MILL VALLEY LIVING | Featured resident
Margaret O’leary and Susan Griffin Black
On friendship, grit, and building something that lasts. By Tami Larson
THERE’S A MOMENT IN A GOOD INTERVIEW WHEN THE ROOM CHANGES. The prepared answers give way to something more alive — a laugh, a memory that surfaces unexpectedly, two people finishing each other’s sentences. About ten minutes into sitting down with Margaret O’Leary and Susan Griffin-Black, we hit that moment and never left it.
You know their names even if you don’t realize it. Margaret O’Leary’s cashmere and knitwear — spare, beautifully made, unmistakably Californian — hangs in thirteen boutiques up and down the West Coast, with a fourteenth opening soon in Montecito. Susan Griffin-Black, co-founded EO Products, the essential oil-based body care company that has been manufacturing out of San Rafael for three decades, long before “clean beauty” became a marketing category. Both women built their companies from nothing, the old-fashioned way: by hand, from their homes, with borrowed momentum and a lot of determination.
They met on New Year’s Eve, 1989, at a club called Townsend, south of Market in San Francisco. Susan was there to meet a mutual friend and film producer, Paul Zanetz who had just finished filming The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He’d come from dinner and brought Margaret along. Susan had come alone. What followed is the kind of origin story that doesn’t get told enough — two women in their late twenties, both figuring out who they were going to be, deciding somewhere between a carrot salad at a health food store on Sutter Street and a sketch on the back of a napkin that they were going to build something together.
THE NAPKIN, THE LOOM, AND A SWEATER CALLED “CRAZY ABOUT SEAN”
Margaret had arrived in San Francisco in 1986 from County Kerry, Ireland — one of twelve children, a Trinity College engineering degree in her bag, and a one-way ticket. She’d been recruited by Silicon Valley during the Sun Microsystems era, but the money was poor and visa sponsorship uncertain. So she pivoted, as resourceful people do.
“Someone said, can you import some sweaters from Ireland?” she says. “I thought, maybe I’ll just make them.”
She started on a single hand loom, in her apartment. She gave looms to Irish babysitters who knit between school pickups. She brought in her brother. She found a way.
Susan, meanwhile, who had come to San Francisco in 1983 had run a clothing boutique called East Coast Girls in the Castro, then a second store on Sutter Street. She understood fashion, retail, and boutique-scaled commerce. When she saw what Margaret was making, she saw what it could be.
“Let’s go New York,” Susan told her. “Let’s go to the garment industry.”
So they went. They finished sweaters on the flight. They drew their line sheet at Kinko’s the night before. They wore knit hot pants and high boots. They got orders from Barneys.
The sweater that launched them was called Crazy About Sean — named, with verb subtlety, after a beautiful Irish boy with black hair and blue eyes back in Dublin. “He knows,” Margaret confirms, still amused. “He’s always known.”
TWO COMPANIES, ONE FOUNDATION
Their partnership eventually evolved into two separate lanes running parallel. Susan went to start Esprit — working under the late Doug Tompkins, …then Susie Tompkins — absorbing trends and feeding them back to Margaret on the side. Margaret, meanwhile, traveled to Osaka to buy computerized Japanese knitting machines and learned to program them herself, her engineering degree finally earning its keep.
“It only helped with the math part of knitting,” she laughs. “Numbers.”
By the mid-nineties, both had settled in Mill Valley. Both had children. Both were running companies finding their legs. Susan had been struck — stopped in her tracks, really — by a visit to Neal’s Yard Remedies in London’s Covent Garden during a buying trip for Esprit. The smell hit her first: essential oils, botanicals, possibility. She loved the integrity of it, the sensory experience, the idea that products could be both beautiful and purposeful. She brought Neal’s Yard to San Francisco, and from there the bridge to EO Products began to form. In the mid-1990s, she and her then-partner Brad Black launched EO. Early orders were filled by hand — private label kits, thousands of small bottles, hand-stamped boxes, endless assembly. It was labor-intensive, chaotic, and exhilarating. Soon came a holiday catalog order from Bloomingdale’s, and the company was on its way.
