PURE PRODUCTS HELP FIRM CARVE A HOLISTIC NICHE.

Byline: Cheryl Hall Dallas Morning News

Horst Rechelbacher never met a petrochemical that he trusted or a polyester that he liked. And heaven forbid the pesticide.

The 54-year-old founder and CEO of Aveda Corp. is determined to prove that we can all live without man-made ``poison'' and still look and smell attractive.

The world's latest Aveda store, just opened in the Dallas Galleria with 700 pure-flower and plant-based fragrance, cosmetic and apparel items, stands as a testament to that.

And he's equally adamant that his Minneapolis-based corporation ``walks the pure path'' by using organically grown materials in making its lifestyle products and by always taking the environmental high road even if it takes him to the ends of the Earth and costs much more.

``It's not about the money. It's about the mission,'' Rechelbacher says, parroting his longtime yogi mentor. ``It's very difficult but possible. We're better at it than most people in the United States. But we're not perfect.''

It may sound funky, but apparently it works.

The Galleria store, the first in Texas, is Aveda's 53rd, with 54 through 70 spread from Milan to Jakarta slated to open by July. The way things are quickly moving, Rechelbacher wouldn't be surprised to hit 100 by the end of the year.

Products also are distributed through a network of about 2,000 outlets and salons around the world. Many customers buy the Aveda array never realizing their eco-pedigree. They simply like the way the products smell and feel.

Aveda, which means ``knowledge of nature'' in Sanskrit, posted 1995 sales in excess of $100 million. Rechelbacher tosses out a 30 percent or so growth rate as a distinct, albeit a bit vague, possibility for 1996. The family owned enterprise, which keeps company figures mum, experienced the highest returns in its 18-year history, he says.

``We do a lot of things other companies don't have to do,'' Rechelbacher says. For example, Aveda has to track down farmers willing to grow plants, herbs and flowers without pesticides and fertilizers. The bigger Aveda gets, the more difficult this becomes. ``But you know what? We had a great profit last year. It was huge.''

He quickly shifts gears back to environmental issues, finding talk about material success off-putting.

Horst Rechelbacher is a reluctant businessman.

More cosmic monk than worldly mogul. Green long before being green was cool. John Lennon, stuck in the sitar mode, goes corporate.

He prefers transcendental meditation to mundane meetings, dislikes managing people and admits to being a demanding, and at times obnoxious, boss. He has no use for numbers and delights in giving away a small fortune - 10 percent of gross profits each year to promote grass-roots environmental causes.

He believes a company is a tribe, where every individual functions for the good of the whole community holistic business, if you will.

``I am the chief,'' Rechelbacher says, his Austrian accent giving way slightly to his Tibetan training, ``but the chief's job is not to make the decisions. It's to force the people to make decisions.''

Yes, he earns $1.5 million a year for his services, but he reasons that's less than most executives who own giant companies pay themselves.

And he doesn't limit the good life to himself.

Aveda's 65-acre corporate headquarters complex, which includes on-site day care, rests adjacent to a 1,000-acre wildlife preserve 12 miles north of downtown.

Rechelbacher wants to create a nurturing environment that encourages performance.

The 500 employees can take strolls or bike rides at will. They're fed organically grown food. A full-time trainer teaches exercise techniques in a gym that can be used whenever. Workers can chill out in Aveda's silence room or shoot pool on company time.

``Stress is toxic,'' he says flatly. ``It brings out the worst in us and keeps us from being what we really are by nature: spiritual.''

He employs ``ethnobotanists'' and anthropologists to ensure his agricultural and business dealings with remote indigenous cultures have the natives' best interests in mind.

``What built Aveda wasn't my business skills,'' he says. ``It was my drive and my belief system. My heart was so full with this belief.''

Rechelbacher has traded pauper for princely status several times in the course of a career that already has spanned 40 years.

A poor Austrian boy who couldn't get his dyslexic mind to function in school, Rechelbacher started cutting hair at the age of 14. ``The feedback from my teachers was cruel. They didn't understand what my learning disabilities were,'' he says, the hurt still there. ``So, I escaped.''

