The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
First Time Founders with Ed Elson – How Bobbi Brown Built A Beauty Empire
02 Mar 2025
Ed speaks with Bobbi Brown, the founder of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics and Jones Road Beauty. They discuss her journey in the beauty industry, the impact of social media on the makeup world, and the importance of building a personal brand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
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And that means your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Get started at servicenow.com slash ai-agents. Scott, how much do you know about the beauty industry?
More than your average straight white guy. I worked with L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, LVMH, Clarins, MAC. And what were your main takeaways? That it's a really impressive industry. It attracts a lot of very smart people. It's a growing industry. It's a fantastic high-margin industry that it's all about. It's the ultimate branding celebrity deathmatch because they're all selling the same mud.
I mean, it really is kind of 90% branding. And there's a ton of innovation there. The beauty industry or the luxury industry, it doesn't get the credit it deserves in terms of innovation. True innovation around branding, they were some of the first to go vertical, have celebrity spokespeople, embrace social movements.
John Dempsey at Estee Lauder was one of the first people to embrace gay people and transgender people as spokespeople. So they were always kind of cutting edge. There's also an industry that advanced female executives pretty quickly.
So I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed working with those companies.
Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. In 1991, one woman forever changed the makeup industry with a bold mission, to enhance, not alter, a woman's natural beauty. Her approach redefined how we think about makeup, and her name became synonymous with innovation all over the world.
After building a billion-dollar brand, she stepped away from the company to return to her entrepreneurial roots. She has succeeded as a makeup artist, an entrepreneur, a television personality, and a writer. As a true legend in the industry, she continues to reshape the beauty landscape, this time with Jones Road, a new makeup company built on the idea of clean beauty.
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