Glossy Pop Newsletter: Brooke Shields used community insights to build a hair-care line — and it’s proving successful

August 2, 2024 Mary

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Actress Brooke Shields knew she had to gain her customers’ trust before rolling out a beauty brand. “We decided we would only start with a few hero products,” she said of her new brand, Commence, which launched on June 3.

Though some might have expected a Shields-owned brand to start with brows, it instead opted for hair. The brand launched with three products: the $21 2-in-1 Instant Shampoo, the $30 Root Serum and the $26 3-in-1 Leave-In Conditioner.

Before launching the brand, Shields created an online community called Beginning Is Now, where women over 40 could connect and discuss “the changes they were experiencing and fears they were having,” she said. It reached 100,000 Instagram followers before Commence launched and took over the account — it now has 115,000 followers.

Likewise, the Beginning Is Now website redirects to Commence’s e-commerce site. And the Beginning Is Now newsletter has become the Commence newsletter. The Commence team is working to extend recurring virtual meetups to keep the community engaged.

When Beginning Is Now launched in 2021, Shields would occasionally host Zoom calls with members. Eventually, people started to ask, “What are you selling?” she said.

“I started this community just to get to know them, never really to monetize them,” she said. But understanding “their grievances” prompted the brand, she said, adding, “By the time we were getting ready to launch, we had a waitlist of 23,000 people.”

As for why the brand started with hair, Shields said the decision was an organic byproduct of her conversations with her community. “When we did a much deeper dive [into the needs of our community], we found out that one of the biggest problems was hair. The quality of your hair changes, [as do] the density, the thickness and the shine,” she said. “Scalp health becomes the main focus for a lot of women [age 40 and up]. Then there’s hair thinning and graying”

Shields said that, as a result of these conversations, there wasn’t the same amount of “skepticism” there may have been around her launching a brand. “By then, I had done Zooms with them. … We had used every sort of marketing tool we could so that we could, in a positive way, get to know them and take a consensus on the biggest problems they were facing. … The waitlist was because they already trusted us.”

As a member of the demographic Commence seeks to cater to — Shields is 59 — she had strong opinions when it came to the brand’s products. The first matter of business was eliminating the word “dry” from the brand’s language. For example, its dry shampoo is called Instant Shampoo. “Any woman over 40 will tell you the word ‘dry’ needs to be taken out of their book no matter what it’s pertaining to,” Shields said.

Shields also had opinions on the ingredients. “The obvious thing to be different in the marketplace is [to ensure] no benzene with non-aerosol products, because 90% of the dry shampoos I’ve used have all been aerosol. It’s horrible for the environment and horrible for your lungs. … Benzene is poison,” Shields said.

Another goal was to avoid drying out customers’ scalps. The solution of the brand’s head of research and development, Mark Knitowski, was to use quaternized hyaluronic acid, a smaller version of the molecule that could reach the pores on the scalp.

“We have filed for a patent for this first-to-market [quaternized hyaluronic acid] innovation, and it is going through the process to gain the status of [being] patent pending now,” Knitowski said. Other ingredients in the dry shampoo include rice powder to absorb excess oil and alfalfa extract, which contains a peptide that may support hair growth. “With one application, in 32 hours, users demonstrated immediate and short-term sebum-reducing properties while also enhancing scalp hydration,” he said.

“[The consumers] are latching on to that product and saying, ‘Yeah, I could wash my hair less. I could get the volume I want. I could start getting a different type of scalp than I have now, which is more healthy. The same way I treat my face, I’m going to treat my scalp,’” said Karla De Bernardo, COO at Commence.

When the brand’s products launched on June 3, Shields found that sales came in from members of Beginning Is Now as well as from people who had never been a part of the community. Most bought two of the brand’s three products.

It’s worth noting that Shields has 2.1 million followers on Instagram and 939,000 on TikTok, where she recently did the “Apple” dance with her daughter, Grier.

The brand did not do paid advertising at launch, but Shields mentioned the forthcoming products while promoting her Netflix movie “Mother of the Bride,” which was released in May. By late June, the brand tapped influencers including Tennille Murphy (316,000 Instagram followers) to promote its products. By July 15, the Instant Shampoo had sold out — it restocked on July 25.

A successful celebrity-founded beauty brand has a kind of alchemy: a combination of good products, a founder who people like and want to support, a smart team and a strong retail partner. For example, both Fenty or Rare Beauty launched with Sephora. Fenty has since expanded to Ulta Beauty, as well. At under two months old, it’s too soon to speak to how Commence will stack up to the long list of celebrity-founded brands, as well as the ones still launching. To wit: Blake Lively announced her own forthcoming hair-care brand, Blake Brown, earlier this week. Commence is currently exclusively available direct-to-consumer.

Shields has much going for her, including her likability and connection with her fans and followers. “I see it when I walk with her on the streets [in New York City],” De Bernardo said of Shields. “She’s truly authentic. She has a power that most people don’t have because it comes from within her. People trust her and talk to her [about issues including postpartum depression], and she speaks back to them,” she said. Shields published a memoir about her own experience, titled “Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression,” in 2005.

When asked about the brand’s mid-range price point, Shields said it was a non-negotiable. “We always say, I’m ‘People Magazine’ and I’m ‘Vogue’ — I can do high and low,” she said. In the past, Shields has worked with Colgate, True Botanicals and Coppertone sunscreen. She also worked with Ivory soap at 11 months old and Band-Aid at age 5, to mention just some of her childhood portfolio.

For now, Commence is focused on building trust in hair care. “We [can’t] give them 12 SKUs and expect people to abandon everything they’ve been using to just hop on board when we haven’t earned their trust yet,” Shields said. Still, more products are coming: The brand’s next launches will arrive in another batch of three. It started with treatments, but “routine” products, which are likely to include shampoo and conditioner, will soon follow.

As for her famous arches, brow products will eventually be a part of the equation, too. Shields knows that hers are iconic, of course, and you can’t leave an opportunity like that just sitting on the table.