Bobbi Brown said she felt defeated when Estée Lauder cut her creative contract at her namesake brand in 2016.
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The brand didn’t technically fire her, but she equates the two. The beauty conglomerate cut her work contract while offering to allow her to remain the face of the company. Brown, as a result, said she felt like she had no choice but to leave.
“I felt like such a loser,” Brown told Business Insider. While few people experience this exact sort of exit, there are lessons anyone can learn from Brown’s story. Losing your job — and figuring out what to do next — is never easy.
Her first piece of advice for those who find themselves in a similar situation is to “realize it’s normal to feel these things,” and it’s a necessary part of the process. But Brown said she doesn’t encourage staying in a slump.
“It’s up to you if you want to spend six months in bed being sad — or you want to try to feel better,” she said.
That doesn’t mean forcing yourself to feel better overnight. Brown said that in the months that followed, it was hard to hear that the company was going on without her. But she kept herself busy and tried to a better place mentally and figure out what she wanted to do next.
“Standing still is not an option,” Brown said.
Brown said she had a “spiritual chiropractor” who helped her release bad energy, and also saw a business coach during that time. Eventually, she started to get back to the mindset of “what could be.”
Estée Lauder didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“I’m not someone that likes to stay sad or mad, so I just worked on myself — from the inside out,” Brown said.
In her memoir “Still Bobbi,” Brown wrote about how she developed resilience during her teenage years, as she was faced with her mom and brother’s mental illnesses and her parent’s divorce. Brown wrote that she still feels pain from those events at times, but she doesn’t let it consume her or hold her back.
Finding her second act
Brown said she never imagined she’d still be working in her 60s — in fact, that was part of why she agreed to a 25-year non-compete with Estée Lauder upon exiting the brand. But in the years that followed, she said she felt rejuvenated by her work and spending time with so many young people that she felt like she was in her 30s again.
One of those endeavors was promoting her book, “Beauty From the Inside Out,” which she announced shortly after leaving Estée Lauder. She described it as the ideal book to mark her “rebirth.”
“I had things to look forward to and occupy my mind and do differently,” Brown said.
As she figured out her next career steps, she experimented with various ventures, including a short-lived supplement brand and a shop at Lord & Taylor called “JustBobbi,” which included a curated selection of her favorite products. She said the shop combined her love of content creation with coming up with new products, and gave her the support of a big company and the freedom to assemble a team.
Eventually, Brown’s various projects led her to her second act: Jones Road Beauty. Today, the clean beauty brand is known for its viral Miracle Balm blush and bestselling foundation.
She said that when she launched it October 2020 — when her noncompete expired — she thought it would be a “small, little, fun creative brand” and hoped to reach $1 million in revenue the first year. The brand ended up exceeding that, and hit roughly $160 million by 2024.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg’s David Rubenstein, Brown described her departure from her former employer as “the best thing'” to happen to her.
“I’m doing something that I should be doing, and that I love,” Brown told Business Insider. “And if I didn’t go through the bad stuff, I wouldn’t be able to come out on this end.”
