That was back in 2019, when the world-famous actress was on the cover of Entrepreneur, and about to launch her first company. She was an accidental entrepreneur: After becoming a parent, she started worrying about the safety of the products her kids used, and that led her to wonder about the products she used. She asked fine fragrance companies to reveal their ingredients publicly; when they said no, she spent 20 years figuring out how to build a company that would. The result was Henry Rose, a fine fragrance brand that’s transparent about its ingredients, and the only one to have those ingredients certified by two leading environmental groups. Back then, Pfeiffer also applied that transparency to herself and shared how hard the journey had been.
Now, nearly three years after launch, Henry Rose has doubled its revenue annually, expanded into new categories like body cream, bar soap, and candles, and is forming retail partnerships (having launched purely as direct-to-consumer). Pfeiffer also reconnected with Entrepreneur to share insights on adapting to business’s never-ending demands
So you saw what people were doing organically, and then turned it into a marketing campaign?
Yeah. We invited people to play and experiment with these fragrances. Because the other thing we’d realized is, especially with younger millennials, they approach fragrance in a very different way than people in my generation or my mother’s generation. They look at it as an accessory to their wardrobe; they don’t necessarily fall in love with one fragrance and then wear it for 30 years. They like to have a variety of them for their given mood.
This seems like another answer to my question about how your relationship with the brand has evolved. Once you put it out there, you realized it was no longer yours. Now it was theirs.
Its creation. You know, I’m a painter. So when you start a painting, you have an idea of what you’re going to paint. And you draw your picture and then you mix your paints and think, I want it to be this. And then at a certain point, it starts to tell you what you need to do. That’s my favorite part of painting. It’s also the part that’s the hardest for me to get into, because I’m a little bit controlling. But it’s the same process.