Bobbi Brown has created not one, but two groundbreaking cosmetics companies and written nine best-selling beauty books, but she’s not a fan of traditional makeup.
“I don’t like makeup that looks like makeup. When you’re done, I want you to look better. I want you to look not tired. I want you to look beautiful. I want you to have a glow,” the 67-year-old mogul told The Post.
Her current company, Jones Road Beauty, is a leader in the growing clean beauty market. Brown’s philosophy has meant that she has never offered certain products, such as those used for contouring.
“People want to contour and I refused,” she said of the makeup trend, popularized by the Kardashians, that uses a heavy application of light and dark foundation to change the way the face looks. “I didn’t want to teach or promote the contour because I don’t believe in it.”
After calling Manhattan home for decades, Brown now lives outside the city in Montclair, New Jersey, but she remains a quintessential New Yorker, always on the go.
In addition to running Jones Road, she also recently launched her Substack newsletter, and she and her husband, developer Steven Plofker, designed and operated a local boutique hotel, The George.
She doesn’t have time for an elaborate beauty routine, and she assumes many of her Jones Road clients don’t either. As such, some products are multi-purpose, blurring the line between skincare and makeup.
“It’s a no-nonsense, very New York approach to beauty, but it has broad appeal to all women,” Brown said.
Her story is a classic tale of the heights that can be achieved with ambition and talent in the Big Apple.
She moved to NYC from Chicago in her early 20s, picked up a phone book and started calling modeling agencies, asking them to hire her to do makeup. It worked and soon she was booking regularly
work.
“If you move to New York, you’re going to make it,” Brown said.
Eventually, she grew tired of working with the bright and chic makeup of the 1980s. In 1991, she launched her own line, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, with the idea of enhancing rather than changing a woman’s appearance.
“I think faces are beautiful the way they are and you improve and you don’t try to change things,” she explained. “If you’re always looking in the mirror and always thinking about what you can change, I don’t think it’s a positive change for confidence, and I believe in self-esteem and confidence.”
In 1995, Estée Lauder purchased Bobbi Brown Cosmetics for a reported $74.5 million. Brown stayed on as Chief Creative Officer, helping grow the brand to over $1 billion in sales.
After more than two decades as an employee of Estée Lauder, Brown left her iconic brand in 2016 to return to her roots as a makeup artist and entrepreneur.
Four years later, the day after her non-compete with Lauder ended and in the midst of the pandemic, Brown launched a small line of clean beauty products under the name Jones Road Beauty.
She and Plofker put $2 million of their own money into the company, so it has no boss and no outside investors to answer to.
“When I started [my] opening line, I had this [natural beauty] philosophy, but you change and adapt and do things because the markets want them or someone thinks you should do it,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”
Jones Road now employs 115, operates six stores — including locations in Williamsburg, Greenwich Village and East Hampton — and expects to do $140 million in revenue this year. LinkedIn just named it among the top 50 startups.
On Black Friday 2023, Jones Road’s viral Miracle Balm — a subtle wash of moisturizing color that can be applied to cheeks, lips and “anywhere you want to color or shine” — sold over 375,000 units on Shopify, making it the platform’s best-selling product.
Jones Road is well on its way to a seven-figure valuation, but Brown has no plans to sell this time.
“I’m in charge,” she said.
While she didn’t hit Bobbi Brown Cosmetics—Leonard Lauder wisely told her to “always apologize—don’t ask permission”—she now has unfettered freedom to do things exactly how she wants.
That means simple packaging – a twist on the brown paper bag instead of fancy boxes – and irreverent names for her products, such as What The Foundation (WTF).
Coffee is obsessed with details big and small.
Twenty minutes into our conversation on Jones Street in Williamsburg, she stops mid-sentence to call out a white mark that looks like a light scratch on one of the store’s glossy posters.
“I noticed it the second I walked in” and now I’ll be focused on it until [they] bring another photo. And I think the poster could be bigger — there’s room on the wall,” she said.
This attention to detail is essential to success. “The details make the difference,” she explains.
“Anyone who has a business knows that ‘other people are not seeing what we see.’ It is difficult
Jones Road is small enough that she does a lot of things herself, rather than delegating them to a team of employees.
She chooses the models for the shoot, does their makeup, chooses the photos and even edits them.
“I’m pretty involved in anything I’m interested in that I’m good at,” she said. “I’m involved in things I want to be involved in, which is most things.”
But for all her success, Brown is humble and modest, shrugging off compliments like one of her face powders.
“I didn’t invent makeup,” she said. “I just reinvented it, didn’t I?”
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Image Source : nypost.com