California Baby founder Jessica Iclisoy isn't a fan of halfway measures. When the Los Angeles native decided to create a family, she didn't just pop a few folic-acid capsules and call it a day. "I started cleaning up my lifestyle—eating organically and becoming a vegetarian," she says. And when Ian, the first of her two sons, arrived, she felt that he needed a healthy beginning, too. There was just one problem: At that point, there wasn't any all-natural infant skin care around.
So, armed with little more than curiosity and a desire to do right by her tiny guy, Iclisoy, a former fashion buyer with zero cosmetics experience, set about crafting chemical-free kids' bath potions. First out of the gate, in 1995, was Calming Shampoo & Bodywash, a best seller to this day. "The retail price was $15.75," she says, "which was considered outrageous at the time."
Fast-forward, and now Iclisoy, who's as stylish as she is fanatic about Pilates, hiking, and meditation, currently oversees a line of roughly 45 California Baby products, a selection of which can be found in every Target store in the country. "We've moved from small to medium," notes Iclisoy, whose husband, Arthur, recently left the world of real-estate development to join the company as operations manager. The couple live in Beverly Hills with Ian and their younger son, Miles, and commute to company headquarters in Culver City. "Arthur functions as the CFO," she says. "He makes sure there's money, so I can spend it on good ingredients—some can cost $1,000 a pound." The couple's business-creative yin-yang partnership thrives on mutual respect: "We have different skill sets," she says. "I can't do his job, and he can't do mine."
Iclisoy applies a similar "let them do their own thing" strategy to her sons, now that they're teens. For example, though they were raised as vegetarians, they both now eat meat. "Three years ago, Ian declared, 'I want a hamburger,'" she recalls. "I said, 'Fine. But it's going to be a good, grass-fed one.'" Still, some habits have stuck. "I always encouraged them to drink mint tea," she says. "And now I'll see them wandering around with cups in their hands. They don't realize they've been doing that since they were 5 years old."
