It was Ben Bennett’s first job working at Limited Brands that showed him the power of working on a portfolio of businesses. Early in his career, Bennett, the founder and CEO of beauty brand incubator The Center, worked on 14 different apparel businesses at Limited Brands, but it was his time helping to conceive Bath & Body Works that got him hooked on beauty.
“I’d never considered developing fragrances or personal care products,” he said on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “I looked at Bath & Body Works like this was another specialty business that I was brought in to help influence seasonality and trend: What would that mean, season after season, to look at what was happening culturally in the world and how we could incorporate that into the things that we were developing?”
At the time, body wash hadn’t quite upended bar soap and consumers were shopping in drugstores. “Body wash was something that maybe wealthy people used when they went to a spa. It wasn’t such a common item. Bath & Body Works opened up a whole new category of personal care for consumers and created almost a frenzy around coming in and experiencing the new fragrance,” he said.
Since then, Bennett has been instrumental in creating the next guard of beauty brands, first at incubator Hatchbeauty and now at The Center, which he founded in 2020. At just over a year old, The Center has been busy, relaunching Make Beauty under new ownership and debuting Naturium with skin-care influencer Susan Yara. Bennett will bring Phlur’s rebrand to market in fall and launch a fourth brand in the first quarter of 2022.