In 2016, when a buyer from Sephora told Bee Shapiro that the beauty specialty retailer had picked up her line of eco-luxe fragrance and body-care products, she was ecstatic—until she heard the order was only for dot-com.
“I said, ‘OK, that’s awesome, but I also want 20 doors,’” recounts Shapiro. “The buyer looked at our line, which at that point was quite small, and she said, ‘Look, I’m going to be honest with you, you’re not ready.’ She gave me good, valid reasons, and she explained it to me very clearly, and I still thought, ‘Oh man, I wish I had these doors.’ I walked away from that initially thinking I had missed out, that I didn’t negotiate hard enough.”
Two years later, Ellis Brooklyn is in those 20 doors and, as of this month, 100 more with its full range of sophisticated scents, body milks and candles. The brand is part of the Clean at Sephora initiative helping customers identify products free of potentially harmful ingredients such as parabens, mineral oils, phthalates, sulfates and formaldehydes.
With the Sephora expansion, Ellis Brooklyn’s business is on track to skyrocket 400% this year. Shapiro says, “Going into a Sephora store and seeing my products there is like having an out-of-body moment. It’s crazy.” She realizes the retailer was right to originally make her wait for a brick-and-mortar presence. “I wouldn’t have known anything then,” says Shapiro, adding, “We did not have a merchant person on our team. We did not have any retail experience on our team. We didn’t have the cash flow to be able to support a large retailer like Sephora with education and fixtures.”
Shapiro is underselling her experience a tad. She’s been a beauty columnist for The New York Times for a decade and authored “Skin Deep,” a book profiling the beauty routines of some of the world’s most famous faces. Shapiro’s beauty writing led her to create Ellis Brooklyn. She watched as the clean beauty movement took off, and countless skincare, hair and makeup products in the category crossed her desk, but she noticed there was a white space for clean fragrance. In 2013, when Shapiro was pregnant with her first daughter, Ellis, her brand’s namesake, she ventured beyond the byline to dive into beauty entrepreneurship.
At the outset, Sephora didn’t crack Shapiro’s list of dream retailers for Ellis Brooklyn. She pursued department stores such as Nordstrom and Barneys New York. Nordstrom.com and Net-a-Porter.com quickly brought in the brand’s products, and Shen Beauty in Brooklyn introduced them at its store. Within a year, however, Sephora became a key target. “I think that every single brand can only look at Sephora with respect and think, ‘Wow,’” says Shapiro. “Sephora is such truly a retailer of now. So many brands and companies out there say they’re omnichannel, but I think Sephora truly is. Your brand expression online is seamless with what’s going on in the stores. It’s one universe.”
“The buyer looked at our line, which at that point was quite small, and she said, ‘Look, I’m going to be honest with you, you’re not ready.’ She gave me good, valid reasons, and she explained it to me very clearly, and I still thought, ‘Oh man, I wish I had these doors.’ I walked away from that initially thinking I had missed out, that I didn’t negotiate hard enough.”
Beauty industry friend Laura Slatkin, founder of Nest Fragrances, connected Shapiro to Sephora. Shapiro describes her experience with the retailer as akin to getting an MBA. “If you work with Sephora and they’re your true partner, it’s a fascinating enterprise. My first meeting with them looked like a consultation. It was like paying the best consulting agency you’ve ever had to evaluate your brand,” she says. “They gave me feedback on everything from the thickness of my font to my logo to where Ellis Brooklyn should be written. It was amazing, and that was just my first call with them. I thought that call was going to be 15 minutes long. It turned out to be an hour.”
Following a year of Ellis Brooklyn putting up good numbers on Sephora’s website, the retailer tested three of its eau de parfums in 60 doors for three months. During the test, Shapiro says, “I learned all about things like fixtures and endcaps, and what brands get to do what and what you can negotiate or push for.” The invitation for Ellis Brooklyn’s 120-door break came next.
Shapiro was thrilled, of course, but the offer meant Ellis Brooklyn had to scale up significantly. She’s raised $500,000 from six investors specifically to support the brand’s Sephora rollout. Prior to the investment, Shapiro bootstrapped Ellis Brooklyn after shelling out $20,000 of her own money to get it off the ground.
Ellis Brooklyn’s investors, including Tina Bou-Saba, are independent. Shapiro intentionally steered clear of venture capital. “Even though our brand has 180% year-over-year growth, when I started meeting with the VCs, it felt like, if I took their money, they would have expected me to put the gas pedal all the way down to the floor,” she says. “I think that, when a brand is driven to take that VC money, they should be at a position where they’re strong enough to take on that kind of speed, and I don’t think for us being just three years old—I think we were two-and-a-half when I was raising the money—that’s the right choice.”
“Even though our brand has 180% year-over-year growth, when I started meeting with the VCs, it felt like, if I took their money, they would have expected me to put the gas pedal all the way down to the floor. I think that, when a brand is driven to take that VC money, they should be at a position where they’re strong enough to take on that kind of speed.”
Outside of its independent investors, Ellis Brooklyn secured creative development firm Boom LLC as a strategic partner. “They’re not manufacturers, but [they know the space],” she says. “They have the on-staff packaging engineer. They have somebody in product development to help support me on technical things. I’m still the creative, but sometimes you need somebody really technical in there.” Without Boom, Shapiro isn’t sure if she would have ponied up the cash to hire someone with as much experience in that area. She says, “As a small brand, no matter how fast you’re growing, it’s hard to go hire that because you probably need a gazillion other positions filled.”
Ellis Brooklyn is sorting through the rest of the retail landscape while it’s spreading at Sephora. The brand sells at American clean beauty retailer Credo and Australian chain Mecca, and is exiting Nordstrom.com. “We did not sell well at Nordstrom,” reveals Shapiro. “It was a business mistake, not because of Nordstrom, but because we launched there when the brand was not even a year old, and we just did not know how to support somebody that big.”
Shapiro views less conventional retailers as opportunities. “I am very open from a retail perspective because I think retail is changing, right? You go into a mall, no one’s there. You go into some of these bigger flagship stores, no one’s there. So, where are people going?” she says. Ellis Brooklyn has been selling giftable items like fragrance sets at makeup studio Blushington. “I love the idea of Blushington being an experience, and Ellis Brooklyn actually sells really well there,” says Shapiro.
Additional international distribution is on the horizon for the brand, too. “I just want to see what’s out there because the truth is that perfume is a very international business, especially in markets where people really use a lot of perfume like Europe, the Middle East and Russia,” says Shapiro. “We’re curious about those other markets and want see where that goes.”
At the moment, though, Shapiro is content to plant herself by Ellis Brooklyn’s products at Sephora’s Columbus Circle store in New York City. “It’s my favorite location,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to be standing there, but, in New York, there’s so much foot traffic, so I definitely hang out, listen and ask questions of the staff.”
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