Brown Girl Jane, which launched in 2020 as a CBD skincare and sexual wellness brand offering tinctures, serums, candles and more, has decided to focus on clean fragrance.
“Having been a lifestyle business that was across category, there were some amazing things about that, but it also presented some unique challenges in terms of niche storytelling, building and scaling,” explains Malaika Jones, who founded Brown Girl Jane with her sister Nia and media personality Tia Beauchamp. She adds, “It’s been fun to reimagine the ways that fragrance can be used and the solutions that fragrance can provide.”
Brown Girl Jane partnered with fragrance specialist Firmenich to create two collections of Brown Girl Jane fragrances intended to trigger neurotransmitters that affect moods and feelings. Released in November 2021, the first collection has a trio of scents—Casablanca, Lamu and Bahia—inspired by wanderlust. The Beacon Award-winning fragrances are priced at $62 for 30-ml. bottles.
Brown Girl Jane’s bestselling scent so far, Casablanca, features notes of marshmallow, cardamon and incense, and is also available in a 50-ml. bottle for $102. The bottle is designed to fit in customers’ palms and be easy to throw in a pocketbook.
Released last month, the second collection contains the fragrances Dawn, Dusk and Dare. They’re available in 50-ml. bottles for $102. The scents are meant to take customers through every part of their day, from sun up to sun down. Dawn boasts “energizing and vibrancy properties” from Madagascar bourbon and orchids, according to Jones, while Dusk, comprised of sandalwood and creamy milk, has calming properties.
Jones says Brown Girl Jane’s fragrances are informed by “25 years of clinicals that tie neuroactivity to emotion.” Speaking of Dusk specifically, she continues, “We thought it was really interesting to think about formulating fragrance specifically for rest and sleep. As a company that is always rooted in wellness and knows how hard it is for superwomen to just fall asleep because our brains just don’t turn off, we wanted to create a beautiful fragrance that instantly relaxes you and lets you drift off.”
While it’s shifted its focus to fragrance, Brown Girl Jane still sells tinctures online for now. Jones calls the CBD drops and gelées “limited edition,” and they won’t be restocked after the current supply is snapped up. Along with them and its fragrances, Brown Girl Jane has candles available.
The brand saw success prior to branching into fragrance. It surpassed $2 million in 2021 sales and became profitable beginning in 2020. It expects to be profitable this year. Brown Girl Jane is in the process of fundraising for a round that will be led by the investment firm Fearless Fund. It hopes to raise $2 million to support what Jones describes as an explosive interest in scent.
Referring to Brown Girl Jane’s transition to fragrance, Jones says, “Having already been a fast-growing business, it took us to a different level in terms of scale.” Market research firm Circana pegs prestige fragrance sales growth at 11% last year. The prestige beauty segment as a whole was up 15% last year to $27.1 billion.
Brown Girl Jane has been received warmly by retailers. It’s stocked by Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. The brand is a member of the current cohort of the Sephora Accelerate program. Sephora Accelerate brands of late have gone on to enter the retailer. Brown Girl Jane’s move away from CBD has enabled it to broaden retail distribution.
Jones says, “CBD is an ingredient that sometimes posed a problem because of everything from merchant processing to the gray areas around regulatory issues, so fragrance not only was able to bypass that, but I think because of the success of the collections, it opened even more doors.”
The publication Glossy recently reported on data from Circana revealing that the distribution of Black-founded fragrance brands rose over 9% in unit sales across mass-market beauty retailers from 2021 to 2022, which was three times the overall fragrance rate in the same time period. Brown Girl Jane’s sales are evenly split between retail and direct-to-consumer distribution.
Jones says, “Retailers are super excited about fragrance. It is a growing category I think even more quickly than a lot of people expected, and so they’re also hungry for niche brands and new stories and new ways of approaching that market. It’s exciting to be at the forefront of that.”
At retail and otherwise, Brown Girl Jane is a big fan of in-person efforts. It’s hosted fireside chats in collaboration with Firmenich, panels at the conference South by Southwest, intimate dinners and a homecoming activation at the brand’s annual Black Beauty and Wellness Summit held at Spelman College. Other marketing efforts include email, social media, strategic gifting and word of mouth. The brand recently started devoting a small amount of money to paid digital marketing.
Jones says, “We’ve always known that you cannot seriously address wellness in communities of color without incorporating community, and it was vital for us to get out and allow our tribe to experience the fragrances firsthand and in a multisensory way and learn in real time how they may experience a category in a way that they’ve never thought about it before.”
Jones is enthusiastic about the role Brown Girl Jane can play in evolving the fragrance category. “Fragrance is one of the areas that has been dominated by a few very old, traditional houses and it’s exciting to be able to look at the category with fresh eyes and with our cultural relevance and nuance,” she says. “It feels like such a pivotal and exciting point in the fragrance market, quite frankly, and one that is very ripe for being disrupted and just more diverse, more reflective, but also even more useful in everyone’s day-to-day life.”
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