EEDS OF
HANGE BY TOR I PHELPS
ONE COMPA N Y IS R EI N V ENT I NG MODER N SK I N CA R E BY BR I NGI NG IT BACK TO ITS ROOTS.
our products aren’t ‘pretend natural.’” The casual comment, from an early fan of her company, has stayed with Rebecca Swanson Gournay for nearly a decade. Someone gets it, Gournay marveled. Suddenly, she was sure others would too. That observation about Seed, the plant-based skin care and body care company Gournay founded in 2009, resonated so deeply because it not only summarized Seed’s ethos but also pointed to the reason she gambled everything to launch the brand in the first place. At the time, Gournay and her husband, Benjamin, were trying to start a family and, wanting to stack the odds in her favor, she decided to clean up the products she used. But in searching for body care products that were both natural and effective, she found—nothing. Many looked good on the surface, but closer inspection revealed petroleum-based ingredients, artificial fragrances, and other additives that were far from green. Frustration turned into a flicker of an idea: a company focused exclusively on clean skin care products that were safe for everyone and that actually worked. 100 | A P R IL 2019
If anyone could make it happen, Gournay could. The Minnesota-raised Boston transplant had spent an impressive career working with some of the biggest names in consumer goods, including a decade at the world’s largest personal care product company. She’d been toying with a nebulous vision of entrepreneurship combined with her passion for consumer goods, but the exact products didn’t come into focus until her fruitless search for plant-based skin care. From the beginning, Gournay and her husband, who cofounded the company and continues to keep a hand in while also running an e-commerce consulting business, saw their audience in the mirror. Unlike what was available at the time, Seed wasn’t aimed at a quirky few, nor was it intended to be a bargain-basement line that misled people into thinking they could
