00:00When did you start Bobbi Brown Cosmetics?
00:02Started Bobbi Brown Cosmetics when I married my husband and we moved to Montclair, New Jersey
00:12because I didn't want to be in New York City. And then I just had this idea. I didn't want
00:18to travel anymore for work because being a freelance makeup artist, you're always on a
00:22plane going to some exotic place. And I just said, you know, why don't I, you know, think of
00:28something else. I met a chemist at a shoot and told him how much I hated lipstick that
00:34was in the market and what I was looking for. And he said, I can make it for you. So
00:38he did.
00:39He made me a lipstick. And I thought, wow, this is like amazing. I bet I could sell it to
00:44my
00:45friends, to models. And I started doing that.
00:49So you ultimately started a company that had 10 different shades of lipstick, right?
00:54And I sold them out of my house and my husband would mail them. They didn't even have a box.
01:00They were in an envelope. So they were, you know, very indie. We put the ingredients on
01:07a card and started shipping them. And then one day we were at a party and I said, you know,
01:12thank the hostess for inviting us. I had never met her before. And she said she was a fan of
01:17mine. I'm like, oh, you know who I am? That's so nice. I said, what do you do? She said,
01:21oh, I'm a cosmetics buyer at Bergdorf Goodman. I said, oh, I sell these cosmetics out of my house.
01:28And she agreed to take them and sell them at Bergdorf.
01:33And the venture capitalists didn't come along and say, we'd like a piece of your company and
01:37we'll give you some money or did you just finance it yourself?
01:39No, you know what? We totally financed it ourself. And, you know, I didn't know those people back
01:44then. We had people reach out to us, you know, when our business started to grow that wanted to buy
01:51us.
01:51We weren't for sale until we got a call from Leonard Lauder
01:55because I fell madly in love, you know, at first sight.
Comments