Episode 175: Beatrice Dixon, Co-Founder and CEO of The Honey Pot Company

02.03.2021

Summary

After nearly a year of discomfort, an ancestral vision provided Beatrice Dixon with the recipe to resolve her bacterial vaginosis — and the inspiration for a first-of-it’s kind business. Bea provides women with the tools to safely and naturally care for their “honey pots” with the first plant-based feminine care system that cleanses, protects and balances the vagina.

Transcript

Announcer	Welcome to Where Brains Meet Beauty®, hosted by Jodi Katz, founder and creative director of Base Beauty Creative Agency.
Jodi Katz	Hey, everybody, it's Jodi Katz, your host of Where Brains Meet Beauty® podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. This week's episode features Beatrice Dixon. She's the co-founder and CEO of the Honey Pot Company. And if you missed last week's episode, it featured the co-founders of Nala. It was Mila and Ada Juristovski. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I'm so excited to be here with Bea Dickson. She's the CEO and co-founder of the Honey Pot Company. Welcome to Where Brains Meet Beauty®.
Beatrice Dixon	Thank you for having me.
Jodi Katz	So, it's taken a long time for us to make this happen on the calendar. It seems like you've been pretty busy, Bea.
Beatrice Dixon	Yeah.
Jodi Katz	So busy that I need to ask you now, what's for lunch?
Beatrice Dixon	I ordered sweet green. It's one of those grain bowls, with a bunch of veggies and stuff in it.
Jodi Katz	Yeah. It's so good.
Beatrice Dixon	And some water, and some Spindrift.
Jodi Katz	So, for our listeners, Bea is very busy because I know that you've been traveling all over the country and are so busy that you're in that zone where you don't even have time to eat. I imagine you don't have time to pee also.
Beatrice Dixon	Yeah.
Jodi Katz	So, let's talk about why. What's going on?
Beatrice Dixon	I think for some reason people want to listen to me, and there's just been a lot of opportunities for speaking. I've got personal things that I've been dealing with that has not been easy, so I've been, I'm not a person who does shit when I don't mean it. And so, the last couple of weeks, I've had to just take a moment for myself, because I don't want to try to pour from an empty cup. Because doing this type of work requires a lot of energy that people need, and that I give, naturally. And so, if I don't have to give, I'm not doing it, because that'll make you crazy. So, there's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of a lot of speaking stuff. There's obviously tons of work happening with Honey Pot, a lot of changes. So, it's just been a time. I'm grateful for it all though, don't make me wrong. But shit is just crazy right now.
Jodi Katz	How do you fill up your tank when your personal energy tank is running low? How do you fill it up?
Beatrice Dixon	Different ways. I spend time with people that I care about. I relax and do nothing. I try to turn my brain off. I listen to music. I work out. I cook. Even though I take a moment, I still have a lot going on, so I'm just in my life. But it just depends, I mean, whatever I naturally feel to do is what I do. I don't have a certain ritual. For me, meditation is in everything. Me just saying to you, "Look, I got to go pick my food up, bitch, because it's downstairs," That was real for me. Some people may have just let that go, but I need to eat. This is important, but it's not more important than me. And so, I just try to do that, I guess.
Jodi Katz	I love that you say that, because I think our industry in general, well, marketers in general too, for most of my career, I felt like people were either treated like or acting like robots, completely unhuman, inhuman.
Beatrice Dixon	Right.
Jodi Katz	Just doing what they think is expected of them, or being robotic with their team and not treating them as real human beings who do need to pee, and eat, and breathe, and stretch. It's, I think, pretty awesome that I get to talk to a lot of people like you, Bea, who just really strive every day to just be the best human they can be.
Beatrice Dixon	Right. And that's the goal, and not for any particular reason other than that's just what we want to be. So, thank you for saying that. I'm grateful.
Jodi Katz	Yeah. It's amazing now that when I was in college, so I'm 45. So, I've been working for a long time. So, when I was in college, I was so excited for that, to enter that robot force. I saw it on TV, I wanted that. And then I got there, I'm like, "Oh, my God."
Beatrice Dixon	What is this?
Jodi Katz	"What am I doing?"
Beatrice Dixon	Right.
