Jones Road is growing, and isn’t ruling out any area for expansion.
The brand, founded by Bobbi Brown in 2020, is launching a new complexion product, with fragrance on the way; opening retail stores in Austin and Boston’s Chestnut Hill before expanding its website to ship to Australia and more countries in the European Union, and has named Brown’s son Cody Plofker chief executive officer and Chrissy DeVries chief operating officer, respectively.
It all marks an inflection point for the business, which industry sources estimate surpassed $160 million in revenue in 2024.
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“I’m someone that looks at the numbers every day, but really, it’s all about the comments that people come up to me and tell me,” Brown said of the brand’s trajectory. “We have a Facebook group of 80,000 people, and there’s more on social, too. I know what people love, and I know what they want.”
First up, she said, is Just Enough Tinted Moisturizer, which debuted on the brand’s stores and on its website Tuesday. It is priced at $44.
Just Enough is a follow-up to What the Foundation, one of the brand’s top sellers.
“This was formulated for someone who doesn’t want all of the emollience of What the Foundation. It’s not brain surgery,” Brown said. “We have an immensely loyal consumer of a certain age and their daughters, and now we’re leaning more into their daughters.”
That shift in target is concurrent with the company’s executive changes as well. Plofker was promoted to the top job in January, in tandem with DeVries’ promotion to chief operating officer.
“What’s worked so well for me personally is I have total trust in the people around me,” Brown said, adding that DeVries was actually her first hire for the brand.
“Chrissy came in as product development before I knew what I was doing, and she had a lot of experience from other areas of her life. She did packaging and all that. Cody came in as head of marketing, and then became head of growth. We had other people in the C-suite, but these two seem to do it in a simpler way,” Brown said.
Or, as Plofker put it, “We decide with the board where we want to go and where we don’t. And we really know what we don’t want.” That includes wholesale distribution, which has lent itself to the retail expansion with stores in Austin and Boston, as well as expanding online capabilities to the remaining countries in the EU and Australia.
“We think we can still grow quickly, but this will be more consistent and sustainable,” Plofker said. “It might take a bit more time to get there — getting the leases, getting stores open — but it’ll be fruitful.”
The strategy is to test the waters by expanding digitally before opening a storefront. “The retail expansion is happening more domestically,” DeVries said. “Our position being direct-to-consumer, if we want to make a last-minute change to a product, we totally can. We have flexibility not being in wholesale.”
Jones Road evaluates its opportunities for retail in a way that is both driven by data and happenstance, the trio said.
“Our first store was in Montclair [New Jersey] because my husband had a building, and we opened in the Hamptons because we were going to be in the Hamptons all summer,” Brown said. More recently, “we were in Austin for my niece, and we found this store.”
Plofker said the data generally corroborates those instances. “The first thing we think about is who we are trying to reach and where they are,” he said. “In the beginning, it was about circling the top cities where our DTC customers are, but it’s now more nuanced than that — we look at demographics, income levels and whatever else we can get our hands on in terms of the beauty market. Then, there’s the subjective component.
“There’s not a one-to-one correlation,” Plofker continued, pointing to the DTC success in Brooklyn that was a precursor to store openings in the neighborhood. Though profitable, he said they aren’t as strong as the brand’s digital business in the area, which he thinks has to do with the younger age of the Brooklyn clientele.
“As we open more stores, we’ll learn more about what the main criteria are, how much traffic is needed, and whether or not people will seek us out,” he said. Texas marks the furthest west store Jones Road will operate, but “hopefully, we’ll get all the way to the coast soon.”
Those moves are in tandem with further category expansions, including a second fragrance, a shower gel and a mineral SPF. “There will be five skus,” DeVries said of the latter launch. “There’s an untinted and four with a bit of pigment. This one’s been in the pipeline for a long time.”