For the next three years, all he did was hair, forgoing even trips to the beach with friends. That would get a 17-year-old to Rome combing the coifs of Brigitte Bardot and other luminaries at one of the city's premier salons.

The young jet-setter took a life-changing detour on a visit to Minneapolis. A drunken driver plowed into the Jaguar he was driving, leaving him incapacitated for six months with a mountain of medical bills. The hospital confiscated his passport to make sure he paid up before shipping out. It was a lucky twist of fate.

``I would have split, because Minneapolis, Minn., was not my favorite town in the '60s,'' he says with a soft laugh. ``I had worked in Rome, London and Germany before that.''

Instead, the 22-year-old went to work for a local hairdresser to pay off his doctors. He had enough money for the first Horst of Austria salon in 1965. Five more would follow as the Twin Cities flocked to its new European sensation.

Excess quickly caught up with the hair celebrity. Booze, pot and marital infidelity put him on a self-destructive course.

Meditation and a trip to the Himalayas saved his soul.

``I lived with monks, really got into yoga, gave up smoking dope and doing amphetamines and speed,'' he says. ``Crises are good teachers, in fact, they are the only real teachers. That's when I started paying attention.''

His cleansed spirit led to a health and self-help kick, he says, trading one excess for another.

In search of the perfect shampoo, Rechelbacher began cooking up batches of herbal soap in his kitchen. He also developed a line of ``intestinal cleansers, blood purifiers and essential oils for massage'' that he hawked city to city on weekends.

A new-wave snake oil salesman?

``That's what it looked like to other people for sure,'' he says. ``Nobody took me seriously.''

But he did: ``I,'' he says dramatically, ``believed.''

He became like his mother, a medical herbalist who had worked at an apothecary. He studied plants and natural cures of native cultures around the globe. ``It's called quantum medicines today, and they are very powerful.''

In 1978, Rechelbacher used his expertise of plants and psychology to launch Aveda. Those in the cosmetics industry who snickered back then probably aren't doing so today, as most lines scramble to join nature's bandwagon.

Several rows of earthy red lipsticks stand in a display rack at the Dallas store. It took Rechelbacher seven years to bring these hues to market.

Natural reds are problematic, he explains. Most, like beet juice, turn a muddy brown with oxidation.

But on a trip into the jungles of Brazil he noticed native people with bright reds and blues on their bodies and learned that the dye came from leaves.

He worked with local anthropologists and ethnobotanists to plant 250,000 seedlings that have grown into a cash crop for the tribe.

``We literally reforested a whole area that was brown and dead looking. Now it's green again,'' he says. ``That's economics. That's the stuff that really turns me on.''

He's planning a sabbatical next year to revisit what he most enjoys: meditating, studying native medicines and finding new sources of natural ingredients. He hopes to free himself from routine business chores that he terms ``chasing mediocrity.''

Personal rejuvenation will be his pursuit. He's just not a material guy.

``I live modestly. I live in a cabin in the woods,'' he says. He kept its cost down to $250,000 by building things with the help of friends and buying second-hand stuff.

``I do have a little penthouse apartment. A small, very small, one-bedroom in New York City's lower Fifth in the Village,'' he adds, as if this disclosure might be interpreted as a material excess.

He shops for food at the Minneapolis co-op, which he helped found years ago.

``Money doesn't set you free,'' he says. ``It gives you freedom to do certain things, but it also makes you more attached to things. The more you have, the more afraid you are of losing it. That's human nature.''

Back in the early '80s, Gillette offered him $10 million for his company, which was generating about $4 million in annual sales.

``We the people who helped me start the company were looking at each other and saying, wow, $10 million.''

So he called his yogi in the Himalayas and asked him about the deal.

He's carried the yogi's response ever since: ``Ten million. Very good. Then what you gonna do? Die?''

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Photo

Photo: Horst Rechelbacher, CEO and founder of Aveda Corp.,celebrates the opening of his 53rd store in Dallas.

Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service