Beauty’s default growth story has become familiar: build a cult following online, land in Sephora or Ulta, then use retail doors to scale. Bobbi Brown is doing something much more interesting with Jones Road. She is saying no.

Jones Road Beauty has stayed out of Sephora, Ulta Beauty and department stores, with London’s Liberty as its sole wholesale account. Instead, the brand is growing through direct-to-consumer sales and its own physical stores — 18 of them today, more than 20 expected by year-end and another eight planned for 2027.

Owning the counter means owning the conversation

At a multi-brand beauty retailer, a product sits beside hundreds of competitors. The retailer owns the environment, much of the customer data and a significant piece of the discovery experience.

A Jones Road store can do something different. Every mirror, makeup artist, tester and message can explain Bobbi Brown’s philosophy without fighting for attention three feet away from another launch.

Stores currently represent about 15% of Jones Road sales. Brown believes that could grow to roughly 30% within a couple of years.

The Rhode comparison is fascinating

Earlier this week I wrote about Rhode expanding across Europe through Sephora — an equally intelligent but almost opposite strategy. Rhode is using a global retail powerhouse to translate enormous cultural demand into physical distribution at scale.

Jones Road is choosing control.

Neither strategy is inherently better. That is exactly what makes the comparison useful. Modern beauty brands no longer have one prescribed path from Instagram fame to the beauty counter.

Bobbi Brown has already lived the traditional beauty story

There is another reason this strategy feels significant: Brown does not need to prove that she understands department stores or global beauty retail. She built one of modern beauty’s defining brands before launching Jones Road.

Choosing a narrower wholesale footprint now reads less like a limitation and more like a deliberate decision about what she wants the second act to feel like.

The AURA take

For years, getting into Sephora felt like beauty’s version of arriving.

But distribution is not the same thing as brand equity, and more doors do not automatically mean a stronger relationship with the customer.

What Jones Road is testing is whether a beauty brand with a powerful founder, a clear point of view and enough direct demand can build its own beauty counter instead of renting space on somebody else’s.

That is a very different definition of scale — and I am watching it closely.

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Source: Beauty Independent interview with Bobbi Brown, published October 1, 2026. Store counts and projections are based on Brown’s reported plans and may change.