Bobbi Brown built a billion-dollar beauty brand only to find herself feeling pushed out of it in 2016.
Though she is one of the beauty industry’s most influential founders, she coped after exiting Estée Lauder in the same way many would after leaving a job.
“My neighbors came over and I drank tequila with them,” said Brown at The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Council Summit on Wednesday.
Brown, who recently published her memoir, “Still Bobbi,” said she considers herself fired from the beauty conglomerate, even though it never officially terminated her.
Roughly two decades after the corporation acquired her makeup brand, her work contract was canceled, and she was given a new role without involvement in daily operations, Brown said in a recent “Master of Scale” podcast episode.
“My new position was to be the face of the brand, but get out of the day-to-day,” Brown said on the podcast.
Estée Lauder didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
When she left the company, Brown still had four years remaining on a 25-year non-compete contract that prevented her from being associated with another makeup company — but at 59, she wasn’t quite ready for early retirement.
“I don’t have girls waiting for me at the tennis courts, or a book group,” Brown said on the podcast, adding that her kids were also out of the house by that point.
Rediscovering herself
Brown said on the podcast that she no longer feels “tortured” by her departure, but at the time, she was angry and hurt. She said at the WSJ CMO Council Summit that her former employees, many of whom she had hired, were given orders not to contact her.
After meeting with Estée Lauder’s legal team that day in 2016 and deciding to leave, Brown said on the podcast that she called her husband, a real-estate developer, who met her in the city.
He told her he was glad she’d left — he’d been waiting a long time to “get a little bit” of her, she said. Then he suggested they turn a historic building he had just bought into a hotel, Brown said. They eventually went on to do just that, creating The George, in Montclair, New Jersey.
In the days following her exit, the makeup founder began to figure out how she wanted to move forward.
“The third day, I started just going to the city and meeting people for breakfast and lunches, because I never had time for that,” Brown said at the WSJ CMO Council Summit.
Brown kept herself busy, taking on hobbies like hip-hop dancing, and building a TikTok presence.
“I love to dance,” Brown said. “Any wedding or Bar Mitzvah, I don’t leave the floor.”
She soon started to take on new projects. Richard Baker, who was owned Lord & Taylor at the time, reached out to Brown and suggested that she create a curated shop called the Just Bobbi Shops. In 2019, MasterClass asked her to lead its first-ever makeup course. She also earned a health-coach certification, focused on her own wellness, and published a book called “Beauty from the Inside Out.”
“It just hit me: I wasn’t done,” Brown said on the podcast. “I had more things to teach, and the world had changed. I had changed since I left the company.”
Brown said she wanted to launch a new business before her non-compete agreement ended, but her husband wouldn’t let her. So she counted down the days, even purchasing a charm with the date the agreement was set to expire — October 2020.
That exact month, she launched Jones Road Beauty, a makeup brand focused on creating “no-makeup makeup” looks with clean formulas.
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