The Secret Side of Selling: Beauty Brand Founders Talk Post-exit Life
James Manso
8 min read
Don’t ask Jerrod Blandino how many carats of fine jewelry he wears on a given day.
“I don’t count,” he said, when asked last year during a cover shoot for WWD Beauty Inc, commemorating his and his partner in business and life Jeremy Johnson’s re-entry back into business. “But my ring’s 33.”
Carats in the double-digits aren’t out of the question when you sold your company for $1.45 billion to the Estée Lauder Cos. in 2016. Though with the windfall comes its own set of challenges, as Blandino and Johnson, the founder of Too Faced Cosmetics, and a host of other entrepreneurs told Beauty Inc.
Among them, finding fulfillment after building a successful brand and then relinquishing ownership, financially managing such a large windfall, and, yes, deciding how best to spend those earnings.
Such is life post-exit.
When Blandino and Johnson first sold a portion of their business, the duo bought their entire family homes. “You work this hard, you go through everything you have to go through to become that successful, and you either want to share it with people who love you, or you want to run away to an island and disappear,” said Blandino. “There are two types of people.”
The nuts and bolts of financial management also come with their own set of challenges.
“Relationships are everything. The same way that you’re going to court an investor for a few years before you let them invest, the same is true with money managers,” said Nancy Twine, founder and CEO of Briogeo, which she sold to Wella Company in 2022. “The more you can have those relationships and learn how that world works, with asset allocation and diversification, the easier it is when that time comes to have a group of people you trust.”
Nancy Twine
Part of that, Twine said, is also understanding the varied paths to wealth management. “You need to understand your risk tolerance. For many years, you put everything on the line for your business, and what do you want to do when you invest your money? We all know how volatile the stock market has been, and some founders can’t stomach that.”
Today, Twine is still involved in the business and has a few more projects on her plate outside of the brand. She said the deal actually hasn’t changed much of her day-to-day.
“Sure, there are some cool things that maybe you can buy yourself, or go on vacation, but fundamentally, my life has really not changed,” Twine said. “The same things that annoyed me before still annoy me, I still wear the same loungewear around the house. People think that when you get to this certain point, everything in life just fixes itself, but it really doesn’t.”
That sentiment isn’t an uncommon one.
“The amount of money doesn’t make things easier in every way. It can make things more complicated, and even scary — there’s a responsibility that comes with it you don’t expect,” said Tiffany Masterson, who founded Drunk Elephant. “There’s a honeymoon phase where you don’t have to worry about things you’ve always worried about. Things aren’t as stressful, but they do get more complicated.”
She said her mission with Drunk Elephant — and her devotion to it — hasn’t diminished since its 2019 acquisition by Shiseido for roughly $845 million.
“The true purpose of the brand and your true intention doesn’t change when you sell your brand. People start brands for the money, or to become the face of a brand, and there are different intentions one can have,” Masterson said. “I’m still as convinced that the philosophy of my brand and this way of thinking about taking care of skin is great, and it still helps people.”
Vicky Tsai, who founded Tatcha, shared the same outlook. “I love my company the same, and my connection and commitment to it has not changed in any way,” she said. “It sort of feels like I sent my kid off to college — you’re always going to be the mom, and even though they need you a bit less, every time they call, you’re like, ‘Mommy loves you!’ There’s mind share and there’s heart share. I’m able to start splitting my time among different things now, and Tatcha still has almost all of my heart share, and probably always will.”
Tatcha founder Vicky Tsai.
Tsai still advises on the brand, and jumps in when appropriate on strategy, product development and the like. She’s also focused her sense of purpose externally, too. Since before Tatcha sold to Unilever in 2019, the brand has had its Beautiful Faces, Beautiful Futures Fund that helps fund Room to Read, a nonprofit that benefits literacy and girls’ education in African and Asia. It has since funded more than 10 million days of school.
“I sit on the global board for Room to Read, and now I have more time to go in-person to the global board meetings,” Tsai said. “In addition to that, it’s about mentorship. Whether it’s in the beauty industry or not, people in big corporations or starting their own companies, as long as they come from an underserved community, I get excited to talk to them.”
Similarly, Twine started her own content platform, NancyTwine.com, in addition to the Dream Makers Founder Grant, a $1 million fund that grants to female founders. For its first year, it partnered with Sephora and the Fifteen Percent Pledge.
“It’s a grant, but it’s also about mentorship. I really believe you need both,” Twine said. “If I were to die tomorrow, I don’t want my legacy to solely be that I launched and sold Briogeo. That’s a big part of it, but being a Black woman, there’s not a lot of people like me doing those things, and a big part of figuring things out was what I was most passionate about from a philanthropic perspective.”
Others also find fulfillment by rekindling their love of the game.
Jerrod Blandino and Jeremy Johnson
Of the lucky ones to get there, many depart their brands to focus on new ventures: case in point, Bobbi Brown, who sold her namesake brand in 1995 to the Estée Lauder Cos., left it in 2016 and later founded Jones Road Beauty. Last year, that brand was estimated to have sales of $120 million. Meanwhile, Blandino and Johnson created a Newport Beach-based incubator called Toy Box Brands, which launched Polite Society makeup and Diamond Drunk jewelry cleaner in 2023; Wende Zomnir, who founded Urban Decay, went on to depart and then launch Caliray. Jeanine Lobell, of Stila fame, debuted her new makeup brand Neem two years ago, while serial entrepreneur Marcia Kilgore has created no fewer than four companies since selling Bliss Labs to LVMH in 1999.
“We wanted to get the band back together and do it all again, because we had so much fun doing it,” Blandino said. “We wanted to try it again, but do it with all of the knowledge, experience and relationships that we didn’t have the first time.”
Frédéric Malle departed his brand, Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, earlier this year, after 10 years of Lauder ownership. And though he’s working on an unspecified new venture, “for the first time since working after college, I’m on this endless vacation, which is bizarre and wonderful,” for the remainder of the summer.
Frédéric Fekkai sold his namesake brand to Procter & Gamble in 2008, eventually to buy it back in 2018.
“It was an amazing reward financially, but emotionally, I had wanted to continue to grow the brand and it was a difficult adjustment to being a backseat passenger,” Fekkai said. “I didn’t want to just be staying on the sidelines and just enjoying life. Enjoying life, for me, is a hybrid of business and family and lifestyle, and that’s what I did.”
In addition to hiring the right people — “You have to make sure you’re equipped to deal with all the actors, whether it’s the lawyers, the acquirer, the sellers, the banks and so on,” Fekkai said — it’s just as crucial to get clear on one’s intentions for post-deal life.
“You need to have a real come-to-Jesus moment with yourself about whether or not you want to stay with the business or whether you want to get out,” said Divya Gugnani, investor and entrepreneur who sold Send the Trend to QVC in 2012 before starting both Wander Beauty and 5 Sens. “Do the diligence on the enterprise, meet the stakeholders and decision makers, understand the culture, and then do a self-assessment.”
“Know what you’re good at, know what your core skill is, and know what makes you happy,” she continued. “My calling is to launch from the ground up, and that’s what I went back to do.”
