Bobbi Brown Is Ready To Slay The Wellness Industry. Nicely.
Leaving global domination behind, the 60-year-old is taking it to the next level
On a strangely warm morning in late winter, cosmetics tycoon Bobbi Brown was in her new headquarters here: a former auto body shop left with pipes exposed and concrete floor unfinished. On a bookshelf was a case that used to belong to Frank Sinatra’s make-up man; a sign reading, “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss”; and a photo of Brown dancing onstage with rap star Flo Rida, “with my 14-year-old son watching in amazement or horror”, she said. “Please don’t find it on YouTube.”
Against one wall was an inspiration board with pictures of the many, many fashion models whose faces Brown has daubed. “I’m a crazy visual person; words are hard for me,” she said. “I can’t make a business plan, but I could visually explain what I want to do, which is good if you can read my brain and in order to work with me you kind of have to. Right?”
Titters from several staff members who were hanging around. After more than two decades turning her famously simple makeup line, Bobbi Brown Essentials, into a billion-dollar global brand with Estée Lauder, Brown, 60, is back on her own and ready to roll out her next act. Like Oprah, Gwyneth and Martha before her, she is starting a lifestyle brand, Beauty Evolution, with an accompanying editorial website, justbobbi.com.
On April 20, she will start selling products on QVC, such as a 60 calorie vanilla collagen “cocktail” and a chocolate drink fortified with protein, fibre and coconut oil. “The idea is that when you’re in a slump, instead of grabbing a coffee you have this,” she said. “It fills you up, keeps your brain going, and you won’t eat the bread basket when you go to dinner.”
What does she have against bread?
“I love bread more than I love my children,” Brown said. She has three grown sons — Dylan, Dakota and Duke — with her husband, Steven Plofker, a real estate developer with many projects in the area. Like Oprah, she shared a bread fantasy: “I would have crusty bread with steak tartare. Pizza. I think I would rather have bread than pasta. I like crunch.”
Back at headquarters, Brown’s phone beeped the opening bars of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. She took the call, looking like a teenager in a white Brandy Melville T-shirt and black sweater, legs curled up under her in jeans with prefabricated holes.
On another board nearby were some of Brown’s favourite mantras, which she has had put on pencils, such as “Be Who You Are” — “Everyone else is taken, you know,” she said, once off the phone — and “Focus On What You Do Like” and “Simple Is The New Black” and “Be Nice”.
“Duh. Hello?” Brown said. “Like, you don’t like something? Be nice.”
If this all seems terribly basic, consider how she amassed her fortune.
I’M STILL HERE
Brown first moved to New York in 1980, the child of an amicable divorce in suburban Chicago (down the block, at one point, from Hugh Hefner and his ex-wife) who had gotten a degree in theatrical make-up from Emerson College after years of struggling with schoolwork. She lived with her boyfriend from high school, a photographer, in a one-bedroom apartment on West Fourth Street that cost $500 a month, maxing out credit cards and making cold calls to agencies and bookers.
Her ad in The Village Voice offering make-up lessons got one answer, from a peppily dressed man who said he was in a play and needed to look like a woman. “I was freaked out,” Brown said. “He dressed up in drag and then wanted me to teach him how to do make-up. I made a few bucks, but I didn’t put an ad in again.”
Brown got a break when an agent called to ask if she was available the next day to work with photographer Bruce Weber. “I was a wreck,” she said. “I must have tried on 15 outfits because I wanted to just have the perfect cool when I walked in.” She and Weber were a good match. “He didn’t want any make-up!” she said. “He wanted not to see anything.” Asked if she witnessed any bad behaviour from Weber, who has been accused of sexual misconduct, Brown said: “Honestly, I grew up in the fashion industry, with photographers and assistants and male models and you know, the 80s, everything just seemed like a big party. Which I really wasn’t a participant in because I either had a boyfriend or a husband.”
She was introduced to Plofker in 1988 by a friend over dinner at Raoul’s, a restaurant in SoHo. “All I can say is, boom,” Brown said. They talked nonstop, she remembered, then put the friend in a cab, then “talked for an hour outside my building”.
The next day, Brown was happy to find out that her new swain had a master’s degree from Harvard and was, like her, Jewish. “Then I realised his last name was Plofker,” she said. “But I married him anyway.”
I grew up in the fashion industry, with photographers and assistants and male models and you know, the 80s, everything just seemed like a big party
COMPANY WOMAN
After the newlyweds moved to Montclair and began raising a family, Brown started to tire of the fashion industry’s constant travel. She had fantasised about creating her own line. “My philosophy was women don’t need a lot of make-up, they just need a few things,” she said. “Clearly that’s not what happened to the billion-dollar brand.”