Jodi Katz	And I was such a jerk. I was snotty. I was entitled, because I'm like, people aren't doing things the way I think they should be doing them. I'm this 19 year old intern telling people who have been in the industry forever how to do their job. And I think I just realize the human-ness of who I am is not allowed here. I'm really not allowed to be human. I have to be this networking corporate robot. And I'm grateful that I've been able to make a career of figuring out how to be me, how to make money, be me, respect people around me. So I'm really grateful for that. It's not easy.
Beatrice Dixon	It's not.
Jodi Katz	But I'm grateful for it.
Beatrice Dixon	Yeah. Me too.
Jodi Katz	So, there's so much to talk about. We have our conversation that we had a while ago and I highlighted so many things, but I want to start with my favorite pandemic time period question, because usually I ask as a first question, "How are you spending your day today?" But most of us are literally in our chairs all day, so it's not as interesting a question. But my new favorite question is really about who we saw ourselves as when we were kids. So, if you think back to when you were a little kid, I don't know, eight years old, 10 years old, and someone would ask you, "What do you want to be when you grow up," what is that answer?
Beatrice Dixon	I think I wanted to be a doctor.
Jodi Katz	Why?
Beatrice Dixon	I always found joy in healing, even when I was a child.
Jodi Katz	Did that last with you long? Were you in high school thinking, "I'm going to be a doctor"?
Beatrice Dixon	Actually, when I was in high school, I wanted to be in fashion. And I was in the 11th grade, actually got accepted to FIDM. My mom took me. I want to say we went to San Diego. Where is Disneyland at?
Jodi Katz	In Anaheim.
Beatrice Dixon	In Anaheim. Yeah. But they had a campus, they have a campus. I don't remember exactly where the campus is, but I just remember we went and looked at the campus, and I went and sat down and met with the counselors and the advisors and all those things. And I went through all the stuff and I got accepted, but then I saw how much money it was going to cost. And there was just no fucking way. It was as much as going to medical school. You know what I'm saying? It was crazy. So, yeah.
Jodi Katz	When I was little, I wanted to be an archeologist.
Beatrice Dixon	That's so cuties. Why? What did you like about it?
Jodi Katz	I had a first grade teacher who went on a trip to Egypt, and when she came back, she talked about it and showed us pictures, and trinkets. And I was just so amazed by the pyramids, and the history, and different cultures, and the fact that we can learn about people who are long, long gone. I was really into it. And so, now I feel like a marketing archeologist. I dig around for stuff. But yeah, that was my eight year old version of myself.
Beatrice Dixon	That's dope. I guess I'm a beauty healer in a way.
Jodi Katz	Yeah. You definitely are. Well, which is a beautiful segue, Bea, thank you for helping us move to the next part of the conversation.
Beatrice Dixon	Thank you.
Jodi Katz	Because I asked you on our call, why health and wellness? And you told me, "It chose me." Tell us what that means.
Beatrice Dixon	I mean, honestly, I started my career in pharmacy. I did that for almost 10 years. I didn't want to do that anymore, so then I left that and went to work at Whole Foods. And when I worked at Whole Foods, it was the time for, it was when Whole Foods was Whole Foods. And we learned a lot. We went on health immersions. I mean, I learned how to eat, how to feed myself, working at Whole Foods, literally. I went to the Dr. McDougall's food camp, and we were there for four or five days, and we learned how to eat and cook, and how to put food together. Different companies would come in and talk to us about what was going on in their products, and why they made them, and what ingredients they used, and what those were for. And so, I had already gotten this love for what I was doing, because I had come out of the world of medicine and entered into this world of natural medicine, and it was just such a beautiful segue. And then around that same time is when everything happened with Honey Pot, when my vagina was acting up. And so, me working as a pharmacy tech for 10 years and knowing how to do that, and that teaching me how to make things, because you have to know the equations, for example, when you're going to put, when you're going to make an IV bag. Me working at Whole Foods, in order for me to be a really great salesperson, I worked in whole body, so I needed to understand how to talk to people about the herbs, and what they should use, and what supplements, and if something happened with their skin, or their body, or whatever, I needed to know how to help them with that. And then by the mother of invention being necessity, with what happened with Honey Pot, just with my body, having bacterial vaginosis as long as I did, and then with my grandmother coming to me to tell me how to fix it in the dream, everything that had happened, had happened in order for me to understand what I needed to do. And so, I just think that that's why it chose me.
