Ten years ago, Rudolf Reitz found it extremely difficult to interest customers in buying his company's nontoxic paints. Getting a new customer, he said, was like finding a needle in a haystack.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Ten years ago, Rudolf Reitz found it extremely difficult to interest customers in buying his company's nontoxic paints. Getting a new customer, he said, was like finding a needle in a haystack.
But these days, Bioshield Healthy Living Paints is a thriving Santa Fe business with clients worldwide.
"We're growing 20 to 30 percent a year," Reitz said.
Bioshield's paints, which are made in a German factory under supervision by Reitz's business partner, Hans Willi Babka, use less than 250 chemical compounds compared with the thousands of different chemicals used by conventional paint companies. Most of the compounds -- 98 percent to be exact -- are derived from plant sources and minerals.
"We've developed a lot of different paints during the past 10 years," he explained. "Our water-based paints don't have any solvents in them, and our oil-based paints use low- or nontoxic solvents. We're always creating new products."
Reitz's entree into the world of natural living and environmentally friendly products came during childhood in a town east of Cologne, Germany. His mother served organic, vegetarian foods to the family. When the "green" building movement became popular in Germany in the early 1980s, his parents built what Reitz called "a healthy house."
"I didn't know I'd be 20 years ahead of the time when I started my company in America," he said. "Interest in environmentally friendly products has been big in Germany for several decades."
Reitz was involved in his family's steel business as a young adult. By 1982, he got so tired of living in a town with 300 rainy days a year that he shipped his VW bus to Delaware and drove across the country to California. He stopped in New Mexico along the way, admiring the climate, crisp air and light. Although California's climate was appealing, Reitz opted for the more European feel found in Santa Fe.
He started his business as Woodpecker's Tools, since building furniture had been a hobby when he lived in Germany. In addition to selling furniture, he sold natural wood finishes and paints imported from suppliers in Germany. The business went through various incarnations during the 1980s.
He sold clothing made from hemp and unbleached cotton, which didn't turn out to be very profitable, as well as natural body care items. In the early 1990s, he hooked up with Babka, and business began to take off.
But there was a four-year period from 1996 to 2000 when he had to go back to Germany to take care of the family business, and Bioshield's business slumped.
"I couldn't monitor the business from across the ocean," he explained. "I had to build it up again when I returned to Santa Fe."
A decade ago, Bioshield sold a dozen products. Today's catalog has 45 items -- including resin and oil stain finishes, floor and furniture finishes, oil sealers, floor waxes and household cleaners -- and is constantly growing. The company offers more than 100 paint colors and will custom make a paint color for orders of at least 25 gallons.
A quarter of the business is generated by American customers. The remaining sales, which are under different brand names abroad, take place in Germany, France, Australia, England, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan.
Customers always know what Reitz puts in his products. The ingredients, such as orange peel oil, coconut soap, rye bran, beeswax and linseed oil, are listed on the labels. Reitz has one major U.S. competitor -- AFM Safecoat out of California.
Purity comes with a price. Bioshield's special clay paint, which Reitz and Babka developed three years ago, costs $40 per gallon. High-end home builders like William Szczech, president of Life Style Homes Inc., use this low-odor, clay-based paint in select rooms in custom homes.
"The paint gives a very nice feeling to the wall," Szczech explained. "We put a glaze over the clay paint in the powder room of one custom home and added mica to it to make the wall shine. I do a lot of green building, so I'm always looking for products that work well in upper-end homes."
When it's less expensive to make his products in the United States than import them from Germany, Reitz plans to manufacture them in Santa Fe.
"It's not just the cost of the materials that I have to consider, but the cost of buying machinery and supporting a manufacturing facility," he explained. "The time will come when it makes sense to manufacture here."
Bioshield Healthy Living Paints is located at 3215 Rufina St. and can be contacted by calling (505) 438-3448.
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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
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