We spent 30 minutes with Jess Hunt, here's what we yapped about
I’m walking into a London hotel lobby for a meeting and I’m anxious. Anyone au fait with chic and intimidating central London hotels knows how dimly lit they can be, so I’m anxious that I’m not going to be able to find who I'm meeting; I squint as my eyes adjust to the moody lighting. I'm looking particularly uncool considering I'm about to chat to one of the coolest woman in beauty right now. As I turn left, I catch a glance of tumbling blonde hair and a face that is one of the most recognisable in the industry – Jess Hunt.
I’m here to discuss the newest launches from her brand Refy, which stormed the industry just four years ago. However, we spent the first five minutes simply yapping. About work and life and beauty (which intersects work and life for both of us), it’s honestly like we’re having a little catch-up.
But I’ve never met Jess before, I know her brand, her name and face so well but what’s she’s like? Not the foggiest. She never seems to smile in her content, so I assume she’s extremely serious and maybe not super warm. I should know better than to judge a person by their Instagram profile by now, but I’m human. While Jess is every bit as beautiful as she looks online, the warmth of her personally IRL reaches far beyond your lunchtime scroll.
Started with grandma's makeup bag
Jess’s route into beauty is a similar story to many of us (inc Hailey Bieber btw). “I just remember my grandma always had this makeup bag and she always smelled like powder. You know that powder smell?” I nod. It’s that nostalgic talc-meets-Ponds cold cream smell that defined our grandparents' generations. “Essentially, she kind of taught me everything I knew. But it was more like a little lipstick and that kind of thing, a little bit of powder.”
Fashion took over, and while she loved makeup it just remained a hobby. “Makeup was just more something that I enjoyed doing, but I knew it wasn't that great at it. It was fun to me.” Fast forward to meeting Jenna, founder of the brand Shrine on a photoshoot. While they had met through industry mutuals and events they didn’t know each other, little did they know they were about to become co-founders.
Soon, the duo were dissecting Jess' brows, natch.“She was like, “What are you doing here? What is this process?” Jess says, admitting that her brow creation process was quite extreme. “I explained every element of it to her. We were just laughing about it. And then that day on the shoot, we had lunch together, and we're talking about the brow thing again. She was like, “I just can't believe that's how you do it.” I’d get asked on Instagram and things, and I felt like, “How can I give this crazy answer? Wouldn't it be cool if we created this brow product that had all these elements in one?”
And that’s how Brow Sculpt was born. But building up the range was a lot more complex than Jess realised. “I think I was just so naïve,” she admits. “I was like, “Yeah, let's create a brand, woo!” she laughs. "And then we went straight to the lab and started working on it. Honestly, it took two years before we even got the final samples. We have people all over now, which is amazing, so we're very fortunate that we have access to incredible labs.
“I feel like as the brand has grown, it's only just meant more labs want to work with you and believe in you as well, which is so great. We actually have them in China and Korea now, which is great. We have them in Europe, each lab specialises in different things.”
When she says this, I understand just how tuned into the industry she is. As a beauty director, I have gotten to see the best and worst of brands. I’ve seen brands that grow their own produce for formulations and brands that use white labelling companies and simply pick a ready-made beauty product and stick their branding on. Any beauty editor will tell you that the best brands always go far and wind to source and create for their products. They understand that the best base makeup is formulated in Italy and that South Korea are at the cutting edge of ingredients. So, when Jess mentions this, my eyes light up. To be honest, when you try the Refy range, you can tell that innovation is at the heart of what they do combined with the simple, aesthetically pleasing branding is a winning combo.
Before the brand’s first launch, the duo had to overhaul the packaging. “It was pink and had my face on it. It was so ugly, I don’t know what we were thinking,” she laughs. It’s a far cry from what the branding is now, which Jess believes is a part of its staying power. “I think it would have done well because the product’s great. I think it would have gone like a flash in the pan. I don't think it would have any legacy or any other products that came after it. So, we really just stripped it back and started again, thankfully.”
Community is everything
They may have started with Brow Sculpt, but the brand now has a 40-product line-up including tools and accessories and a loyal army of fans that support it. The Refy team recently repaid their communities’ support with a trip that flipped the switch on beauty events. While they aren’t the first brand to do a community trip, an influencer-founded brand to do one on the scale they did? Unheard of. “We have really amazing communication with the community via our broadcast channel now, which is invaluable,” she says. “So, we put in there, “Did you guys want to come away?” And everyone said yes, so we popped a little application form up where they could fill in where they saw the brand, and what they thought of the brand. Essentially, I just wanted to take people away who truly love REFY and want to be part of it. We then selected eight people from those applications.”
Eight out of thousands of hopefuls feels like a golden ticket. “We were like, ‘Oh, is it unfair because we've only taken a few people away?’ But we knew we were going to do more, so we were trying to involve [the broadcast channel] in the conversations too. And they were all so excited and wanted to see more. It felt really good. So, we want to do more of that going forward, for sure. I think I'm not too sure what it looks like just yet, but we have some ideas.”
Social media is a huge part of the brand’s success, but I do wonder how much Jess likes to lean into the ‘influencer’ angle or being referred to as a TikTok brand. “I think social media is such a powerful tool to be able to get something out there and show it for real. Especially TikTok, you can't hide results,” she tells me, “you can’t apply it off camera and then show it – people just want one take and to see it done.”
“I think having the background that I do have, it's really helped in terms of the fact I already have relationships with a lot of the influencers who have wanted to support me, especially in the beginning. But now, some influencers use the products that we've sent to them, and I don’t even think they know who I am, in the best way.”
But while the influencer scene helped the brand build on social, it’s the everyday customer that continues to sustain its presence on your feed. “There was this one video that jumps to mind in particular,” says Jess. “She had 200 followers on TikTok and she's applying our mascara. It was the most silly video but her lashes looked insane. She didn’t say the product, and didn’t put in the name of the brand. But now it’s at 53 million views and counting – yeah, you couldn’t even make it up. She’s now a TikTok phenomenon.”
We both start laughing. “People were in the comments like, ‘Stop gatekeeping, what’s the brand?!!’ I’m so grateful to her.”
It’s feedback from the community (and their buying power) that influences the brand’s decisions from marketing to launches. And so we turn the their latest drop, which hit shelves today (10th of September), Blur Liner.
“It’s all in the spirit of things being easy,” she says as we swatch the shades on the back of our hands. They aren’t a traditional lip liner shape; they're thicker and without a precise point, “It's just a really beautiful, smooth, buttery formula you can build but it also shears out really nicely.” It’s in line with the ethos of the brand that Jess says has seeped into her every day. “REFY’s whole mission is to simplify beauty,” she says.
“I used to think makeup was a much bigger thing and a scarier thing before I had a brand. I'm not a makeup artist, so I can't create that look, or I can't wear a bright lip, it's not something I can do. And I think this has probably like – bit cringe, but – empowered me a bit more to be like, ‘Yes I can.’ And it doesn’t have to be scary or hard.”
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