EO Products:one bottle oflavender, and shefound her calling
In 1991 Susan Griffin-Black walked into a London apothecary, picked up a little blue bottle of lavender essential oil, and inhaled. By the time she exhaled, she knew what she wanted to do with her life. Four years later she co-founded EO with Brad Black in a ten-gallon stockpot in a San Francisco garage.
EO began with a single breath. In 1991 Susan Griffin-Black walked into an apothecary in London, the kind of place lined with essential oils, dried herbs and tinctures, and later described it as a portal into a whole different world. She picked up a little blue bottle of lavender, brought it to her nose, and inhaled.
She was not in the beauty business. She was working for the co-founder of Esprit, in fashion, a career with a relentless travel schedule that kept pulling her away from her young family. The lavender did something a job never had. It told her, in one breath, what she actually wanted to spend her life on.
She did not have a company, a lab, or a plan. She had a smell that would not let go of her.
So she went and learned it properly. Griffin-Black studied aromatherapy, took a crash course in cosmetic chemistry, and started blending essential oils herself, turning the thing that moved her in a London shop into something she could actually make. She was teaching herself a craft in the early, unglamorous days of the natural products industry, before clean beauty was a category anyone was chasing.
In 1995 she and her partner Brad Black co-founded EO, which simply stands for essential oils. The whole operation began in a ten-gallon stockpot in a garage in San Francisco, bottling four essential-oil blends by hand in a small warehouse, bootstrapped and under real financial pressure. Her son Marc was about five.
The break came faster than the garage suggested. Bloomingdale's called and asked Griffin-Black to create a collection for its 1995 holiday catalog, putting a stockpot brand into one of the country's best-known stores. An early contract with Whole Foods, back when it was only about fifty stores, gave EO a home in the natural-products aisle just as that aisle was about to explode.
It worked because the product was real. EO was built by someone who had taught herself the chemistry and genuinely cared what went into the bottle, in an industry that still rewarded shortcuts. The brand grew on the strength of being exactly what it claimed to be, essential-oil-based products that were clean before clean was a marketing word. In 2024 the work got an outside read: EO's Warm Embrace bath oil was named a Good Housekeeping Sustainable Innovation Award winner, and Griffin-Black and Brad Black landed on the year's MO 100 ranking of the most impactful CEOs.
The thirty-year version of the story skips the years that nearly ended it. EO was bootstrapped from a stockpot, and staying alive that long with no outside money meant absorbing hits a funded brand could have spent its way past. "We endured through divorce, bad cash flow, slow sales, all sorts of manufacturing issues, and the myriad small business and life challenges," Griffin-Black has said. The skill the company actually built, before it built a clean-beauty category, was a less flattering one: "we got really good at not going out of business."
The structural problems never fully left, either. Essential oils are finicky and far more expensive than the synthetic fragrances most of the industry leans on, which makes them hard to formulate with and harder to price. Holding the line on a zero-waste, B Corp facility in California, one of the costliest places in the world to manufacture, means EO knowingly sacrifices margin that a less principled competitor keeps. The brand is profitable in spite of those choices, not because of them. The bet is that being exactly what it claims compounds, slowly, when nearly everyone around it is racing to the cheaper version.
From one bottle of lavender to a clean-beauty mainstay.
The turning point was personal: her own son could not afford the products she made.
Griffin-Black realized that the person she most wanted to take care of, her own kid, was priced out of EO. So she built Everyone, a line with a lower percentage of essential oils sold in bigger bottles at a much lower price, designed so a clean product was not a luxury. It is the rare brand extension that came from a parent's guilt rather than a spreadsheet.
EO is still proudly family-owned, run by Griffin-Black as co-CEO, and pushing toward becoming a zero-waste, zero-plastic manufacturer. The mission she has stated for it is plain: make products that nurture the people who use them, respect the people who make them, and honor the planet they share.
The blue bottle, all grown up
The French Lavender body oil, in the cobalt-blue bottle EO is known for, a direct line back to the little blue bottle of lavender Susan Griffin-Black inhaled in a London shop in 1991. It is the same essential oil that started everything, blended and bottled by the company that grew out of that single breath.
EO Products, in five moments
The arc
- 1991In a London apothecary, Susan Griffin-Black inhales a little blue bottle of lavender and knows what she wants to do with her life.
- The craftShe studies aromatherapy and cosmetic chemistry and starts blending essential oils herself, leaving her fashion career behind.
- 1995She and Brad Black co-found EO in a ten-gallon stockpot in a San Francisco garage, with four essential-oil blends.
- The breakBloomingdale's commissions a holiday collection and an early Whole Foods contract puts EO into the natural-products aisle.
- TodayEO is a family-owned clean-beauty mainstay, with the lower-cost Everyone line and a push toward zero-waste manufacturing.
Most brands this old were either sold or sanded down years ago. EO is still family-owned, still made by the woman who taught herself the chemistry, and still picking the more expensive raw material on purpose. Griffin-Black did not spot a market and build for it, she fell in love with a smell in a London shop, learned to make it, and then spent thirty years refusing to cheapen it, building a second brand so her own son could afford it and keeping the factory zero-waste even when the margin said otherwise. The durable thing was never the lavender. It was the stubbornness.
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