Bobbi Brown is Back

In 1995, she sold her iconic cosmetics company-and spent the next 25 years barred from doing it again. Now she's returned with a new startup, a new outlook, and a whole new way of winning

- By Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. Photography by Jingyu Lin

For a while in October 2020, Bobbi Brown simply stopped taking calls. Even close friends didn't know what she was up to, tucked into a storage-closet-turned-office within her husband's production studio. If she'd opened her mouth to the wrong person, she could have been in breach of contract. It was nerve-racking, but also-she'll admit it now-the right kind of electrifying.

Around her neck hung a tiny gold chain with a charm she'd had made reading "10/20." It was the expiration date of the noncompete agreement she'd signed 25 years before, when her eponymous cosmetics company was acquired by Estée Lauder for some $75 million. In the years she'd been prohibited from all but touching another beauty brand, Brown had spent more than two decades doing something else almost unheard-of: staying put within Estée Lauder, an executive leading her Bobbi Brown Cosmetics to more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

Within Estée Lauder, her perseverance and problem-solving had become legendary. She was the "last founder standing" of more than a dozen prestige cosmetics, skin care, and fragrance startups the Lauders would acquire. But, in 2016, in year 21 of her noncompete, it had become too much. The quarterly meetings it took a full quarter to prepare for, the bureaucracy, the top-down management, the budgeting, the pushing back against products she didn't believe in or want her name on. And so that year, she'd stepped away and retreated to her home in Montclair, New Jersey, where Brown now found herself brandless.

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