For EO and Everyone, Authenticity Is as Much in Their Essential Oil-Based Products as Their Brands

After nearly 30 years in business, you might think that EO, the brand that makes essential oil-based body and hair care, runs like a machine without much heart behind it. But soon after meeting co-founders and co-CEOs Susan Griffin-Black and Brad Black, you feel like you’re talking to the passionate team behind a small, family-run business. From mixing the first stockpot of shower gel in their garage in 1995 to the zero-waste factory and Certified B Corporation they run today, Susan and Brad have grown EO and its sister brand, Everyone, into tenured, trusted brands without losing any of the soul behind them. 

To hear more about the magic behind their products, we talked to Susan and Brad about what goes into a bottle of EO and Everyone and how they’ve nurtured their brands throughout the years, staying true to who they are and the purity of the products they create.

Like Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice

A box of EO deodorant wipes and a bottle of Everyone 3-in-1 soap are probably not the flashiest items in your bathroom. The packaging is simple because it’s what’s inside that counts; the beauty of the products is in the essential oils that each one features. As Brad explains, that means using aromatherapy-grade essential oils and 100% non-GMO ingredients, staying “authentic to ourselves in terms of the raw materials that we want to use in our products.” Beyond that commitment to ingredient transparency and quality, the brand is a certified organic manufacturer that never uses animal-derived ingredients or tests on animals. 

At EO and Everyone, “lavender is not just lavender,” Brad says. “One of the things that we’ve said in the past is orange juice freshly squeezed or orange juice from concentrate is still orange juice, yet they’re different.” To bring that freshly squeezed approach to their products, EO sources the lavender for their shower gel, hand soap, and body lotion from farms in southern France that distill their oils on-site, making for fuller and more potent scents. 

It’s not only about the ingredients that go into their products, but the purpose behind each and every one of them. Susan describes that many of their products start by knowing they can do something better, then getting to work making it happen. “When we launched the first organic hand sanitizer in 2004, we imagined an alternative to the mainstream options, which were really harsh and drying. We knew we could do better. We found we could create an FDA-approved, certified organic product that meets all the efficacy standards and still use our preferred organic ingredients.” That commitment to making better products has paid off — today, there’s one EO French Lavender Hand Sanitizer sold every minute across the country. 

A large part of making better products is in EO’s long-term relationships with growers and suppliers across the globe, like those farmers in France. As Brad describes, “relationships allow us to create products that we really intentionally want. It needs to be beautiful, it needs to perform, be efficacious, but then also we have to be respectful of the workers along the whole path, and for the earth.” He travels several times each year to visit suppliers, ensuring the quality behind each of the oils that they bring back to formulate into their products at their factory in San Rafael, CA. “We want to have a firsthand experience with each of our ingredients… We make each formula ourselves internally, so the relationship [with our suppliers] is meaningful in a depth way.”   

Crafting Products for Everyone

While EO was well established by the mid 2000s, Susan and Brad found a moment to expand their community when their son and his friends came to stay with Susan in 2012. “I had a really small apartment,” she remembers, “and I went in to pick up [their] towels and I just saw all these crappy products in the bathroom. We had a small focus group meeting [where I asked them] ‘Have I taught you nothing?’ and they said ‘Mom, no. We love you, but [EO is] too expensive and we need bigger sizes.’” Simple as that, the Everyone brand was born. 

Susan describes how they used their years of experience with EO “to make a really good quality product that’s affordable” with Everyone. “If you didn’t use the most expensive essential oils, you could use the still-very-beautiful, high-quality [oils], but just have a different formulation… We pared it down and we made it beautiful and with all the same standards [as EO].” Today, Everyone’s soaps, lotions, and hair products are Thrive Market member favorites for the whole family. “The longer we’ve been doing Everyone, the more we think that it really needs to be everywhere,” Susan says. “For a really great, value-driven price, it’s a really beautiful product.” 

As for what’s next for their brands, Susan and Brad are continuing on the path they committed to almost 30 years ago. “It’s always moving toward continuous improvement in terms of: Can we make it less harmful, more sustainable, better? And better with all the standards and values that we started with,” Susan explains. Brad adds, “Part of what really drives us from the beginning has been: We’re doing the best for ourselves and for others. And so that’s a philosophy that’s really stayed the same amongst the challenges that happen in the path.”