Batiz owns ninety-seven per cent of the company, and her three children own the remaining three per cent. Scentsible L.L.C., the parent company of Poo-Pourri and Supernatural, is projected to generate a hundred million dollars in revenue in 2019. The company recently expanded into shoe odor, and also released a line of cleaning products, called Supernatural, which sold out within two hours of premièring on Gwyneth Paltrow’s life-style site, Goop. Earlier this year, it rolled out at Costco. In 2014, it made its first national brick-and-mortar appearance, at Bed Bath & Beyond. In 2012, Poo-Pourri formed its first national partnership, with the home-shopping network QVC. Its ostensible mechanism is depicted in an animated video on the product’s Web site, in which cartoon bombs and missiles plunge into a toilet bowl, detonate, and trigger an efflorescence of vines, daisies, and butterflies. As its name suggests, Poo-Pourri is designed to mask the smell of excrement-or, more precisely, to trap unpleasant odors in the toilet, below the surface of the water, and to release pleasant natural fragrances, including citrus, lavender, and tropical hibiscus, in their stead. “Then,” she recalled, “I was at a dinner party, and my brother-in-law asked, ‘Can bathroom odor be trapped?’ And lightning went through my body.”īatiz is the creator of Poo-Pourri, a bathroom spray made from essential oils, which has sold sixty million bottles since it launched, in 2007. She got out of her head and into her body. I knew there was a larger meaning here.” She developed a self-help course called Inside Out: How to Create the Life You Want by Going Within. “I went in drinking a big thing of Yellow Tail every night, and, when I came out, I was sober for eight years. “Two weeks later, I’m at her ten-day workshop,” Batiz said. “I was the ultimate seeker.” At a bookshop, she came across “Loving What Is,” by the motivational speaker and author Byron Katie, who teaches a method of self-inquiry called the Work. “I had an insatiable desire to find something,” she said. He gave her the book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Viktor Frankl, which inspired Batiz to take what she calls a “spiritual sabbatical.” She studied Buddhism, Kabbalah, Hinduism, and metaphysics. One day, she went to see a hypnotist, who told her that her life lacked purpose. “They were very energetically aligned with where I was at the time,” she said. She swore off business and stayed home, painting and listening to the heavy-metal band Disturbed. Her investors backed out, and within a year she’d lost her house and her Range Rover. In 2001, she was in the final rounds of fund-raising for a startup, a recruiting firm that matched job seekers and companies by culture-“The problem was that it was twenty years ahead of its time,” Batiz said-when the dot-com bubble burst. “I needed money, so I would call manufacturers and see what excess inventory they had that I could turn. Another time, a couple tractor-trailer loads of fabric,” she said. “One time, I sold a tractor-trailer load of gearboxes. (“You know those Listerine strips? I tried to make those with, like, Red Bull,” she said.) There was a tanning-bed-repair business and a hot-tub-repair business. She’s sold green-tea patches and at one point wanted to create a caffeinated gum. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of her gambits: She’s sold exercise equipment started a clothing line opened a clothing store, a beauty salon, and a tanning salon and sold cheap lingerie at a markup to strippers, until a club owner with three missing fingers demanded a percentage of her profits. Not just out of Arkansas and generational poverty, but out from under her oppressive religion, her mother’s low expectations, her father’s alcoholic volatility, her childhood sexual abuse, her suffocating first marriage, her tumultuous second marriage, and her cash-strapped third marriage.Īs an entrepreneur, Batiz has prodigious drive but a spotty track record. “I really believed that money was going to get me out,” she said. For most of her life, she was driven by an intense desire to make money. She describes her family as “Irish potato-famine people” on her father’s side and “cotton pickers from Arkansas” on her mother’s. Batiz, whose net worth is estimated at more than two hundred and forty million dollars, grew up poor. A few days after Suzy Batiz learned that she’d made Forbes’s 2019 list of America’s richest self-made women, she lay down on her kitchen floor and wept.
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