Bobbi Brown's Guide to Success: Go To Fewer Meetings, and Take More Action Makeup legend Brown is taking her own advice, and building multiple new brands.
By Jason Feifer
This story appears in the September 2019 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
What do you do for a second act, when your first act literally changed an industry? That was the question facing makeup powerhouse Bobbi Brown, whose simple line of lipsticks blossomed into the billion-dollar company Bobbi Brown Cosmetics. She left it in 2016 with no plans for what to do next; all she knew was that she was done with corporate life. (The company had been acquired decades earlier by Estée Lauder.) "It wasn't freeing," she says. "It was like, Oh, shit; now what?" But she's since found an answer -- expanding into new territories with a supplements line for Walmart (Evolution_18), an editorial site (justBOBBI), and a boutique hotel (The George), all of which launched this spring. She also has a new podcast (Long Story Short) and a film and photo studio (18Label), and more to come. But the second act isn't really so different from the first act, she says: At its heart, everything an entrepreneur does is just about doing.
Related: How Kylie Jenner Built One of the Fastest-Growing Beauty Brands Ever
You made your name in a time before the phrase personal brand existed. Did you ever think of yourself as a brand?
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