Aveda heiress adds buzz to her father’s dream of saving the world
MINNEAPOLIS — “The bees are out! Yes! Oh, but they shouldn’t be out.” Nicole Rechelbacher beamed and fretted all at once. Even in late April, the morning’s bite in Osceola, Wis., foretold a chance of snow. The arcing sun had power enough to coax a few bees from their hive, yet she worried. A legacy was at stake.
Now, in glorious summer, those bees are nosing into roses and hyssop, monarda and mint, species planted just for them in the fantastical landscape of a farm where Rechelbacher’s father changed the world.
It’s also where she intends to help save it.
Rechelbacher leads an ambitious research venture to aid bee populations harmed by pesticides, diseases and parasites. But she also wants people to learn how daily decisions have real environmental impact.
It’s an ethic she inherited from her father, Horst, a charismatic hairdresser who in the 1960s took Minneapolis by storm — and by accident — and ended up raising the city’s cool quotient around the world.
Horst was an Austrian immigrant who would go on to create the Aveda Corporation.
On a 500-acre farm north of Osceola, he created products from organic ingredients. One barn still holds a mad scientist’s heap of distilling equipment where his young daughter would help glean essential oils from a harvest of mint.
In 2012, Horst offered the farm to the University of Minnesota’s Bee Squad to use as a rural lab. The squad leapt at the opportunity and established four colonies, only to watch as the bees inexplicably failed to thrive.
“We thought, ‘What’s going on here?’” says Rebecca Masterman, the squad’s associate program director. “It turned out that the bees actually were short of food, that they lacked the right habitat.”
Experimental plantings began in 2014, but then Horst died of pancreatic cancer. He was 72. Given his death and the bees’ struggles, the project might have ended right there. But Rechelbacher, along with Horst’s widow, Kiran Stordalen, didn’t want to see that happen.
“We decided, ‘Let’s do something amazing.’”
At first glance, Rechelbacher embodies how we regard the impossibly chic. She’s an heiress, for starters; Horst sold Aveda in 1997 to Estee Lauder for a reported $300 million.
Rechelbacher earned a beauty school degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and dabbled in clothing, but returned here to work with her father and Stordalen, whom Horst married in 1985.
In 1997, the year Horst sold the company to Estee Lauder, Rechelbacher married Peter Thomas, a Minnesota man she’d met in New York City. With that, and the sale, her priorities shifted. “I didn’t want to work for Estee after working with my father,” she says. She had one, two, three children — and a new career away from Aveda’s allure.
“Becoming a mother, it’s the hardest job I’ve ever done,” she says. “I wore a T-shirt and khakis for years.”
Motherhood informed her return to Intelligent Nutrients, or IN, an even more environmentally focused line of beauty products that Horst founded in 1992. She’d gained a fresh awareness of kids’ vulnerabilities in a chemical soup of fabric protectors, detergents, preservatives and so on.
The HMR Pollinator Project — for Horst Martin Rechelbacher — was established at Osceola a year after his death as a research and training site for scientists and students.
It’s also a place where the public can come and learn about raising bees and sustainability practices, as at an event earlier this month that included kite-flying and beertasting.
“I just know that Dad would be very happy with the education focus here,” she says. “When we talked about this, he said, ‘I don’t want to burden you,’ and I told him, ‘I don’t have a choice in losing you, but I have a choice to develop this.’”