How Bobbi Brown Beat Bobbi Brown

A decade after exiting her original namesake brand, Brown has achieved an extraordinary second round of success with Jones Road without private equity, Ulta, or Sephora. It must be keeping the Estée Lauder Companies executives up at night.

The symmetry between Bobbi Brown’s decline and Jones Road’s meteoric rise is surely not lost on Estée Lauder leadership. Photo: Courtesy of Jones Road

Rachel Strugatz

May 13, 2026

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Earlier this week, the O.G. makeup artist turned founder, Bobbi Brown, appeared on her first-ever TikTok Live to showcase her newest product for Jones Road—the brand she launched in 2020 on the very day that her 25-year noncompete with Estée Lauder expired. For two hours, the youthful 69-year-old faced the camera and demonstrated her innate ability to connect with beauty shoppers—many of them, in this case, one-third her age. That magnetism has fueled her wildly successful career, which now spans four decades, and helped her original namesake brand achieve mainstream fame and a $74.5 million acquisition by The Estée Lauder Companies in 1995.