Christopher Gavigan and the business of picking up the phone

A founder calls a customer. The customer may answer, may be busy, may let the call go to voicemail. There is no guarantee of an audience. For Christopher Gavigan, that uncertainty was part of the job. In a 2019 interview, he described calling ten customers a week. Building a company apparently had not excused him from the telephone.

Consider the alternative available to someone who had co-founded The Honest Company with Jessica Alba: another meeting, another presentation, another conversation with people paid to agree that the customer mattered. Gavigan made time for conversations in which agreement was optional. He wanted to hear how the thing he had helped put into the world was actually landing.

The calls fit his attention to the people behind a purchase. He has described checking a company’s About page to see whether an actual person appears there. A brand, in his view, should have someone answerable for it. This is a fairly demanding position for a founder to take. An attractive logo rarely has to explain itself over voicemail.

His career has supplied several opportunities to test that position: outdoor education, a nonprofit, a book, Honest, Prima, and now WalkFully. The businesses differ. The recurring problem is how to persuade people that the person making the promise intends to keep it.

Before the shelves, a Volkswagen bus

Gavigan grew up in New York and Connecticut. At seven, he moved to the Connecticut shoreline, where he and his three brothers explored a creek. His early recollection of environmentalism involves children finding somewhere to play. The outdoors arrived as a place to spend an afternoon before it became a subject to study or a principle to put on packaging.

At twenty, he headed west to Santa Barbara. He has recalled living in a Volkswagen bus on the Pacific cliffs while studying environmental sciences. He graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. The bus makes the better anecdote; the degree helps explain the work that followed.

He taught ecology and science in the Bay Area and Los Angeles and founded Pinnacle Expeditions, an outdoor leadership program. Teaching and taking young people outdoors required him to make ideas usable. A participant had to understand something well enough to act on it. That practical problem would reappear later, with a shopping basket replacing the expedition bag.

His studies also included graduate work in education and child psychology, alongside an academic focus on environmental science and geography. It is a combination suited to someone interested in both a material question and a human one: what is this made of, and what will persuade somebody to choose it?

A promise printed on the label

Before Honest, Gavigan ran an environmental nonprofit and published a book in 2008. He had already spent years translating concerns about everyday products into language families could use. By January 2012, that work had taken a commercial form. The Honest Company launched with Alba and fellow co-founders Brian Lee and Sean Kane.

His responsibilities included product and brand leadership; he also served as chief purpose officer. Those titles joined two jobs that can become strangers inside a growing company: deciding what to make and explaining why anyone should care. Honest sold household, baby and personal-care products. Its name put a large expectation on otherwise small, repeat purchases.

Gavigan understood the exposure. In a 2017 interview, he acknowledged that naming the company Honest had invited scrutiny. Challenges to the brand’s claims were personally painful, he said. He framed its ambition around commitment while acknowledging the difficulty of living up to the name. A word on the front of a package can become a question customers ask of everything behind it.

He also talked about performance. Customers buying a cleaner wanted it to clean. Environmental principles still had to survive the ordinary household test of whether the product did its job. The language, the formula and the customer’s experience had to agree often enough for the next purchase to happen.

“It always comes back to relationships,” he said. That sentence gives the phone calls their context. A purchase opened a relationship with someone who could be disappointed, surprised or persuaded to try again. For Gavigan, hearing from that person belonged inside the work of building the brand.

“It always comes back to relationships.”

Christopher Gavigan · 2017

Prima began with the explanation

Prima was founded in 2018 by Gavigan, Laurel Angelica Myers and Jessica Assaf. Myers had also worked at Honest. Assaf brought an activist’s experience in beauty and consumer products. Gavigan became the original CEO. The team entered a crowded consumer category with an unusually deliberate sequence: explain first, offer products second.

An educational platform went live in March 2019. The first three products followed in June. Whatever else a launch needs, it usually needs something available to buy. Prima spent its opening months making room for questions instead. It was consistent with Gavigan’s interest in helping a customer understand a decision before asking for the sale.

