We Put 3 Founders of Iconic '90s Beauty Brands in a Room Together

SECOND TIME AROUNDWe Put 3 Founders of Iconic '90s Beauty Brands in a Room TogetherIn the '90s, they brought us three of the beauty industry’s buzziest behemoths. Now the entrepreneurs behind Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, Bliss, and Urban Decay are doing it all again — and we have a few questions.

By Jenny Bailly

April 27, 2022

• Facebook
• Email
• Pinterest

Clockwise from top: Bobbi Brown, Marcia Kilgore, and Wende Zomnir—then and now. (Plus, their latest ventures, respectively: Jones Road, Beauty Pie, and Caliray.)Brown: Getty Images. Zomnir, Kilgore, and makeup: Courtesy photos

• Facebook
• Email
• Pinterest

In many ways, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, Bliss, and Urban Decay defined the ‘90s beauty scene. They introduced us to the concepts of a lipstick the color of lips, a day spa so cool it has a wait list, and a manicure in Roach. They were irreverent start-ups with dynamic founders and they eventually became part of Estée Lauder, LVMH, and L'Oréal, respectively. After a few decades of perspective, those founders — Bobbi Brown, Marcia Kilgore, and Wende Zomnir — all have new ventures and a few things to say about then, now, and why they're doing it all again with Jones Road, Beauty Pie, and Caliray. Allure executive beauty director Jenny Bailly got them all in a room and hit record.

WE START OUT TALKING ABOUT THANKS, TRANSITIONS, AND — OF COURSE — TIKTOK:

Bobbi Brown: I just want to say first that when I left Bobbi Brown [Cosmetics in 2016] and I had all this emotion and all this junk, Marcia reached out to me and said, "Let's talk." She basically said, "You got this. You could do it again. If you wanna know the lab, if you wanna know this, if you wanna know that, I'm here." When we were young, no one ever did that for each other. Marcia was incredibly kind and got me through a really hard time. So I just have to say thank you.

Marcia Kilgore: Oh, thank you! I would've done it for anybody, and I would hope that somebody would do that for me. After I sold Bliss, it was like, Who am I? Your life has been so wrapped up in the whole thing for so long that it is kind of like you are the business. And then when your business is gone, you can have a real crisis. I experienced it much earlier than you did. I knew that I could get through it, so you could get through it. 

Wende Zomnir: I think the pandemic actually helped me because I was creating my own little world again and hunkering down with my family. Your self-worth can be really tied up in, I'm the founder, and I appear at these events. But [during COVID], I had this reenergized family life. Eventually I was like, "You know what? I'm a creative person and I need to do something creative again." That's how Caliray came about.

Brown: I took two days off after I left [Bobbi Brown Cosmetics]. Then I started looking... What's next?

Zomnir: I was like, "Oh, my God... Do I have to become a YouTuber? Is that my fate?" Because I don't really enjoy doing that. I enjoy creating things and putting stuff on my face and the whole top to bottom of beauty. I love it. But I couldn't imagine sitting in front of a camera and doing my makeup and saying, "Hey, I'm 50-plus. Let me show you how to lift your eyes!"

Brown: A friend of mine said open a TikTok account and just be yourself. Myself is not dancing to bad music. It's giving tips and advice. So I started doing it, and I couldn't believe it. The first couple got over a million views, and all the women were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, saying, "Thank God you're here. I need real advice."

Zomnir: It's a bigger group than Gen Z, which everyone wants a piece of. And, look, I want a piece of Gen Z too, but I don’t think we can ignore our own sisters.

Brown: I don't pay attention to Gen Z. I don't care.

Kilgore: I don't know what Gen Z is.

Zomnir: It's children, your children.

Kilgore: I just think, What will this do for a customer? What might she need?

Zomnir: Okay, now Bobbi's inspired me to try TikTok. 

Brown holding Cody, the second of her three sons, in an ad for the Bobbi Brown Baby fragrance. (Cody is now the director of e-commerce for Jones Road.)

Jeff Licata

"I was like, 'Oh, my God. Do I have to become a YouTuber? Is that my fate?"

Brown: And by the way, our sales quadrupled. Do it your way. It's not perfect, not scripted. It's just what you feel like saying — about entrepreneurship or raising your kids or three things you do when you're having a [terrible] day.

WITH ZOMNIR READY FOR TIKTOK, WE MOVE ON TO THE BIG QUESTION: WHAT’S CHANGED?

Zomnir: Social media has caused a democratization of the industry. When we launched our first brands, it was about, "How do you get out there?" There wasn't social media and nobody was paying attention to these little brands. I remember going into a store and asking for my own brand and someone was like, "Let me show you Lancôme." You couldn't get past the wall of the giant brands. And now it's all about the noise, right? There's a hundred different brands out there. And I think all of us helped break down that barrier for everybody else to have the opportunity to be in the business, which is really cool.

