Jean Godfrey-June has spent more than three decades writing about beauty, including at Vogue, Glamour, ELLE, Lucky, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and, most recently, as Executive Beauty Director at goop. Today she writes Godfrey’s Guide, her Substack about beauty and everything that inevitably surrounds it—style, aging, wellness, travel, food, culture, and life.
Jean has tested an extraordinary number of products and watched the beauty industry change from magazines and department stores to e-commerce, social media, affiliate commerce, and an almost overwhelming amount of choice.
We talk about her career, from writing about the very early days of Bobbi Brown to helping launch Lucky and later joining goop as it was building its beauty business. We get into what makes Jean notice a product after decades of seeing almost everything, why names and packaging matter so much, and why some beautiful products simply never sell.
We also talk about how much easier it has become to make and launch a beauty product—and how much harder it has become to get anyone’s attention. Jean talks about the danger of trying to make something for everyone, moving on from products too quickly, listening too closely to retailers, and why founders who stay deeply involved in the details tend to build better brands.
And we get into trust: what happens when editorial and commerce become intertwined, why Jean only writes about products she actually likes, and whether expertise and real human judgment become more valuable as there is more and more content, product, and noise.
In this episode, we discuss:
* Jean’s career advice
* What makes a beauty product get noticed
* Why names and packaging matter
* Products editors love that consumers don’t necessarily buy
* Building for a specific person rather than “everyone”
* Why founders should resist the pressure to constantly launch something new
* Editorial trust, affiliate commerce, and recommendations
* Scale, margins, and building a smaller, very good beauty business
* Why founder vision matters more than ever
Listen to Jean Godfrey-June on Start to Scale From The Beauty Center at FIT.
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