Jodi Katz	Can you paint a picture of that dream, because it's pretty compelling? So, you're suffering with an infection you couldn't get rid of. And what came to you during that dream?
Beatrice Dixon	So, I mean, literally, my grandmother in the dream, she literally, me and her were just sitting down, and I had had bacterial vaginosis for almost a year. I was taking medicine. It was reoccurring, it wasn't constant, but it was almost every month. And it would go away and come back, and I was doing all kinds of remedies, on all kinds of Google forums, and talking to all kinds of women, and putting all kinds of things in my body just to get healing. And one morning, my grandmother came to me in a dream, and we were just sitting down at a round table talking, and she hands me a piece of paper and it has a list of ingredients. And she told me that I needed to remember what was on that paper. So, I'm trying to have a conversation with her, but she's like, "No, don't talk to me. I'm not going to be here long. You have to remember what's on the paper." And so, that's what I did. I just kept reading it. And when I woke up, I woke up saying it. I was waking up like, "Coconut oil, water, vinegar, garlic." I was waking up saying these things. And then literally, within a couple, I wrote everything down, when I woke up from the dream. Within a couple of days, I made it. Within a few days after that, everything that I was dealing with went away.
Jodi Katz	It's amazing. It's also doubly incredible, because you told me that you never met your grandmother.
Beatrice Dixon	No.
Jodi Katz	She passed away when your mom was a kid.
Beatrice Dixon	Yeah.
Jodi Katz	So, what a beautiful way to connect with your family through healing in your dreams. So, was this a topical remedy or was this something you were supposed to drink?
Beatrice Dixon	No, it was just, it was a wash. It was what I wash in now. It was basically our normal feminine wash.
Jodi Katz	It's so awesome. I'm grateful that you shared that story with me because I actually am someone who really trusts my dreams. I know some people ignore them or don't pay attention to them, but I get a lot of value out of them, even when they're those hard, scary ones that you wake up from like, "Oh, my God, what just happened," or the ones that feel like I've just filmed an action adventure movie in my head.
Beatrice Dixon	Right.
Jodi Katz	Whatever the dream is, I know it's telling me something and I know it's my chance to listen.
Beatrice Dixon	Right.
Jodi Katz	And most of the time, it is for healing, one way or another.
Beatrice Dixon	Right.
Jodi Katz	I haven't had dreams to solve physical problems, but definitely dreams to help me with emotional ones. And it's scary when you have such clarity in your dreams, it's a little overwhelming.
Beatrice Dixon	It can be, because sometimes it's like, "Okay, now what?" Especially in this instance, because I just knew that I wanted to do it, but I didn't know what to do.
Jodi Katz	Right. So, that's such a great topic to move on to, which is those taking the next steps. And obviously, you have tons of initiative. If you didn't have initiative, you never would have ground up the garlic, and added the vinegar, any of that. You wouldn't have even paid attention to the dream, but you told me that owning a business is a lifestyle. So, what does that mean?
Beatrice Dixon	I mean, because it's your life. It's like being healthy isn't necessarily just eating vegetables all day. You have to drink water, you got to eat vegetables, you got to walk, you got to move, you got to take your supplements, you got to think healthy. It's a whole thing, and business is the same thing. You don't just wake up and now you're just doing business. You don't just start a website and now everybody comes. It's a process and it really can't be rushed. It's like driving across country. If I was driving from New York, from where I am now, to California, that shit's going to take how long it takes. You understand what I'm saying? It's not like if you're going from Brooklyn to Manhattan, if you push it on the gas, you might can get there 10 minutes sooner. But if you're driving from California to New York, it's going to take, I don't know what that time is, but it's going to be hard to really get there in a really shorter amount of time. So, it takes time, and it takes effort, and it takes thick skin, and it takes love, and it takes patience, and you're going to mess up a lot, and you just have to be willing to get back up and just keep moving. It takes listening. It takes not listening. It takes intuition. It takes on so many forms, because you really have to be in it. You have to be paying attention, which goes back to what I was talking about earlier when I said that if I'm not well, or right, I have to stop. I have to just take a break, because I never want to put that energy into what I'm doing, and I never want to do things half ass.