Its origin story is now part of corporate lore: the chemist she met during a Mademoiselle shoot at Kiehl’s, the 10 subtly coloured lipsticks (including one named, conveniently enough, Brown) that sold 100 units their first day at Bergdorf Goodman in 1991.
Four years later, Leonard Lauder courted Brown and her business partner, Rosalind Landis, over grilled chicken, steamed vegetables, brown rice and wine on the terrace of his Fifth Avenue penthouse. “It was an out-of-body experience, to see Picassos and Dubuffets and everything there,” Brown said. As the sounds of the New York Philharmonic playing in Central Park wafted toward the sky, Lauder told her she reminded him of his mother, Estée.
“You’re beating us in all the stores, and I want to buy you,” she recalled him saying. “What if I told you could do exactly what you love to do and want, and I would give you complete autonomy?” “I didn’t even know what autonomy was,” Brown said. She added that her company’s reported selling price of around $75 million was inaccurate, but she doesn’t remember the precise amount. “Oh, it was a lot,” she said. “Yeah, I never had to work again.”
By 2010, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics was available in more than 980 doors and 56 countries. By 2012, there were over 60 freestanding Bobbi Brown Cosmetics stores worldwide. But in her last five years at the brand, Brown said she experienced more “aggravation”, like when she started a “JustBobbi” Instagram account. “I would always get in trouble,” she said. “Someone from corporate would always call down, you know, ‘What did Bobbi post?’, and I was like, ‘Guys, I’m a person’.”
Eventually such strictures began to chafe. “Look, anyone that leaves any kind of company will tell you how tough it was — that’s why you’re not there anymore,” Brown said. “I’m a good girl. I don’t live my life trying to piss people off, but honestly sometimes I can’t help it.”
After leaving her namesake company behind in 2016, Brown cycled through relief, anger and sadness. “I thought I was going to spend weeks and days in bed,” she said. “I didn’t. I moped around for a couple days and drank tequila with my best friends.”
In the Bahamas with Plofker for his 60th birthday, she met a chef who said: “I can’t wait to see what you do next.” “I don’t know,” Brown said.
“Dude, you got this!” the chef said admiringly.
“And that’s why I’ve got posters and pencils and hats that say, ‘I got this’,” Brown said. “It just kind of clicked.”
BUFFING UP THE BIDENS
Brown was going to do Michelle Obama’s make-up for the 2009 inauguration, but it fell through.
“You know, she went with someone else,” she said. “I was so bummed and someone said, ‘Oh I know someone who knows the Bidens’. I was hired to do Mrs Biden’s make-up, which was awesome. It was an amazing experience. I did Jill’s make-up and touched the vice-president up and I found myself alone with him in a hotel room, just me and him with a ruffled bed. I have a picture of it. The door was left open.”
The former second couple now visit Brown’s beach house on the Jersey Shore, she said. “Joe Biden is the most simple, by-the-book guy. He’s amazing.”
At the Obamas’ last state dinner, she and Plofker were in line when former president Barack Obama got her attention. “And I run over and I say, ‘Hey!’. And I said, ‘Oh my God, your skin looks so good! Can I touch it?’.” He said yes. “He had quit smoking, I think, at the time. And he’s like, ‘Michelle! B. Brown just told me my skin look good!’. And Michelle goes, ‘Steven!’. So we had a moment.”
She hesitated to call Obama her friend. “But when I would walk into the White House, the president of the United States would say, ‘Hey B squared, how you doing? Nice kicks’,” Brown said. Obama eventually appointed her to serve on the US Trade Commission.
“Even when that happens in my life, my husband says, ‘That’s really dumb, you hate going to meetings’,” she said. “And I said, ‘I know but it’s so cool’.”
And the truth is, those particular meetings weren’t so bad. “I’d be sitting next to someone, the head of the pork bellies,” Brown said.
Her maternal grandfather, “Papa Sam”, had owned Sandra Motors, a big car dealership in Chicago named after Brown’s mother. Calling himself “Cadillac Sam”, he appeared in local TV commercials. “And every time I was in these situations I would look up at Papa Sam,” Brown said, “and think, ‘I used to sit in these corporate meetings, and now I’m here at the White House?’.”
In the apartment, staring down at her, was a large portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
“I mean, look, I haven’t met the queen,” Brown said. “But I did get a private tour of Buckingham Palace because I had breakfast with her granddaughter Eugenie. I started asking her questions, ‘Eugenie, so your grandma’s the queen?’. Because Eugenie’s this nice sweet girl, Fergie and Andy’s daughter. I’ve had breakfast with Kate Middleton — not Kate, Pippa! Wrong Middleton. But Kate wore Bobbi make-up on her wedding. So all those moments are close though I haven’t met the queen. Yet.”