In 1991, in response to red lipstick, Bobbi Brown, a then-30-something makeup artist, launched her eponymous brand with a handful of nude lipsticks. It marked the world’s introduction of the no-makeup makeup look, the antithesis of the more-is-more aesthetic that prevailed in women’s makeup bags long after the ’80s had come to an end.
As a makeup artist, she initially sold it directly to friends and clients and then, by chance, met a buyer from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, where it was officially launched. Brown expected to sell 100 lipsticks a month. The new brand sold 100 per day. It outperformed all established beauty brands in the store and soon other retailers, such as Neiman Marcus, were asking to stock the brand nationwide. “I wanted women to look like they weren’t really wearing makeup,” 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 $75 million), stayed on as captain of the now global Bobbi Brown ship, and steered it on its way to becoming a multi-billion dollar company. And then, in 2016, she walked away. Nobody saw it coming.
‘Burn’ is how she describes how she felt at the time. “I was done. I thought, ‘I did it, I did it, I built a billion-dollar brand, I’m done with beauty.’” Fashion and beauty history is filled with designers and founders who name on a label, but then they have to give it up when they sell to a conglomerate. Usually the designer himself disappears and is never seen again.
But not Brown. Weeks later, she realized she wasn’t quite ready yet. There were a number of false starts, including a short-lived supplement line (“I thought I was going to be a natural wellness guru. That didn’t happen,” she deadpans) and a vain attempt to go freelance again. makeup artist (“No agent wanted to represent me,” she shrugs.) But then she hit the jackpot – again. In October 2020, on the day her 25-year non-compete with Estée Lauder Companies ended, Brown Jones launched Road Beauty, a modern makeup line that champions clean minimalism.
“My philosophy on beauty,” she explains, “is about confidence and just loving what you see on your face, whether it’s lines or whatever. Just go with it, it’s easier.” The brand, like its predecessor, is also fully inclusive, because, Brown says emphatically: “It is very important to have makeup for everyone’s skin.” The timing of her launch was daring. The world was in the middle of a pandemic and worldwide makeup sales dropped significantly.
And yet Jones Road tapped into the zeitgeist of what women – from TikTokers to Boomers – actually wanted. “It’s common sense,” Brown shrugs. She does not want to reveal figures: “We have been completely profitable from day one,” is all she will say. But if the rumored global daily sales (seven figures and counting) are anything to go by, Bobbi Brown is well on her way to creating another billion-dollar brand.
Born in 1957 To middle-class parents in the Chicago suburbs, Brown describes her mother as “beautiful and very glamorous,” but credits Ali MacGraw in Love story for helping her realize that there was “another kind of beauty.” She studied theatrical makeup at Emerson College in Boston and moved to New York after graduating in 1979. She contacted a makeup artist agency and started working in the fashion industry. She eventually landed covers on American Fashion And Elle and built a reputation for a minimal, girl-next-door aesthetic that would make Brown a very wealthy woman. New York Times called her “The Mogul Next Door.”
This no-makeup makeup look (criticized over the years for, among other things, concealing the labor required to meet Eurocentric beauty standards) involves wearing quite a bit of makeup to look like you just stepped out of a yoga class. class – young, fit and rich. This oxymoronic fashion evolved along with Brown’s success, with the most recent iteration being “clean” beauty, or the “five minute face” – a minimalist beauty aesthetic that promises to make users look like themselves, only better.
The editors liked it when we talked about our children and how tired we were
Brown’s confidence is light years away from the intense, charged woman in a blazer and heels I first met at a Bobbi Brown launch in 2015. Today she sits yoga-style with her legs folded at a banquet in Claridges, dressed in a calm black sweater and jeans – and wears no make-up. She’s small – “I’m about five feet tall” – but on that day she seemed towering and a little scary. “Yes,” she chuckles, “a lot happened then. I always had PR people staring at me; I always had marketing people around. Yes, I was in charge, but…’ she adds emphatically, ‘I was constantly fighting for what I wanted. When I left the brand, I took off my heels and became myself again.” Leaving and being himself again meant Brown had to start over 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 instead of being intimidated by the prospect, she saw it as an opportunity to do things differently. “I like a clean slate. You can throw everything away and think: ‘What would I do now?’”