The founders’ experience mattered in less photogenic ways, too. At launch, Gavigan described how their backgrounds helped them secure manufacturing and supply-chain partners. They were drawing on relationships established before Prima existed. Starting again did not mean starting without a history, and a polished new brand still depended on the people willing to make its products.

Prima’s early funding included nearly $3.3 million in 2019. A $9.2 million financing followed in May 2021, led by Greycroft, H Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Defy Partners. By then, the assortment had reached fifteen products and distribution included Sephora, Nordstrom and other retailers. The small launch had become a substantially more complicated business.

The part that does not fit on a pitch slide

Gavigan’s second act also required a different pace. In 2020, he admitted that building credibility with retail partners had taken longer than he expected. “It’s forced me to slow down,” he said. For someone who described himself as demanding and sometimes obsessive about his own output, the adjustment was considerable. Effort did not automatically shorten the timetable.

Prima’s subsequent history gives that admission weight. After an unsuccessful merger, the company paused operations in 2023. In February 2025, it announced its sale to Austin-based Sky Marketing Corporation for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition announcement identified Assaf as an adviser who would help preserve the brand’s values and formulation standards.

This matters to a profile of its founder because Prima’s story continued beyond his original CEO role. The brand he helped establish now sits within another company’s portfolio. Founding a business and determining its whole future are separate privileges, and the second can be considerably harder to retain.

The shutdown and sale belong alongside the funding and retail expansion. All are part of what happened. Gavigan’s faith in education and relationships met the practical limits of operating a consumer company. A founder can care intensely about the promise on the package and still face a business that needs to stop, change hands and begin again.

At home, the audience talks back

Gavigan married actress Jessica Capshaw in 2004. They have four children. His family life appears in his public conversations with a mixture of pride and the recognition that children form their own opinions. By 2024, he was living in Bedford, New York, where environmental choices had become the subject of a local conversation about his home and parenting.

Asked whether his children were receptive or rebellious, he answered that they were both. He welcomed their questions. He wanted them to understand the information and make choices themselves, rather than comply with a heavy parental decree. The founder who calls customers also has an audience at home that is free to challenge the presentation.

His local commitments went beyond conversation. Bedford’s 2024 Community Preservation Plan lists him among the volunteers on its task force. That places his environmental interest inside the slow, collective business of a town deciding what to preserve. There is less room for a founder’s personal timetable when the work belongs to a community.

The ordinary details are appealing. He has said breakfast is his favorite meal because it is the one he cooks best. A Sunday family ritual paired breakfast with The New York Times. Asked which historical encounter he would like to witness, he chose Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir in Yosemite. His idea of a fascinating meeting evidently allows for considerably more trees.

A new venture, at walking speed

His newer venture, WalkFully, returns to the outdoors through walking. Its public story names Gavigan as the founder and describes an ambition to make daily life slower and more connected. Its stated standards include durable products, transparency about trade-offs and attention to the person using what it makes. Those priorities are recognizable from his earlier work.

The advisory council includes author Michael Easter and entrepreneur Martha Stewart. Gavigan has also been writing on Substack, where he introduces a project called The Great Subtraction. Its subject is removing the things that keep people from becoming more fully themselves. After years spent adding products, partners and responsibilities, he is giving subtraction some public consideration.

In January 2026, he wrote about an exercise he had done with his four children to close the previous year. The questions covered what to release, what to appreciate, what they had learned and what they wanted to practice next. He offered the exercise to families and teams. The connection between parenting and leading a company remained close.

It would be easy to turn all this into a tidy conversion story, with ambition finally putting down its briefcase. Gavigan is still building a venture. He is still explaining an idea and gathering people around it. Walking has given the work a new setting and his writing has opened another conversation.

There is a pleasing consistency in the scale of his chosen actions: make a call, take a walk, ask a child a question, help with a town plan. Companies can grow large around such gestures, then stumble or change hands. The gestures remain available the next morning. For someone who has spent years asking brands to behave like people, that seems a useful place to begin again.