Earlier this month, I was onstage with Bobbi Brown during New York Tech Week (at an event hosted by the AI company Gamma). We were there to talk about the makeup artist-turned-entrepreneur’s journey as a second-time founder. And just a few weeks before that, one headline had captured that path.
In May, Puck published an article titled “How Bobbi Brown beat Bobbi Brown.” That’s how Brown (the person)—now running her brand Jones Road—beat Bobbi Brown (the brand), owned by Estée Lauder Companies.
I asked Brown how she felt reading that headline, but before I could get the question out, she made her feelings clear with a shrug: “Oops.” Brown isn’t shy about sharing the low points that came at the end of her 22-year tenure under ELC; she launched Jones Road the day her noncompete expired, four-and-a-half years after leaving the brand that had her name on it. Is it a competition? I asked her. “There is no competition,” she said, before adding a cheeky “anymore.”
Puck theorized that Jones Road has cannibalized the business that used to belong to the Bobbi Brown brand (and reports that while Bobbi Brown exits almost all U.S. department stores, Jones Road is expected to do $200 million in sales this year). Jones Road is, unsurprisingly, closer to Brown’s original vision. “[The Bobbi Brown brand] started as a very small essential line that helped women figure out how to do their makeup very quickly, with a few products and just what they need,” she told me. “By the time I left, it was a 10-step, 20-step, figuring out how to sell a lot of products to a lot of people.” Jones Road sells a more minimal assortment; it’s still 85% direct-to-consumer, with 17 of its own stores.
While some founders might argue it’s hard to build a brand today, Brown says it’s much easier than it was the first time around. Then, if something went wrong, it required 30 people in a conference room to figure out how to respond. “Now if something happens, I just press a button and say, ‘Sorry guys, we sold out. This is what happened,’ or ‘Sorry, this is how you use the product.'” For anyone who’s “scrappy, creative, smart, authentic” and can explain themselves—it’s easier to build an audience and a brand.
Brown doesn’t wish she knew anything that was to come before she sold to Estée Lauder. “If I would have known that it would have been so hard at the end—I don’t want to know that,” she says. “Going through those hard things has made me such a better person in life. I have no regrets.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
"Thank you for uniting our city again…for uniting the world. You restored faith, hope and belief in that there’s nothing we can’t do!! ... Proud to be from the block!!"
— Jennifer Lopez on the Knicks' history-making championship win