	You understand what I'm saying? And that's how business is. It's just, sure, there's going to be days that you have to work. And you just feel like you can't, but you have to push through, but it requires a lot of you, having your own company. Because you're literally, especially if you did it the way we did it, you're literally pulling something out of thin air and being like, "Voila!" shit's almost like a magic trick, man. It's crazy, and it's hard. It's not easy.
Jodi Katz	You mentioned that you need a thick skin, which is something I really struggle with. I think my skin is transparent. Sometimes I feel like it's like Saran Wrap, it's so thin. A friend of mine just said to me something recently that I wrote down, "QTIP, quit taking it personally." Do you have any guidance for me on having a thick skin? Because yeah, it feels, because it's my business, it feels so emotional. When a client's not happy, I'm in pain. And if they have a complaint, I'm in pain, and I know that I'm letting it seep into my skin too much. It's good to care, but how do I wash it away and accept that that's just part of every day?
Beatrice Dixon	Just what you just said. Everything can't be good all the fucking time. It just can't up. If everything were good all the time, you would have no respect for what can happen if shit goes bad. And so, I'm not saying to remain neutral, because that doesn't exist, but understand that there's so many things that are going to be out of your control. And we can feel, I think that it's important to feel, because at least you can feel. At least you give a fuck. You understand what I'm saying? So, I don't think that you should, I think that you should not be so hard on yourself for caring, A. And B, I think you just have to understand that you're not in control of probably 90% of the things that you think that you're in control of. You know what I mean? And so, we almost have to die to trying to have so much control, because that shit will make you crazy. I mean, don't make me wrong, with our companies, there's a lot that we're in control of, but you can't control what somebody thinks, how somebody feels, how somebody is going to react. You just can't control that, because they could be having a bad day. They could hate their life. What are you going to do? As long as you're doing everything that you can to make a customer happy, that's all you can do.
Jodi Katz	Right. I work hard to, I guess, keep my side of the street clean, to know I've approached a situation, I've offered a remedy, blah, blah, blah. And then I think I need to go do jumping jacks. I need to get out of it.
Beatrice Dixon	I mean, or you just have to feel it, if that's what you choose. Really, what you need to do is make a choice. Do you want to be neurotic about it, or do you want to execute, do the best that you can, give it all that you got, and then get to the next thing? I think really, you just have to make a choice. I can't tell you what to do, because you have to do what you want to do. Otherwise, you're never going to fucking do it. So, for me, that's how I look at when I deal with things, or when I have issues. I just had a personal thing that happened, and it feels terrible still, but I know that I can't control, what am I going to do? I had to make a decision. I could have let it go, but I had to make a decision. And if I let it go, then it would have took another two or three years to get the shit done that I needed to get done. Fuck that. I need to get this shit done right now. So, what is that going to take? It's going to be hard. It's going to be uncomfortable, but I'm just going to have to deal with the repercussion of that, because I don't want to be doing this shit for two or three years. You understand what I'm saying? So, I think what we have to do is make a conscious choice of what do we want to do. Do you want to be sad all day? Do you want to be all in your head, or do you want to fucking be in your head for an hour, and then, "I need to go have a drink," or "I need to go listen to some music," or "I need to go do some jumping jacks." It depends on what you truly want, and that's what you should do, I think.
Jodi Katz	Yeah. I mean, sometimes I just want to go in that hole and have a temper tantrum. And sometimes I do that for 10 minutes, I'm like, "I don't want to do this anymore. I'm ready to move on." So, I guess it's like each situation is a little different, and maybe what I'm hearing is, I just need to give myself a break. So, if it's the temper tantrum that I need in that moment, fine. If it's not, fine. And why am I judging myself for the way I have these feelings?
Beatrice Dixon	Yeah. Give yourself grace. Give yourself grace, because this shit is hard, sister. If this shit was easy, everybody would be doing it. We are a little bit crazy for doing the shit that we've decided to do. We put this on ourselves. Nobody put a gun up to our hand and said, "Hey, you should start a business."
