2008 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame

We’re all on a first-name basis with Mr. Rechelbacher. “Horst,” as he’s known here in Minnesota (and the world over), is an icon, a man who’s been employing his creative genius in our state for more than 40 years, first with Horst & Friends salons, then with Aveda Corporation, and now with health- and beauty-products company Intelligent Nutrients.

Horst’s philosophy has always been this simple: Health is beauty. In the mid-’60s, he warned against the use of toxic petrochemicals in hair products and started making shampoo from plants. By the mid-’90s, his privately owned Aveda Corporation had more than $100 million in revenue, selling plant-based products through 25,000 stores, salons, and spas.

When he sold Aveda to Estée Lauder in 1997 for $300 million in cash, he thought he was ready to sit back and relax.

Instead, at 66, he’s as busy as ever, determined to “change the cosmetics industry” with his current business, Intelligent Nutrients, which began with a small store in Minneapolis’s Uptown selling organic food, drinks, and supplements. When his noncompete agreement with Aveda expired in 2006, Horst went to work developing the Intelligent Nutrients personal-care product line, made entirely from food-based ingredients and all certified organic. From shampoo to lip balm to body lotion, Intelligent Nutrients products are, literally, good enough to eat.

“Anything you put on your skin or lips immediately goes into your bloodstream,” Horst says. “I’m making good, responsible cosmetic products from food, not petrochemicals.” The cosmetics industry is self-regulated, he adds, leaving companies free to make misleading claims. “If you have one organic ingredient, you can call your product organic! Whenever you have something popular, like organics, people start ‘greenwashing.’”

Intelligent Nutrients is headquartered in the original Aveda factory and warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis, 15,000 square feet including a flagship store, education center, research laboratory, and restaurant. Plans for more retail stores in New York City and at the Mall of America are in the works.

In October 2006, Minneapolis-based Regis Corporation formed a new limited-liability company in a joint venture with Intelligent Nutrients and will sell the products at its high-end salons. “I have no doubt it will be successful,” says Horst, “because excellence always succeeds.”

He was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1941. His dad was a shoemaker and his mother was an herbalist working part-time for an apothecary and mixing remedies in the kitchen for her own neighborhood clientele. The Rechelbachers lived across the street from a hair salon and a delicatessen. Says Horst: “I worked first in the delicatessen, arranging cold meats and cheeses in the showcase. I loved that! Then I went to the salon, which opened later, to help clean up hair from the floor.”