When Bobbi Brown first started her eponymous beauty brand, she kicked it off by selling lipsticks out of her home. Now, a few decades and several businesses later, she’s taking another whack at the category.
“The lipsticks were beautiful, and were everything I wanted in a lipstick. They were creamier, denser, and it was the ’90s. It was modern,” Brown said of her first foray. “But that’s not for right now.”
Enter Jones Road’s 2025 take, which debuts Thursday in 12 shades, priced at $30 each, on the brand’s website and in its stores. Brown, in the throes of promoting her new book and launching a brand campaign, said it took her time to come back to the category. As she put it, “I’m a person that makes lipstick that hates lipstick. Now, I actually like this one.
“I was so not into traditional lipstick. It was old-fashioned, it didn’t feel right, it felt aging and it doesn’t feel like me,” she continued. “But we started working on a formula to see what I would like, we got a bunch of things, started smushing them together. We didn’t want one that was too dense, or one that was too sheer. We wanted it to feel like it wasn’t makeup.”
It’s part of Brown’s evolved sensibility, which is more Brooklyn than Bergdorf Goodman, where she launched her first range. Called The Classic Lip, the formula has a satin finish that also hydrates with peptides and vitamin E.
“Our lip pencils have been this sleeper success for us, and all the pencils are lip color-inspired plus three bright colors. Those are the colors of the lipstick range,” she said. “A lot of the younger girls wear them without much makeup on their face – just a little concealer, a little mascara. No one’s wearing full faces of makeup at Jones Road.”
The launch comes at a good time for Jones Road, which was said to reach revenues of $160 million in 2024. “What’s working is that I’ve got this vision, this team, and we’re all figuring it out as we’re going,” Brown said. “We’re able to do things without a lot of approvals and a lot of layers. We’re just able to be scrappy and quick.”
Makeup still comprises beauty’s largest category across mass and prestige channels, despite showing signs of wear in the first half of 2024, as reported. Lip treatments, however, such as balms and oils, are offsetting those challenges, at least in part.