What she has done is build a new company that is in complete contrast to her previous one. No one on her team has a background in beauty. Unlike most corporate structures, they do not have a CEO or COO. “We tried it, it didn’t work, we got rid of them.” Her top team is largely a family affair. There is itself (“I have no title. I don’t need a title”); her husband, Stephen Plofker, a real estate entrepreneur; her son, Cody Plofker, the Chief Marketing Officer; and her daughter-in-law, Payal Patel Plofker, the brand and marketing director. (“I actually can’t wait to get home and see my 13-month-old granddaughter,” says Brown, then chuckles: “She’s the child of the people who work for me, so I have an extra reason not to worry about them.” to make angry.”)
She and her husband live three minutes from the office and the rest of the family is also nearby.
Combining family and business seems to work well. Brown was the makeup artist for both of her daughters-in-law on their wedding days. She has described it as more terrifying than being asked to do Michelle Obama’s makeup because “I really 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 places, 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 sounded like a bespoke British brand that they asked me to reinvent and make more modern.”
Brown himself is a mix of modern and old-fashioned pragmatism. “Even early in my career,” she recalls, “I was telling people how to apply makeup while they were trying to get their kids to school. I would tell them to stick to a few things, put them in the car at traffic lights…’
Many at her eponymous brand, Brown reveals, found her daily approach too “mommy” or parochial. “One time, someone very high up at 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 may think you are a city girl.’ Someone else said that because I’m so small, I needed something that would make people notice me when I walked in, like a hat with a feather. Then I was told to dress ‘cool’, so someone took me to buy leather pants [trousers]”.
Brown can’t suppress the wry smile 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 businessman, and none of it made sense to me. In the end I thought, ‘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 does not consider herself a “New Yorker” and continues to live in Montclair, New Jersey, where she moved with her husband in the late 1980s.
Her authenticity, at a time when the perfection of social media is slowly losing its luster, could explain her popularity on TikTok. When Meredith Duxbury, a beauty influencer known for her full-coverage makeup looks, gave Jones Road’s What The Foundation a bad review in 2022, Brown lightheartedly parodied the influencer’s video. It went viral, resulting in a huge sales spike. She is self-deprecating because she is a social media hit. “The joke is that afterwards I see that my hair is sticking out and that I am covered in dog hair and dust. I’m like, ‘Guys, you gotta tell me!’” But her fans still just seem to get it.
Brown has no plans to sell Jones Road in other stores outside London’s Liberty, despite turning down numerous requests. Her unambiguous point of view provides insight into her success as an entrepreneur. She radiates warmth, but her eye contact is serious and steady; her tone direct and her vision clear. “I only launch a product if I see a need for it,” she says. She jokes that there is “no real strategy,” but clearly there is. Sales, she says, have “tripled” in the past year and while the company’s growth invariably means higher costs, she notes: “We don’t waste money.”
And perhaps this is a clue to her success. Even her own sartorial approach has a thrifty approach – albeit a relative one. “I just like very normal things.” At my raised eyebrow she laughs and adds: “Okay, yes, I like Celine [fashion designer Phoebe Philo era]. They are the things in my wardrobe that I will never give away. But I combine it with my Uniqlo jeans.” Her love of Philo’s Celine – an effortless, pared-back luxury (“It would be my dream to do the makeup for her next campaign”) set the tone for the Jones Road aesthetic.
The week we met, Philo’s highly anticipated eponymous collection was launched, marking her return to the industry after leading a brand that was hugely successful under her leadership and abandoning it at the height of its success. Sounds familiar? “I waited with bated breath to see what she would come back with because,” says Brown, “I love a good comeback story.”
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