If their stories sound romantic in retrospect, that is only because both women survived the unromantic parts.
Neither story was padded by venture capital mythology or polished startup theatrics. There were no overnight successes here. There was work. There were kids. There were marriages and divorces. There were payrolls, product decisions, and exhausted nights. There was that uniquely female calculus of trying to run a business while holding together the rest of life: lunches packed, finances reviewed, children picked up, fires handled, another day started.
Both speak plainly about how hard it is to lead as a woman, especially as a mother. Susan describes sitting in meetings where she feels the pressure to know every number perfectly, to prove and re-prove her authority in rooms still shaped by male assumptions. She remembers raising money early on and realizing, in one ugly moment, how quickly business conversations could become demeaning when a man across the table decided he was entitled to more than the pitch.
Margaret’s perspective is quieter but no less forceful. Financial independence mattered to her deeply. Not as a slogan, but as a practical source of freedom. Build your own company. Earn your own money. Keep your choices alive.
That theme — choice — runs through both of their lives.
Perhaps that is part of what makes their leadership feel so distinctive. Neither woman speaks about growth in the empty language of domination. They speak about people. About product. About staying close to work. About intuition and integrity. About retaining the soul of the company even as it grows.
Today, Margaret has 13 stores and is opening her 14th in Montecito. Susan and EO employ more than 120 people and continue to manufacture in Marin. Yet both remain deeply involved in day-to-day life. Margaret is designing future seasons, reviewing photography, shaping store environments, studying the numbers. Susan is in product development, finance, brand oversight, and weekly one-on-ones with key team members. Neither has drifted into founder-as-symbol. They are still working.
I AM WOMAN
As this interview took place in March, it occurred to me that it was Women’s History Month, and the question felt necessary: did any of this happen because they were women, or in spite of it?
“Both,” they say without hesitation.
Susan grew up with a self-described early feminist father whose message was consistent: have your own money, because it gives you choices. Her parents divorced when she was fifteen, and she watched what happened to women who hadn’t built that floor beneath them. Financial independence wasn’t aspirational — it was the whole point.
“I love the idea of just being financially independent,” she says. “Everything else was interesting, but that was non-negotiable.”
And perhaps most notably, both women have chosen growth models rooted in values, not extraction.
Susan talks about EO as a social justice-minded company: B Corp principles, zero-waste goals, internal opportunity, language support, training, advancement, and a culture where people stay. Margaret, in her own way, has made an equally radical choice. Rather than building for a big outside sale, she is moving toward employee ownership, ensuring that the people who helped build the company will share in its future.
In an era obsessed with exits, this feels almost revolutionary. It’s what they built around them. Both companies feel like expressions of character — measured, generous, durable. Not built to flip. Built to last.
It is also profoundly feminine — not because men cannot lead this way, but because women often build with a different definition of success. Less conquest. More stewardship. Less vanity. More continuity.
“When you’re a good person, you attract good people,” Margaret says. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
“I feel good when I go to sleep,” Susan says. “What I’m doing makes sense, even when it’s hard. I don’t think everyone gets to say that.”
FAMILY, MUSIC, AND THE LIFE THAT GREW UP AROUND IT ALL
Both women are grandmothers now, and the way their faces change when the subject comes up tells you everything. Margaret has sons Jack, 33, and Charlie, 29 — and through her marriage to Bill Green, a stepson Danny, also 29, who played Pop Warner football with Charlie when they were kids. That’s how she met Bill, at the football field, fifteen years before they married.
“The best,” she says, shaking her head. “The second time around, if you learn from your mistakes — there’s just no question.”
The wedding was intimate and very Mill Valley. The officiant was Bob Weir, who is a friend of the family. Yes, that Bob Weir.
Margaret laughs at the look on my face. “It was a small wedding,” she says.