Kilgore: And how you sell is so different. Retailers used to be the only way. It was you making the product and coming up with the ideas. Retailers gave you shelf space. They brought the traffic in. You stayed in your box and they stayed in their box. Then retailers started their own incubators. They would tell you that they were pushing everybody's products the same, but actually they were using you for foot traffic while they pushed the products that they owned and had a bigger margin on. So you'd be giving the retailer 60 percent of your profits, plus the 400,000 free samples, plus this, plus that. Even if you were making $50 million a year with some big retailers, you were basically coming out flat — and they'd copy your best product. It used to be you knew that the retailer was your partner. Now it's every dog for himself. So to get that kind of attention from consumers, a lot of us are paying Google or Facebook instead. So it's really a shift of where's the money going. The whole concept of Beauty Pie is transparency. We sell our products direct, without the huge markups, to members.

Brown: We have a Jones Road flagship in Montclair, New Jersey, and are in about 10 Credos, but we don't have a plan for other retail space. We are a DTC [direct to consumer] company. We save so much money now. For example, I don't know if you guys use any focus groups, but mine is on social media. You just read your DMs.

Kilgore: You never used to be able to go straight to your customer and have that real conversation.

Brown: Bobbi Brown turned into the biggest corporation that I couldn't imagine. I would listen to these teams talk about what the focus groups were saying and all I could think was, Who are these people making $50 a day to go sit in a room and give their opinions? I already knew what people thought because I gave [the products] to my friends, my sister, my next-door neighbors. I think it was a waste of time and it was certainly a big expense.

Zomnir: They don't have it as much today, but [Urban Decay] had a big sales team, a field team on the ground. And you got more rich stuff from them than you ever got from the research.

Long before starting Urban Decay in 1996, Zomnir got her introduction to the makeup industry as a model in Belgium, where her family lived during her teen years. She doesn’t remember the exact date of this photo, but based on the Flashdance top, we’re gonna say 1983.

Courtesy of subjectOTHER THAN IGNORING FOCUS GROUPS, WHAT DID YOU LEARN THEN THAT’S HELPING THE MOST NOW?

Brown: For four and a half years, I was an indie beauty person, and then I was a corporate citizen — for 22 years. So when I did the next thing, I knew exactly what to do. But more important, I knew what not to do and that's to waste time, energy, and resources, to spend money on consultants and teams of people creating things that don't mean anything. It's really important how you spend money, especially when you're a new brand. And I like making a profit.

Zomnir: I'm pretty scrappy and that was probably my biggest asset in doing it all again. I don't need a PR person holding my hand. I'm willing to carry boxes and just do whatever it takes to get it done. Last week I went to MakeUp in L.A. [a trade show], and my friends, who are all in charge of big beauty brands, were like, "That's beneath you. Don't go." And I was like, "No... I think I'm gonna go." I want to get my hands dirty.

Brown: Yeah, I think we all share that for sure. Not only do I not need the PR person, I don't want it. Now I can wear my hair in a ponytail, wear my sneakers, and there’s no PR person to say, "Oh, no, no, no! You have to wear the heels." I can be myself. And scrappy is everything.

Kilgore: I would say also we're probably all ridiculously optimistic. You can see it, and you think you can get there, and not very much will tell you that you can't.

Brown: I launched Jones Road the day my 25-year noncompete [with Estée Lauder] ran out. It was a week before the presidential election, in the middle of a pandemic. Everyone said, "You can't do this now." I was like, "I don't care. I have my freedom today."

WHAT ABOUT THE GROWING CELEBRITY BEAUTY COMPLEX? WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO THIS NEW GENERATION OF BEAUTY ENTREPRENEURS?

Kilgore: It's really hard work having a start-up beauty brand. And we're used to it ‘cause we weren’t celebrities. So we know how to do that work.

Brown: Yo, dude, we're celebrities! [Editor's note: We don't disagree. But to paint the scene of this Zoom room — Bobbi, in a hoodie and ponytail, is sitting on a folding chair in an empty room in her new house, putting on makeup with her fingers before an Instagram Live she is starting in five minutes.]

Kilgore: You know what I mean.... We never had it super easy. No one's gonna do anything for me, so I know how to do it. But they get in [to the business of beauty] and it can be a bit shocking.

Zomnir: I think a lot of people think the name equals automatic sales. And you might get that first round of sales, but you guys all know — it’s not the first order. It's the next order. And the next order and the next. You gotta fight for everything.

Brown: You have to make things that people want again. Not just one-offs.

Keep reading more on beauty brands:

• 23 Allure-Approved Small Beauty Businesses Worth a Road Trip
• Anastasia Bezrukova Is Launching a Beauty Brand That's "Only the Essentials"
• The Founders of Luna Magic Didn't Mean to Become Ambassadors for Afro-Latinidad

Now, watch Patrick Starr's jaw-dropping makeup room tour:

This story originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of Allure. Learn how to subscribe here.

Jenny Bailly is the executive beauty director of Allure, where she also co-hosts The Science of Beauty podcast with senior beauty editor Dianna Mazzone. Previously, she served as executive beauty editor at O, the Oprah Magazine and beauty director at Cosmopolitan, and her writing has been published in... Read moreExecutive Beauty Director

• Instagram

Keywordsbobbi brownbobbi brown cosmeticsUrban DecayBlissrepackageinterviewBeauty Brands