Lost &
Found
Clean Juice cofounder and CEO Landon Eckles ’07 was just fine being a D student at Moravian…until he wasn’t.
By Mike Zimmerman; Photos by Jenna Sparacio, Fall 2023
Sometimes you can just flip a switch. Other times life flips the switch for you.
College is a nebulous time at best. You’re young, you’re adrift, and you have no clue that you don’t know what you don’t know. The experience drops you unprepared into all the battles: freedom versus discipline, temptation versus responsibility, the quest for knowledge versus the gravity that glues your face to your pillow.
Safe to say that Landon Eckles lost most of those battles. “I transferred to Moravian as a sophomore, and it was my first time away from home. My focus was definitely more social. I went to have fun.”
When he got to Moravian and his “social” lifestyle really kicked in, Eckles met a girl. They started out as friends, but by his junior year, they were officially an item. And that’s when “everything changed,” the business administration major says. But not because he suddenly found focus or his new girlfriend pushed him to excel. Nope.
“We got pregnant.”
Yeah, sometimes life flips the switch for you.
Today, Eckles, Class of 2007, is CEO of Clean Juice, a national organic juice and food chain. He’s married to that college sweetheart, Kat, who went on to graduate from Wilmington University, and they have five children. (“We’re done at five,” he promises.) He and his wife have built their business from one location in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they live, to a franchise empire that should eclipse 150 locations in 30 states by year’s end (in the Philly suburbs alone, Clean Juice has bars in Malvern, Dresher, Glen Mills, Wynnewood, and Collegeville). Landon runs the business and Kat is the creative vision of the venture.
How big is the company now? Here’s some context: By Eckles’s estimates, Clean Juice went through several hundred thousand gallons of almond milk and more than a million pounds of bananas last year. The stores had 3.3 million customers in 2022 and have sold more than 10 million smoothies since 2014.
So it’s not spoiling the story at this point to say, no, Eckles didn’t drop out of college, he didn’t spin out of control on the pregnancy news, nor did he devolve into a mess of party boy self-pity.
I went from being a young dumb kid to an adult almost overnight. I was standing in my own way. Everything I needed was there. And so I decided to go get it.”
—Landon Eckles ’07
“I decided that I needed to actually, you know, man up,” he says. “I knew that child would depend on me for the rest of my life. And that my income was gonna be important, and these were just things I hadn’t thought about. I went from being a young dumb kid to an adult almost overnight. I was standing in my own way. Everything I needed was there. And so I decided to go get it.”
The day of this interview, Eckles took that college baby to take her driver’s test (“Crazy,” he says). So he’s gotten a taste of how fast time flies. Especially when your business is flying, too. He and Kat had a basic plan to start: Open a juice bar and survive. If things broke right, maybe they could open more in and around Charlotte. The “dream” was 10 locations in the first five years.
Well, there’s that old adage about best-laid plans. After five years, they opened their 100th location.
“It’s funny, when you have something that works, it works fast,” he says. “We definitely did not expect to be a national brand, but we opened up the first one and then we opened up a couple more that we owned. And then people kept coming in and asking us, ‘Hey, is this something we could franchise?’ ”
One of a Kind
Clean Juice started as an organic juice and smoothie bar but has since grown to include organic good-for-you foods: wraps, salads, toasts, and acai bowls. It is the first and only USDA-certified organic health food franchise. (Source: Entrepreneur, November 22, 2022)
They had no intention of franchising when they started. But more and more people inquired, and the more they looked into it, the more attractive it became. The first franchise opened in Florida in 2017 and did “really, really well,” Eckles says.
The 75th location opened in 2019 in Lake Charles, Louisiana; the 100th in 2020 in Morristown, New Jersey.
“We kept opening these stores in these random markets and they kept doing great and it just kept making sense,” he says.
Clean Juice has made Inc. magazine’s list of the fastest-growing private companies in 2019, 2020, and 2021. It’s number 260 on Entrepreneur magazine’s Franchise 500 list.
The pandemic slowed progress, as did recent recession fears. But even over the past three tumultuous years, the growth is still coming, Eckles says. “Being able to take a company and grow in some of the most challenging times I’ve ever faced is a testament to the brand and our team and everything we’re creating.”
So yes, Eckles did indeed get his straight A’s senior year and did indeed graduate in 2007. He and Kat married and wound up having their second child on the heels of their first (“Irish twins,” he jokes) as Eckles took his first job as a pharmaceutical rep. Soon they moved to North Carolina. He wound up burning out in a too-much-travel international finance job, and seven years later they began dreaming of a new business and experimenting with smoothie recipes.
But going from party dude to surprise father to straight-A student to college grad to immediate job inside of a year is, well, unusual. Put another way, maturity forced upon the immature rarely sticks.
Photo by Michael Paulino
So what does it really mean to go from dumb kid to adult overnight?
Hindsight has taught Eckles that he had all the tools to succeed but simply hadn’t opened the toolbox. All he had to do was flip the lid.
“My senior year went from social, fun, hangout, whatever, to straight A’s,” he says. “I had to. But first I had to make the decision that I wanted to actually succeed at something. Class was a nuisance. But then I enjoyed it. I looked forward to it, even the more advanced classes.”
He’s quick to point out that had he gone to a larger school, he would’ve been “lost.” But Moravian allowed his change to take hold faster and with greater impact. He illustrates this with the story of one particular professor.
“I won’t name the professor, but I took two classes with her,” he says. “Spring semester 2006, I got a D in her class. The next class with her, a harder class, I got an A. And she didn’t necessarily say these words, but I knew that I was, pardon my French, a pain in her a— in that first class. I was lucky to get that D, to be honest. I didn’t deserve it. Then I came back in the fall and she saw a completely different human being. She saw the change I wanted to make, and she was there for me every step of the way. So that’s pretty cool.”
It also led to a life lesson Eckles thinks too few learn: Always be worth someone’s time. During the D class, he was a human time suck. During the A class, he was a student worth encouraging. And that’s the secret:
If you’re able to show them you’re worth their time, they’ll give it to you generously.
The Eckleses’ initial five-year business plan didn’t go according to any plan… so what’s the new five-year plan?
If we continue on the growth trajectory that we have, in five years we’ll probably have 300 to 400 stores,” he says. “We want to grow the density in the markets where we’ve already opened stores.”
—Landon Eckles ’07
“If we continue on the growth trajectory that we have, in five years we’ll probably have 300 to 400 stores,” he says. “We want to grow the density in the markets where we’ve already opened stores. Let’s say we have one store in Las Vegas right now. Well, we want to open 10 stores in Las Vegas because we have more purchasing power and more brand awareness. And so we want to backfill a lot of these markets where we’ve opened up. That’s a big goal of ours.”
At this point, Eckles has earned a pass on any warnings about seeking a fortune in Vegas. His true fortune began accumulating in Bethlehem, and he knows it.
His advice to anyone coming up today?
“If you’re gonna commit to four years of college, make the most of it. It’s a really good time to figure out not just who you are, but who you want to be. I finally focused on doing well, and that taught me that the potential was there all along. The journey through Moravian really helped me succeed.” And then Eckles pauses and smiles. “You know, once I decided that that’s what I wanted.”
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