees describe employment with the local startup as a kind of dream job in Taos.

“Humble has been great because I don’t have to do the Taos hustle,” said Glen Corey, facilities and maintenance manager, referring to the local phrase used to describe the chaotic jumble of jobs often required to sustain a living in Taos. “I’ve been here seven years, nine days, two hours and 15 minutes.”

Corey moved to Taos in 2009 to learn to how to build off-grid homes, known as earthships, and trained to become a massage therapist before starting out on the production line at Humble several years ago.

Lynette Martinez also spent a period seeking stable employment in Taos after she and her family sold her late father’s shipping business, Taos Crating, in 2016. For the past three years, she’s worked as a production and quality assurance manager at Humble, which she says has a similar familial feel and exacting commitment to good process her father instilled in his own business.

“They take care of us,” she said. “And for a company in Taos, to find something like that is really hard.”

Fortunately for Corey, Martinez and the 50-some other local residents Humble employs at its production facility on Gusdorf Road, the brand’s new CEO, Duane Primozich, says the company’s roots here are as essential to its business model as the essential oils they source for their products in lieu of the synthetic fragrances used by many of their competitors.

“The brand itself is beautiful. The people are fantastic,” Primozich, who joined Humble in August, said. “It’s a community that we can impact — Taos County specifically, and New Mexico more generally.”

Shardell handed the reins to Primozich last fall, choosing him to shepherd the organization through its next growth phase, but Shardell remains a board member and still sees himself as “the voice of the company.”

He founded Humble Brands in 2015 after leaving his job as a business development executive at Google in Silicon Valley and moving to Taos, where he tinkered in his kitchen with making a deodorant that was free of aluminum and other potential toxins.

“I got a formula that worked well, gave it to friends and family,” he said. “When I started the company, or started the project, I viewed it just as that, like just a project, just to create something better for me. And then people who I was giving samples to started asking for more and more.”

Over the past 10 years, Humble Brands has matured into one of the fastest-growing personal care brands in the U.S.

Made with just four ingredients — non-GMO corn starch, baking soda, beeswax and sustainably sourced MCT oil — Humble Brands’ flagship product can now be found at major retailers like Whole Foods, Walmart and Amazon.

Jason Mamoa, of “Aquaman” and “Game of Thrones” fame, contacted Humble Brands and asked to be a sponsor and investor in 2024, debuting his own scent of deodorant, Rockrose & Cedar, last year.

Production moved from that original testbed in Shardell’s kitchen to progressively larger facilities, most recently on Gusdorf Road in a building Humble purchased in 2020. The company operates a fulfillment center separately in nearby Ranchos de Taos.

Other products the company has created in recent years, like its lip balm and bar soap, are manufactured by third parties that Humble leadership says align with their core values.

Humble’s production team turns out tens of thousands of deodorant sticks daily using raw materials sustainably sourced from the U.S., Canada and around the globe, with partners vetted for their adherence to fair trade, environmental and labor practices.

“If we weren’t smart about it, and we just went with a low-cost provider, we could probably pay half for a dirty MCT (oil), but we don’t,” said Chris Beres, the company’s vice president of operations and a fellow former Silicon Valley executive who came to Taos to help Shardell launch the company. “During COVID, for example, the price of that doubled, but we didn’t change.”

Deodorants come in either 75% recycled-plastic or paperboard casings, allowing customers to select for a more environmentally friendly option for a $2 bump in price.

“We’re one of the few companies that has a paperboard option in the deodorant category,” said Primozich, a Boulder, Colorado, resident who has spent much of his career in the sustainable goods industry. “The plastic we use for those products that are in plastic are 75% post-consumer recycled plastic. We give back 1% of our sales to sustainability efforts, inclusive of some folks in New Mexico.”

Humble has also replaced its shipping materials over the years with lighter-weight, post-consumer recycled pulp paper boxes, printed with an algae-based ink.

Primozich says the company’s sustainability commitments will remain firm, even as the company faces new economic challenges and continues its growth trajectory, with plans to produce around 100 million deodorant sticks annually within the next five years.

The key to getting there?

Investing in good employees, Beres says.

“We have people who’ve been with us five, six, seven years,” he said. “We have low turnover. It’s all about our benefits. It’s just a good, sharing company. Jeff used to pay us by personal check back when we started. Now we’ve added a 401(k), health care. We have a monthly stipend of about a thousand dollars a month every year. We buy everyone a good pair of boots. Everyone’s a shareholder, and this will wrap year seven that we’ve done that.”

Even though he’s no longer at the helm of the enterprise, Shardell said it’s critical the company’s core philosophy of taking better care of one’s body by investing in better products extends to the way Humble treats its staff and the community where it operates.

“Taos is a magical place in a lot of ways,” he said. “It can also sometimes present challenges. You know, a lot of people who move there move there because they want a certain lifestyle, and so we’ve got amazing workers who are at the company.”

The Taos community and New Mexico have been supportive of Humble Brands, with the company receiving a $148,000 USDA grant in 2024, which allowed it to train 10 workers. 

“The town of Taos got squarely involved in that and helping us pull it together,” Shardell said.

He said they have no plans to leave Taos any time soon, seeing the community and its residents as part of its identity.

“We have people from the state coming all the time, and we’re one of the largest employees and employers in Taos County,” he added, “and I think because of that, people really go the extra mile to help us, where we just wouldn’t get that someplace else.”

John Miller is the Albuquerque Journal’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.