Bobbi Brown has launched not one but two groundbreaking cosmetics companies and written nine bestselling books on beauty, but she’s not a fan of traditional makeup.
“I don’t like makeup that looks like makeup. When you’re done, I just want you to look better. I want you to look not tired. I want you to look pretty. 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 it’s never offered certain products, like those used for contouring.
“People want contour and that I refused,” she said of the makeup trend, popularized by the likes of Kardashians, that uses a heavy application of light and dark foundation to change how the shape of one’s face appears. “I did not want to teach or promote contour because I don’t believe in it.”
After calling Manhattan home, Brown now lives just outside the city in Montclair, New Jersey, but she remains a consummate New Yorker, always on the go.
In addition to running Jones Road, she also recently launched her own Substack newsletter and she and her husband, developer Steven Plofker, designed and operate a local boutique hotel, The George.
She doesn’t have time for an elaborate beauty routine and assumes many of her Jones Road customers don’t either. As such, several products are multipurpose, 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,” said Brown.
Her story is a classic tale of the heights one can reach 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 cold-calling modeling agencies, asking them to hire her to do makeup. It worked and soon she was regularly booking
jobs.
“If you move to New York, you make it,” said Brown.
Eventually, she grew tired of working with the bright, garish makeup of the 1980s. In 1991, she launched her own line, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, with the idea of enhancing rather than altering a woman’s appearance.
“I think faces are beautiful as they are and you enhance and you don’t try to change things,” she explained. “If you’re always looking in the mirror and always thinking of what you can change, I don’t think it’s a positive spin on confidence and I believe in self-esteem and confidence.”
In 1995, Estée Lauder bought Bobbi Brown Cosmetics for a reported $74.5 million. Brown stayed on as Chief Creative Officer, helping to grown the brand to over $1 billion in sales.
After more than two decades as an employee of Estée Lauder, Brown left her namesake brand in 2016 to get back 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 handful of clean beauty products under the name Jones Road Beauty.
She and Plofker put $2 million of their own money into the company, so she doesn’t have a boss and there are no outside investors to answer to.
“When I started [my] initial line, I had this [natural beauty] philosophy, but you change and you adapt and you do things because the markets want them or someone thinks you should do it,” she said. “I’m not going to 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 in 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 tint or glow” — 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 around.
“I’m in charge,” she said.
While she didn’t pull any punches at Bobbi Brown Cosmetics— Leonard Lauder wisely he told her to “always beg forgiveness … don’t ask for 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).
Brown obsesses over details large and small.
Twenty minutes into our conversation at the Jones Road in Williamsburg, she paused mid-sentence to call out a white mark that looks like a faint scratch on one of the store’s glossy posters.
“I noticed it the second I came in… and now I’m going to be focused on it until [they] bring in another picture. And I think the poster could be bigger … there’s room on the wall,” she said.
That attention to detail is fundamental to success. “Details make the difference,” she explains.
“Anyone that has a business knows… other people are not seeing what we see. It’s hard.”
Jones Road is small enough that she does a lot of thing herself, rather than outsourcing them to a team of employees.
She picks the models for shoots, does their makeup, chooses the photos and even edits them.
Shop Bobbi's makeup bag
“I’m pretty involved with anything I care about that I’m good at,” she said. “I’m involved in things I want to be involved in, which is most of the things.”
But, for all her success, Brown is humble and unpretentious, brushing off compliments like one of her face powders.
“I didn’t invent makeup,” she quipped. “I just reinvented it, right?”
This story is part of NYNext, a new editorial series that highlights New York City innovation across industries, as well as the personalities leading the way.
