FOR A WHILE in October 2020, Bobbi Brown simply stopped taking calls. Even close friends didn't know what she was up to, tucked into a storage-closet-turnedoffice within her husband's production studio. If she'd opened her mouth to the wrong person, she could have been in breach of contract. It was nerve-racking, but also—she'll admit it now—the right kind of electrifying.
1round her neck hung a tiny gold chain with a charm she'd had made reading “10/20.” It was the expiration date of the noncompete agreement she'd signed 25 years before, when her eponymous cosmetics company was acquired by Estée Lauder for some $75 million. In the years she'd been prohibited from all but touching another beauty brand, Brown had spent more than two decades doing something else almost unheard-of: staying put within Estée Lauder, an executive leading her Bobbi Brown Cosmetics to more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
Within Estée Lauder, her perseverance and problem-solving had become legendary. She was the “last founder standing” of more than a dozen prestige cosmetics, skin care, and fragrance startups the Lauders would acquire. But, in 2016, in year 21 of her noncompete, it had become too much. The quarterly meetings it took a full quarter to prepare for, the bureaucracy, the top-down management, the budgeting, the pushing back against products she didn't believe in or want her name on. And so that year, she'd stepped away and retreated to her home in Montclair, New Jersey, where Brown now found herself brandless.
She was 59 years old and had nearly five years left in her noncompete. Her children had left for college. “There was sadness,” she says, “a sense of loss. Then there was anger.” She'd been so loyal for so long, and now the separation took its toll. As in the wake of a divorce, it was the tiny logistical matters that claimed outsize mental space. Like: What on earth could she give away for Halloween?
1n Montclair, a commuter town just 12 miles west of New York City, a stretch of boutique stores and ice cream parlors sits nestled beneath manicured hillside estates. It's a haven for the mix of media folks, entrepreneurs, and celebrities who prefer a quiet town to midnight cab horns. But settling down in Montclair isn't necessarily about anonymity. It's a close-knit town. People notice things—like how one Halloween, a VP of Scholastic gave away books. Or how Hall of Famer catcher Yogi Berra used to give away his own signed baseball cards. Brown, who'd raised her three sons in Montclair, and whose husband, Steven Plofker, was one of