Susan’s family has its own beautiful shape. She has two children (Marc Griffin aka Marc E Bass) and Lucy Black (multi media artist) and two sisters who are both deeply woven into the fabric of San Francisco and Marin — Karen Goldberg who has created myriad local brick-and-mortar businesses over the years. From a candy shop (Bon Bon) to restaurants including Rustico in the city, Annabelle’s which she co-created in the city, and now Sonya’s (which she co-founded) to furniture when she opened The Warehouse right across the street from Miller. And Leslie, who has run Hazel’s Kitchen on 8th Street in Potrero Hill for 34 years. Simple mom, beloved institution, still going strong.
“We’re all unemployable,” Susan says cheerfully. “That’s the common thread. My dad always said you have to have your own thing, and apparently we all listened.”
Both women are devoted Deadheads — though in slightly different ways. Susan likes to say she’s “adjacent.”
It was 1991. She and another colleague at Esprit, the head of accessories, were both on their way out of the company. Around the same time, George Lucas had just secured the licensing contract for Grateful Dead merchandise. It seemed like the perfect moment to take a leisurely drive out to Skywalker Ranch to meet with the head of licensing — because, of course, that’s the kind of casual errand anyone might run.
On the drive, Susan asked her colleague if he had ever been to a Dead show.
“No,” he said.
“Well,” she replied, “we’d better fix that.”
Their next stop was Shoreline Amphitheatre.
At the height of the experience, she turned to him and said, “This might be the most incredible thing I’ve ever experienced. If you can make music your life and have this kind of relationship with a community like the one they’re having better.”
Boom. The light went on. “We can ever do this- put all of these people out of business who are making accessories and sell it to Macy’s.”
Margaret took a more psychedelic route to Deadhead heaven — and later deepened her commitment through marriage. She married Bill Green, who works in climate infrastructure and is, in Margaret’s words, “trying to save the planet,” grew up a Deadhead in San Francisco. He speaks the language fluently. Margaret has learned it well enough to keep up.
Both women love the Sweetwater Music Hall and a Friday night at the Depot. They agree that Mill Valley’s cultural heartbeat — small, improbable, stubbornly alive — is something worth protecting.
MILL VALLEY MADE THEM
Neither woman is going anywhere.
Margaret walks to Stinson from her front door. She is drawn to the trails, the mountain, the particular quality of light that makes this town feel like it exists slightly outside of ordinary time. “There’s no place else,” she says, and means it in a way that closes the conversation.
Susan is a longtime Zen Buddhist student, and her proximity to Green Gulch has always been part of what roots her here. Community, she says, is not an abstraction — it’s the Mill Valley Market, the local boutiques, showing up to the school board meeting, buying the thing from the person down the street.
“Shop locally,” she says. “Not just my stores — everyone’s stores. That’s what keeps the town itself.”
They both worry a little about the empty storefronts. The rents. A new generation that sometimes moves to Mill Valley without quite understanding what they’re living inside.
“Involve yourself,” Susan says. “Whatever it is. Just engage.”
THE LIGHT IN THEIR EYES
At one point near the end of our conversation, I saw what I’ve been thinking for the last hour: that there’s a light behind both of their eyes that you don’t see very often. It’s the kind that comes from genuinely loving what you do and who you’re doing it with.
Margaret looks at Susan. Susan looks at Margaret.
“This is probably the most time we’ve spent together in a while,” Susan says. “Which is crazy, after thirty years.”
“I know,” Margaret says. “I know.”
They’ve been on each other’s boards. They’ve watched each other’s children go into adults. They’ve texted about Dead shows and grandchildren. Susan gave Margaret a baby deadhead shirt for her new grandbaby before the interview and whatever is going on inside the room — the deep respect, the mutual admiration — is obvious. They’ve built companies that look, in important ways, like each other — values-first, community-minded, yet perfectly independent.
If you want a definition of success that holds up over thirty years, it might look something like this: two women sitting across from each other in Mill Valley, companies thriving, friendship intact, grandchildren arriving, still designing the next thing. Still lit up about it.
And still, after everything, a little crazy about Sean.
Margaret O’Leary boutiques are open in Mill Valley and twelve other locations. Visit margaretoleary.com. EO Products are manufactured in San Rafael and available at eoproducts.com and throughout the Bay Area — and per Susan’s request, please replace the Mrs. Meyer’s on your sink with EO/ Everyone Handsoap.