Jodi Katz	Yeah. In so many ways, Bea, I feel like on those really bad days, actually, the other day, I was like, "Ugh, complaints, complaints, complaints." Maybe I should be a mail carrier because they literally walk from house to house, almost see nobody because nobody's around. They put the mail in the mailbox, and then they get all this outdoor, fresh air, exercise, and then they get back in the little truck and they call it a day. And there is something so appealing to me about that. And usually my go-to job when I have bad days is, almost once a quarter, I want to have the job at Penn Station for the person who calls the tracks like, "Track five for the Montclair-Booton line," because it's just the same thing every day. And that is so polar opposite to my life, which is like, every day is consistently, who knows? It's like, big highs, deep lows, a lot of things in between. But yeah, this is my calling, I could not do the same thing every day. I just couldn't, my body would freak out. My brain would be sad. I would be depressed.
Beatrice Dixon	It just wouldn't work.
Jodi Katz	And I actually think of myself as unemployable. I could never get a job.
Beatrice Dixon	Me too. I was terrible. When I worked for Whole Foods, I was a really, really excellent salesperson, but I was terrible about getting there on time. You understand what I'm saying? And Nina was so dope, because she didn't even really give me a lot of shit for it after a certain amount of time. She was just like, "You know what? You're good." But I'm the same, absolutely, most definitely, now more than ever, am I unemployable.
Jodi Katz	Yeah. If I stopped this company, I would just have to start another one, because I would not be a very good person to have a boss.
Beatrice Dixon	Yeah.
Jodi Katz	Having a boss with their own mishegoss and their own politics, which is like, I think I'd break out into hives. So, the last thing I want to talk about, because time has flown by, I don't know how that happened. I'm looking at the clock like, "How did 25 minutes just go by?" You said to me, "Nobody is perfect. What is the point of killing myself for an illusion?" And I love that. We talked about perfection on our first call, because I feel like I'm a recovering perfectionist. Every day I work hard at that recovery. Did you ever suffer from perfectionism? Is that something you had to unravel, or were you born somebody who's just able to accept that life is a roller coaster?
Beatrice Dixon	No, I've suffered with perfectionism. I was just so unhappy though. And perfection just does not exist. It's like control, both of them are illusions. And so, my mommy told me that I was going to die one day, and then my brother introduced me to stoicism. And two tenants of stoicism, one is understand what you can control and what you can't. Two, you're absolutely going to fucking die. So, I just got tired of trying to be perfect, and I got focused on just being.
Jodi Katz	I love it. That's so helpful. It really is because, now we're going to get really deep. I started to think about Duff in a new way, which is like, there's a beginning and an end, and I get to choose how I spend my time in between. And don't I want to make those moments really something that I'm excited for, proud of? Whether it is my health, my wellness, my family, adventure, whatever it is, learning, I learn every day. But that's what I get, I get to make those choices. I'm grateful I get to make the choice of how I spend my time. But I want to make those moments matter to me, not to anybody else, but to me.
Beatrice Dixon	Absolutely. Exactly. Because what, I mean, it wouldn't matter to anybody else because it's your moment.
Jodi Katz	I think that I grew up around people, I think when I grew up, there was these pressures, these external pressures of what's expected. So, it wasn't until I was 30 where I'm like, "No, wait, what about what I want?" I started to understand that.
Beatrice Dixon	Right.
Jodi Katz	So, yeah, I'm really focused on that. Every day is a lot of learning. And I think my number one job, besides running the podcast, running the agency, being a mom, being a wife, being a friend, is working on myself. That's where I spend the most amount of time, working on what's in here and here.
Beatrice Dixon	Me too.
Jodi Katz	Bea, this is so amazing. I'm so grateful. I feel like we could talk for days, but you do have your lunch waiting for you, so I want you to be able to eat today. So, thank you so much for your wisdom, and for our listeners, I hope you enjoyed this interview with Bea. Please subscribe to our series on iTunes, and for updates about the show, follow us on Instagram @wherebrainsmeetbeautypodcast.
Announcer	Thanks for listening to Where Brains Meet Beauty® with Jodi Katz. Tune in again for more authentic conversations with beauty leaders.

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