The makeup artist Bobbi Brown is a master of cosmetic invention. Few of her ilk can turn their singular perspective into a hundred million-dollar enterprise; nobody else has done it twice, except for Brown, who launched her eponymous brand in 1991 and her second act Jones Road in 2020.
In an excerpt from Still Bobbi: Stories of Authenticity, Resilience and Reinvention From the Iconic Entrepreneur (Bloomsbury), the legendary founder explains why she started another business — and how she gambled on herself to do it. — The Business of Beauty editors
Patient, I am not.
Optimistic and creative, I am.
I was finally ready to start again — the same but totally different. I realized I just wasn’t done. I still have things to teach and products to create. I began collecting pictures of what this new brand could be. These included images of faces I did with photographer Ben Ritter, whom I’d hired at Yahoo Beauty. His lighting was perfect, because it made the minimal makeup I used look glowy on the models instead of flat. To me, those pictures were revolutionary. They were simple and clean. I’d felt that the later photographs at Bobbi Brown weren’t as authentic looking as I had hoped and were way too retouched. These photos were the opposite. They looked fresh. They were me.
I also took inspiration from Phoebe Philo’s work with Céline. Phoebe is a fashion designer, and I recognized myself in much of what she did, from her minimal designs and tonal palettes to models who were perfectly imperfect and wore little to no visible makeup. I also imagined a downtown, relaxed vibe. I always loved the coolness of the skateboard company Supreme’s hoodies and bolts of red in their logos. I described the vibe I wanted for my new company as Céline-meets-Supreme.
I didn’t want a partner for the new venture, and I have never taken investor money. The entire series — A, B, C — was foreign to me. This time, I didn’t want to lose control over even a small percentage of the ownership. [My husband] Steven, ever the voice of reason, said, “We can do this ourselves. We can invest our own money and see what happens.” He gave me a sum with which he was comfortable starting this new venture. He moved us from our small storage-closet office to a bigger one around the corner with brick walls and cement floors.
He was the “You got this, I believe in you” guy in my ear. He wholeheartedly believes in me. He is a true business partner who sets up everything for success, whether it’s bank accounts, accounting, hiring the right team, building the board (we went with two of our besties with deep experience and big hearts), or just understanding what it takes to make a venture a success—and not only from a business standpoint, but also from a human standpoint.
There are issues that arise that are part business, part emotion and are all real. It’s a must for anyone in business to understand how essential this is. Investing our own money meant we’d be free from outside opinions and control, which sounded great after my last experience. This freedom was exactly what I craved. It was simple, at least in my mind. I wanted to launch the brand the day my non-compete with Estée Lauder ended. The marketing and the products would showcase the ultimate no-makeup makeup, my way. And the formulas and products would be clean.
To make clean products, I invited the New Mexico lab owner to meet me in New York, and we placed an initial order. They didn’t have the capacity to make everything we needed, so we found other companies to manufacture other products for us.
One of my first product ideas was a whipped foundation, creamy and opaque with skin-tone color. I hired my first full-time employee, Chrissy, to lead product development, and together we visited a lot of different labs. After many false starts, Chrissy told me about a lab she knew that we hadn’t tried yet.
I explained to this new lab what I wanted. When the samples arrived, I opened the jar and saw this sheer concoction. “This isn’t what I wanted,” I said. I dipped my fingers in it anyway, rubbed it on my cheeks, looked in the mirror and suddenly looked so much better. “Oh my God! This is a miracle!” It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I loved it. That became the first product. We called it Miracle Balm.
The problem was the new lab couldn’t make it clean. We kept searching until we found a lab that could. Then we re-created the balm with clean ingredients and came up with four tints: Au Naturel, Bronze, Tawny, and Dusty Rose. All the while passing out tiny samples to my friends—who begged for more.
Next we worked on filling out the line. We found a lab that was able to make an ultra-black dense mascara that could be labeled clean. We couldn’t believe it. We created a beautiful sparkle eye shadow formula that looked like transparent glass and didn’t get into lines, as well as a non-gooey, sheer lip gloss with peppermint essence that was not at all like traditional glosses. We made an eye shadow called Just a Sec, because when I first tried it, I dipped my finger in it, put it on my eyelid, and said, “Well, that only took a second.” We made a face pencil with a clear base and tint that keeps it from looking chalky on the skin. Two years later, we developed a foundation that didn’t require moisturizer and didn’t dry down into lines and crevices of the face. We called that one What the Foundation because the first time I tried it, it felt so good and I looked so good, I yelled out, “What the fuck?!”
Without all the corporate layers, things were simpler. I didn’t have to get approval for my ideas, and since we were not in retail, I didn’t have a timeline to consider. I’d think of something, talk to [my chief operating officer] Chrissy [Devries] about it, and if she and the other staff liked it, we made it. I didn’t care what a market analysis would say. Only one question mattered: Do we love the product?
I was having fun again. I had once invented the no-makeup makeup look. Now I had the chance to perfect it and to modernize it. I knew the business. I understood how makeup was made, used, photographed, marketed, and sold. Plus, I was a formulator. I had taught myself by blending other companies’ products and turning them into a single product that would be easy for anyone to apply.
I took everything I had learned in a lifetime of beauty and distilled it for the new company.
I also knew what I didn’t know. I knew makeup. I was less interested in operations and finance. We put together a company board with Steven as chairman, our friend Gary Fuhrman — Estée Lauder’s investment banker back in 1995 and Steven’s longtime business partner, who had the background we needed and was our biggest cheerleader — and Lisa Gersh, former chief executive of Martha Stewart Living and Goop, and co-creator of the Oxygen network. They were among our closest friends, and both believed in me, supported my vision, and brought in skills we needed.
At the beginning of 2020, October seemed far, far away. We had to keep the project under wraps until then. Somehow, though, Estée Lauder found out about what we were doing. Their lawyers contacted Steven, wanting to arbitrate our dispute. We had planned for this possibility. The new company was named Just Steven LLC, and I didn’t own any of it. We had our friend, the well-known women’s rights attorney Nancy Erika Smith, on retainer, along with a crisis PR firm. Our response to their demands was that we had no issues to arbitrate or even discuss. Steven’s law degree came in handy again. He believed they were trying to intimidate us with their demands, and we called their bluff. We never heard from them or their lawyers again. And with Steven at my side, it took the angst away. All he ever has to say to me is “don’t worry.”
Funny, it’s the song we walked down the aisle to — Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t Worry Be Happy.”
Bobbi Brown is a makeup artist, entrepreneur, author and the founder of cosmetics brand Jones Road. Still Bobbi is her 10th book.
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