Paul Armstrong, owner of Earthbath, SheaPet lines

Paul Armstrong is not only the president of a hair care company for pets - he's also a client.

The bathroom in his Cow Hollow home is stocked with shampoos and conditioners from his Earthbath and SheaPet lines, and on a recent morning, he showered with them before heading out to his 4-year-old daughter's Christmas pageant and later to The Chronicle for an interview.

Armstrong was freshly returned from Uganda, where he was visiting the woman-owned co-op that harvests shea nuts and makes the shea butter that is the key ingredient in SheaPet products.

From April to June, the indigenous shea trees in northern Uganda drop their ripened fruit, which the women gather very early in the morning, before it rots or is consumed by critters. Back at their hamlet in Lira, the women strip off the fleshy exterior, which generally is used for food, leaving the nut, which is laid out on a mat to dry for several days. Inside the nuts are the kernels that will be crushed and turned into shea butter.

"It's truly a fair-trade product," Armstrong said of the line, which he purchased earlier this year from its Santa Cruz founders and added to his 15-year-old Earthbath stable. "It goes from the co-op to the airplane to the factory."

Two of the factories he uses are in Berkeley and Oakland; a third is in southern California.

As difficult as it might be to believe, Armstrong didn't grow up wanting to be the "pet shampoo guy" he jokingly calls himself today.

Armstrong, 48, spent his childhood in Hillsborough, where his mother (a nurse) and father (a doctor) moved from the East Coast, where they had met at Columbia University. An older brother is now a doctor in Vermont; a younger brother has an office furniture installation business in Belmont.

When Armstrong was four, his father died; his mother remarried a travel documentarian.

"I grew up in an entrepreneurial family that loves to travel," he said.

His mother has since passed away, but his stepfather still lives in Hillsborough and took Armstrong's family to South Africa and Namibia last summer.

Racing ambitions

When he was in high school, Armstrong recalled, he wanted to be a race car driver. But by the time he enrolled at UC Berkeley, he had chosen to study business.

"I knew that I wanted to have some sort of a business that had some sort of a travel component to it," he said.