by In 1991, as a riposte to red lipstick, Bobbi Brown, a 30-something makeup artist at the time, launched her brand of the same name with a handful of nude lipsticks. It marked the world’s introduction to the one-way makeup look, the antithesis of the ever-more aesthetic that prevailed in women’s makeup bags long after the 80s ended.
As a mail order artist, she first sold it directly to friends and clients and then, fortuitously, met a buyer from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, where it was officially launched. Brown hoped to sell 100 lipsticks a month. The new brand sold 100 per day. It outperformed all the established beauty brands in the store and very quickly other retailers, such as Neiman Marcus, asked to stock the brand nationwide. “I wanted women to look like they weren’t really wearing a suit,” Brown said.
Four years later, Estée Lauder Companies (owner of Estée Lauder, Jo Malone London, MAC Cosmetics, Clinique and more) came calling. Brown sold her company (for a reported $75m), remaining the captain of the now worldwide Bobbi Brown ship, steering it towards becoming a billion dollar company. And then, in 2016, she walked away. Nobody saw it coming.
“Burnt,” she describes how she felt at the time. “I was done. I thought, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve succeeded, I’ve built a billion dollar brand, I’ve done beauty.’” The history of fashion and beauty is filled with designers and founders who put their names on it. label, but then they don’t have to give them up when they sell to a conglomerate. Usually, the designer himself disappears, never to be seen again.
But not Brown. Weeks later, she realized that she had not done well. There were several false starts, including a short-lived supplement line (“I thought I was going to be this natural fitness guru. It didn’t happen,” she said) and a relentless attempt to get back to to be independent. makeup artist (“No agent wanted to represent me,” she says with a shrug.) But then she hit the jackpot – again. In October 2020, on the day her 25-year non-compete with the Estée Lauder Companies ended, Brown Jones launched Road Beauty, a modern makeup line that supports clean minimalism.
“My philosophy with beauty,” she explains, “is to trust and love the things on your face, whether they’re lines or whatever. Go with it, it’s easier.” The brand, like its predecessor, is also fully inclusive, because, Brown says clearly, “It’s very important to have makeup for everyone’s skin.” The time of its launch was bold .The world was in the middle of a pandemic and, worldwide, there was a significant decline in makeup sales.
And yet Jones Road tapped into the zeitgeist of what women needed – from TikTokers to Boomers. “It’s common sense,” says Brown. She won’t reveal figures: “We’ve been completely profitable since day one,” she will say. But if rumors of daily global sales (seven figures and counting) are anything to go by, Bobbi Brown is well on her way to creating another billion-dollar brand.
He was born in 1957 to middle-class parents in the Chicago suburbs, Brown describes her mother as “beautiful and very glamorous”, but Ali MacGraw believes in A love story for helping her see that there was “a different kind of beauty”. She studied theater makeup at Emerson College in Boston and, after graduating in 1979, moved to New York. She joined a make-up artist agency and started working in the fashion industry. Eventually, she landed covers on America Vogue and Elle and grew a reputation for a minimal, girl-next-door aesthetic that would make a very rich woman Brown, and that’s why New York Times she was called “The Mogul Next Door”.
This non-compound makeup look (which has been criticized over the years for, among other things, concealing the work of conforming to Eurocentric beauty standards), involves wearing a lot of makeup to look like you just got out of yoga. class – young, fit and rich. This oxymoronic fashion emerged alongside the success of Brown, “clean” beauty or the “five-minute face” – a minimalist beauty aesthetic that promises users to look themselves but better.
I loved editors talking about our kids and how tired we were
Brown’s self-assertion is light years away from the intense, fraught, blazer-and-heels woman I first met at the Bobbi Brown launch in 2015. Today, she is sitting legs folded yoga style on a banquette in Claridges, she is dressed i. a low-key black sweater and jeans – and no makeup. She is diminutive – “I’m like 5ft nothing” – but that day, she seemed very big and a little scary. “Yes,” she said, “there was a lot going on then. I always had PR people staring at me; I was always surrounded by marketing people. Yes, I was in charge, but…” she says pointedly, “I always fought for what I wanted. When I left the brand, I took off my heels and came back to myself.” Brown intended to rise again at the age of 63 and in a business still rife with misogyny and ageism. “No,” she says, correcting me, “I didn’t have to start over, I chose to start over.” And rather than being intimidated by the prospect, she saw it as an opportunity to do things differently. “I love a clean slate. You get rid of everything and think: ‘What would I do now?’”
