2008 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame

At age 12, he started cutting hair. At 14, he began a three-year apprenticeship in hairstyling—and won three national junior competitions in succession. “Competition hairdressing was the ticket to get recognized,” he says. “I practiced all the time. Other kids went to the beach; I went to special courses. I loved it so much! And after the first one, I got obsessed with the idea that I could win!”

His career took off. At 17, he worked at a famous salon in Italy.Then in Munich, he did hairstyling shows for product companies and was a stylist for fashion photographers and an increasingly wealthy clientele. “I started doing the hairstyles of the stars on my clients,” he says, “and that made me very, very successful.”

Horst was 20 when he won the 1962 European Hairstyling Championship. He got an agent and traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe, a sensation who made the then-princely sum of $500 a day for his styling seminars, and mingled with the rich and famous. “Rich people love hairdressers,” he says with a laugh, “because they always want to look good.”

His high life ended abruptly in 1964, when a drunk driver in Minneapolis rear-ended his Jaguar XKE, fracturing his vertebrae and leaving him with $15,000 in hospital bills. He stayed to recover and pay off his debt—and never left.

Horst’s first hair salon in Minneapolis was so successful that he added three more. He opened his first hairstyling school in 1970, bringing more revenues, but also a talent pool from which he could recruit the best stylists in town.

His first product line, which he made in the mid-’70s with his mother, who came to visit every year, featured shampoo, conditioner, and massage oil made with plant oils including lavender, rosemary, and eucalyptus. To expand his knowledge of herbal preparations, he soon traveled to India to study plant-based Ayurvedic medicine.

With only two people on his staff, Horst launched Aveda in 1978. “I made up the name,” he says with a smile. “Veda is the book of knowledge, and I added an ‘A’ to it because it looked good graphically. Then I found out later that ‘A’ in Sanskrit means ‘all.’”

By 1981, Aveda sales topped $1 million in the five-state area. Horst took the business further by establishing agreements with distributors that required them to carry only Aveda products, building it toward the $100-million-plus company that Estée Lauder would eventually purchase.

Today, Horst lives on 600 acres in Osceola, Wisconsin, where he has a solar- and wind-powered organic farm that produces ingredients for Intelligent Nutrients. Through his Horst M. Rechelbacher Foundation, he actively supports social, environmental, and animal-rights projects.

He says a mentor used to say to him, “‘You’re rich when you can give, and poor when you can’t.’ And that stuck in my mind. That’s what entrepreneurship is all about—the ability to make a difference. I just want to get this movement going, and make sure it stays on track.”