Built for My Kids. Built for Yours.
A Cornell-trained Landscape Architect. A father of two. A daughter with eczema. And the moment everything changed.
It started with my daughter’s skin.
I’m a father of two. When my children were both under three years old, something shifted in me that I didn’t expect — a kind of quiet fury at what passes for personal care in this country.
I found myself standing in store aisles reading ingredient labels on products meant for babies. Synthetic preservatives. Chemical emulsifiers. Carcinogenic sunscreen compounds. Things I couldn’t pronounce, let alone trace back to a source. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to put any of it on my kids.
Then my youngest daughter started developing eczema. Badly. And what I found when I went looking for something clean, something simple, something I could actually trust — was almost nothing. Product after product let us down. Either the ingredients weren’t clean, the sourcing was opaque, or the formula simply didn’t work.
That frustration became an obsession. And that obsession led me to tallow.
I couldn’t find what my daughter needed. So I made it. Then I made it for everyone.
Scott — Founder, Taleo
I didn’t come from beauty. I came from the land.
Before Taleo, I was a Landscape Architect. Cornell University. Fifteen years designing and building some of the largest public and private outdoor spaces in the country — from New York City to Austin — with a background in Plant Science and a career-long obsession with how natural environments shape human experience.
I spent my professional life thinking about the relationship between people and the land. About what happens when you design with nature rather than against it. About how the built environment can either honor or ignore what the earth already offers.
Taleo is that same thinking applied to skin. When you trace every ingredient back to a specific farm, a specific animal, a specific harvest — you’re doing the same thing a good landscape architect does. You’re designing with what’s already there. You’re trusting the source.
What I found in an ancient fat.
Farm Not Pharm wasn’t a tagline. It was a decision.
The catalyst was sunscreen. Living in sunny Austin with two young kids, I knew sun protection was non-negotiable. But I also knew I was never putting a carcinogenic chemical sunscreen on my children. Not once.
So I made my own. Non-nano zinc oxide. Grass-fed tallow from Bastrop Cattle Co. — lot-level traceable, regeneratively raised right here in Texas. Domestic beeswax from Meyer’s Beeswax in South Dakota. Organic jojoba. Ingredients I could name, source, and stand behind.
That was Sun Balm — Taleo’s first product. And the moment Farm Not Pharm stopped being a feeling and became a brand.
Texas isn’t just where Taleo is based. It’s where Taleo makes sense.
This is cattle country. Regenerative ranching country. A place where the connection between land, animal, and human isn’t a marketing concept — it’s daily life. When we source tallow from Bastrop Cattle Co. thirty miles from our kitchen, that’s not a supply chain strategy. That’s a neighbor relationship.
We moved to Texas for freedom. Freedom to raise our family the way we wanted. Freedom to build a business rooted in values rather than trends. The Lone Star State doesn’t just tolerate that worldview — it was built on it.
More than a brand. A decision to live differently.
This brand is my family’s story. I hope it becomes part of yours.
When I’m not in the kitchen formulating or sourcing ingredients, you’ll find me outside with my kids and my wife, shooting my bow, designing and building things, or out on the trails with our dog Floki. The outdoors isn’t just where Taleo’s ingredients come from — it’s where I live.