What she has done is build a new company that is in complete contrast to her last one. No one in her team has a background in beauty. Unlike most corporate company structures, they have no CEO or COO. “We tried it, it didn’t work, we got rid of them.” Its best team is mostly a family business. She is herself (“I have no title. I don’t need a title”); her husband, Stephen Plofker, a property entrepreneur; her son, Cody Plofker, who is chief marketing officer; and her daughter-in-law, Payal Patel Plofker, who is brand and marketing director. (“I can’t wait to go home and see my 13-month-old granddaughter,” Brown says, adding with a laugh, “she’s the baby of the people who work for me, so I have an extra reason not to. to turn them off.”)
She and her husband live three minutes from the office and the rest of the family is also in the neighborhood.
Mixing family with business seems to work well. Brown was the makeup artist for his daughters-in-law on their wedding days. She described it as more terrifying than being asked to do Michelle Obama’s makeup, because “I wanted to please them.”
A self-confessed anglophile, Brown cites Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire, Grays Antiques Market and Anya Hindmarch’s cafe in London as some of her favorite haunts, and she recently joined the British Beauty Council as an ambassador. “I love the British aesthetic.” She even chose the name Jones Road, she says, because: “It was like a British custom brand that they asked me to reinvent and modernize.”
Brown himself is a mixture of modern and old-fashioned pragmatism. “Even early in my career,” she recalls, “I would tell people how to put on makeup when they were trying to take their kids to school. I would tell them to stick to a few things, do them in the car at stoplights…”
Brown reveals much at her namesake brand, that he considers her everyday approach too childish or parochial. “When someone very high up in the old company sat me down and said: ‘I think you should buy a pied-à-terre in New York City. This way you can invite editors and they can think you’re a city girl.’ Someone else said because I’m so small, I needed something that would make people notice me when I walked in, like a hat with a feather. I was then told I should make a ‘cool’ dress, so someone took me shopping for leather pants [trousers]”.
Brown can’t help the laugh that escapes her at the absurdity of it all. “You know, I tried all these things, all the things you had to do to be a fancy business person, and none of them made sense to me. Finally, I was like, ‘I think the editors liked me because we talked about normal things – like our kids and how tired we were.'”
Although she says she loves New York, she doesn’t see herself as a “New Yorker” and continues to live in Montclair, New Jersey, where she moved in the late 80s with her husband. .
Her authenticity, at a time when the perfection of social media is slowly starting to lose its luster, may explain her popularity on TikTok. When, in 2022, Meredith Duxbury, a beauty influencer known for her full-coverage look, gave a poor review to What The Foundation for Jones Road, Brown lightly parodied the influencer’s video. It went viral, leading to a huge spike in sales. She is self-deprecating about being a hit on social media. “The joke is that afterwards I see that my hair is sticking out and I’m covered in dog hair and dust. I’m like, ‘Guys, you have to tell me!’” But it still seems that his fans just get it.
Brown Jones Road has no plans to sell in other stores outside Liberty London, despite numerous applications being blocked. Her unequivocal stance gives insight into her success as an entrepreneur. She loves warmth, but her eye contact is serious and relentless; her direct tone and clear vision. “I only ship a product when I see a need,” she says. She jokes that there is “no real strategy”, but clearly there is. She says sales have tripled in the past year and while the company’s growth always means increased costs, she says, “We don’t waste money.”
And perhaps this is a sign of his success. Even her own sartorial stance has a modest approach – albeit a relative one. “I like normal things.” With my eyebrows raised she smiles and says, “Okay, I like Celine [fashion designer Phoebe Philo era]. Those are the things in my wardrobe that I will never give away. But I’ll team up with my Uniqlo jeans.” She set the tone for Celine Philo – effortless luxe (“I’d dream of doing the makeup for her next campaign”) for the Jones Road aesthetic.
During the week we met, Philo’s much-anticipated namesake collection was launched, marking her return to the industry after leading a highly successful brand under her direction and which was very successful when she was at the height of her success. Sound familiar? “I was waiting with bated breath to see what she would come back with, because,” says Brown, “I love a good comeback story.”
jonesroadbeauty.com
