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Makeup artist Bobbi Brown’s commitment to building a different kind of business with Jones Road, the brand she launched in 2020, seems to be paying off.
That’s despite a series of hurdles, such as launching a cosmetics line during a challenging period for the sector, supply chain hiccups and even a product launch that went viral on TikTok for the wrong reasons. Somehow, Brown and her team are managing to work obstacles in their favour.
From Dr Barbara Sturm and 111Skin to Tata Harper and Noble Panacea, skincare brands are sponsoring shows and joining cosmetics brands backstage as the luxury category booms.
On a low-key afternoon at the company’s only bricks-and-mortar store in Montclair, New Jersey, girls as young as 16 are enjoying pre-prom makeovers alongside women in their fifties and sixties having makeup lessons or browsing the store, which also stocks branded sweaters and baseball caps.
Many customers are known to the staff and are greeted by first name, creating a community feel. The brand’s somewhat guerrilla approaches to marketing, product development and commerce have afforded Jones Road agility, flexibility and more open communication with its customers. “There are just less rules when you’re a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand,” says Brown.
Jones Road — named after a street that Brown passed in the Hamptons, liking the sound of the name — is Brown’s second foray into the cosmetics world. Her first, eponymous brand Bobbi Brown, was sold to Estée Lauder in 1995, and Brown stayed on with the company until 2016.
Until her 25-year non-compete expired in 2020, Brown launched a supplements company called Evolution_18 (she stepped away from the brand to focus on Jones Road in 2021), developed a website named Just Bobbi, and opened a boutique hotel with her husband, property developer Steven Plofker, called The George Inn, also in Montclair.
Jones Road, which launched in 2020, is Bobbi Brown’s second foray into the cosmetics world.
Brown is candid about the frustrations that brand founders sometimes feel after they sell their company to a large strategic. She’s also long been adamant that there are simpler ways for entrepreneurs to do business. “Most of the people that work on my team now have never worked for a cosmetics company before,” she points out. At present, Jones Road has 12 employees and is searching for a chief operations officer. However, Jones Road doesn’t have a dedicated product marketing team. Usually considered an essential component of a beauty company, a product marketing team is responsible for developing and implementing marketing strategies for individual products. Brown says she doesn’t see it as a priority, arguing that the expertise of her product development team and herself is sufficient.
That’s not the only way Jones Road is breaking the rules. When the company launched Miracle Balm, a multi-tasking skin enhancer, Brown thought there was sufficient stock for two years, but the product sold out in months. Rather than wait six to eight months for a new batch to be ready, Brown instructed her team to send out products that were ready, but didn’t have boxes yet.
“We were informed it would take a month to order the external cartons and card inserts,” explains Brown. “I said, ‘Hell, no’, and instead we sent them in sandwich bags with postcards and masking tape.”
The company employed a similar tactic to meet demand for The Mascara, sending out products with mismatched lids and tubes. “We were able to source the correct tube we wanted, which is more matte, but the only lids we could find were shiny,” explains Brown. “It was more important to me to get the product to the people who wanted it than to have everything perfect.”
The company’s latest launch, a skin-perfecting product called What The Foundation, had a difficult debut. Brown says there were internal challenges with shipping and fulfilment that led the company to cancel the product’s initial launch date just a week beforehand. “But guess what? Nobody knew about it, because we didn’t have to notify anyone,” says Brown. “It wasn’t ready to launch until the day we actually made it live, which crossed over with the launch of another product (The Lip Tint), but I wasn’t worried about it.” Jones Road’s only retailer is Credo Beauty, a high-end boutique known for its stringent clean beauty standards.
Externally, it wasn’t smooth sailing either. Meredith Duxbury, a TikTok content creator, racked up 13 million views of her negative review of the launch, saying it was ultimately “a no from her”. More negative reviews from other high-profile creators such as Mikayla Nogueira followed. While fans of the brand attempted to push back in the comments and explain that the product was being misused (Duxbury was seen to have applied a very large amount of the product), it was not a marketer’s dream moment.
Brown’s response? Her team filmed a TikTok of her poking fun at Duxbury’s excessive application style by applying handfuls of product, before deadpanning to the camera, “It didn’t really work.” Such an approach is risky on social media, where nuance is often lost, but Brown’s use of comic relief seems to have paid off. “I’ve been in the public eye a long time and somehow managed to keep a good profile,” explains Brown. “I’ve not done anything to really upset people too much. I pride myself on being emotionally intelligent and knowing what feels right.” Several creators have since posted positive reviews of the product, following the application instructions correctly (Brown and her team acknowledge it is different to a typical foundation).
Credo Beauty, a high-end boutique known for its clean beauty standards, is Jones Road's only retailer.
TikTok serves as an educational and discovery platform for the brand rather than a space to convert sales. When Brown realised that Jones Road was missing out by lacking a presence on the app, she resisted calls to hire a content agency or spend big on production values. “I just sat down in front of the camera, and said, ‘It’s me, Bobbi, I’m here. What do you guys want to know?’ By the end of the week, we had over 3 million views on some of these videos,” she says. Brown’s content — and the brand — has been especially resonant with women over 40, who may have used Brown’s original cosmetics line when they were in their twenties and thirties.
“People like to talk about the idea of the ageless consumer, and I just don’t like to be pigeonholed that way,” explains Brown. “In the same way, I don’t look at the market and think about white space. I just think, what is the product I would want to make? And then we make it.”
Jones Road’s funding structure allows the brand to retain agency — the company is entirely self-funded, with Brown and her husband investing $2 million of their own money to start the company in 2020. She is adamant that the company can sustain growth without outside investment, saying, “I don't want anyone's funding because I don’t want anyone to answer to, or to have anyone expecting certain things.” She adds that she finds it refreshing that the company is not pressured to launch cool products in step with buzzy ingredients or themes.
What does the future hold for Jones Road? Pop-ups, new product lines — and more hires, eventually. Brown claims they can currently meet all of their internal goals without external resources or funding, and says there are no immediate plans to join more retailers. Instead, Jones Road aims to open more freestanding company-owned stores, with plans to expand the footprint of the current store into an adjoining unit in 2022. More skincare launches, such as a facial SPF, are also on Brown’s to-do list.
Brown does things her own way. In another unusual step, she doesn’t use Slack, the popular workplace messaging system, while the rest of her team does. She prefers to connect over the phone.
Will all her innovations work? Brown isn’t too worried. “We're a scrappy startup,” she says. “I don’t like wasting time, money or brain power. People will either love our products, or they won’t. It’s not for everybody.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
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