Wellness Brand Brown Girl Jane Bottles 25 Years of Neuroscientific Research to Offer Mood-boosting Fragrances
Wellness brand Brown Girl Jane has launched its first fragrance line, “Wanderlust,” offering three scents developed for mood-boosting benefits.
“We’ve always known that wellness comes in so many different forms, and the goal of our brand was always to challenge the status quo of the whole wellness industry and what it looked like for far too long, but also just to provide really innovative and disruptive solutions in forms that we had never seen before and felt before,” said Brown Girl Jane chief executive officer Malaika Jones, who launched the brand in January 2020 with sister Nia Jones and Tai Beauchamp.
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“With fragrance, we were just so excited because we began digging and learned that 75 percent of our emotions on a daily basis are really triggered by scent,” Jones continued. “And with the technology that we were able to harness — we use 25 years of clinical studies around neuroscientific links between scent and mood — we thought it would just be so amazing to be able to present this fragrance technology that was really about how you feel. Fragrance for so long has been about how it makes other people around you feel.”
The scents, made with perfumer Nadiyah Bradshaw-Spencer, in partnership with fragrance house Firmenich, are available now direct-to-consumer and exclusively at Nordstrom.
“They’ve been our first large retailer and wonderful partner,” Jones said of Nordstrom. “And it’s been a collaborative process from start, from Day One. And so, we knew that there was an opportunity to leverage the relationship on both sides, to continue to reach broader audiences. We’re excited to be one of their premier brands now in the fragrance category.”
Priced at $62 each, “Lamu” was conceived to evoke “joy” with notes that include coastal sage, salty plumeria and coconut water (“a beach vacation in a bottle,” said Jones); “Bahia” was made for “peacefulness” with orange flower essence, jasmine petals and cedarwood; and “Casablanca” looks to capture “love” with cardamom, vanilla orchid and amber.
“We designed them with notes that complement one another, so really the combinations are endless in terms of how you can play with them,” said Jones.
Along with providing a multiuse and playful element, the founders also aim to offer an escape amid the pandemic.
“We wanted to capture the element and the feeling of travel, while also paying homage to the Black and brown women around the world who inspire us,” Jones added. “The goal is really for these fragrances to take you on a trip to these locations.”
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Brown Girl Jane — which has disrupted wellness with innovation (from vegan, CBD cubed gummies to wellness drops) and has a message of inclusivity, centered on the needs of Black and brown women — grew 4,000 percent year-over-year following its launch. Industry sources anticipate for the brand to more than triple its revenue in 2022, nearing $6 million in sales.
“Something that when you think about, it’s not surprising, but was initially surprising, is that probably half of our tribe is not of color, so white women and white men,” said Jones, when asked about the Brown Girl Jane consumer. “The needs are still there and so many people see themselves in the brand and the community, regardless of typical demographics. And that means ‘I need to feel better. I want to elevate my mood. I need less stress in my life. I need some sleep solutions,’ all of those sorts of things are universal. And so, the consumer has really been more broad than we could ever imagine.”
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