Brooke Shields on Hair Care Line, Community and Entrepreneurship

For Brooke Shields, Commence is more than just a hair care brand. It’s a new beginning with beauty.

At WWD’s annual Beauty Inc CEO Summit in Miami, Shields sat down with Beauty Inc editor in chief Jenny B. Fine to discuss her relationship with beauty, starting Commence, building a community and the similarities between entrepreneurship and the entertainment industry.

“My relationship with beauty was always either work related or vanity,” she said. “It’s only been in this era of my life that I started to realize that it feels like self care and a privilege.” 

It turns out her customers and followers felt the same way. Prior to building Commence, a hair care line formulated for women 40-plus, Shields started Beginning Is Now, a content platform for that same age group, which is being rebranded to Commence, as well. With the platform, Shields has built a community of one million women who are excited to engage with each other and welcome this new stage of life.

“When we started Beginning Is Now, it was a vision to be able to say to women in this age bracket, ‘You can live feeling your best. You can actually live feeling like you’ve done a great job. You’ve done so much, and there’s more for you out there,’ not in an angry way but in a celebratory way,” she said. 

With the platform and its community, Shields learned that many women felt the same way she did. They wanted to celebrate and embrace their age, and they wanted their beauty products to do the same. 

“Women over 40 have already done a lot of things and their lives are so complex. They’ve done so much, and it’s their time. I found myself in that position,” Shields said. “There was so much white space in regards to hair care, specifically for women over 40 but not in the geriatric realm or the medicinal realm.”

According to Shields, the number-one question women had on the platform was around how to care for their hair. While she initially set out to get answers to these questions, she quickly learned that her followers wanted her to actually launch products — enter the Commence line.

“What we did was we decided to really listen to our community,” she said, adding that all future products will be driven by this community feedback. “They inform me as to what they want, and I continue to listen to them.” 

With this in mind, Shields expects Commence to grow beyond hair care, based on her customer’s needs.

With her recently released Netflix rom-com “Mother of the Bride,” it may seem Shields doesn’t have time to also be a beauty entrepreneur, but she would argue otherwise. 

“I’ve spent so much of my life working for other people,” she said, adding that Commence was an opportunity to do something for herself. “This started as an emotional desire to have a conversation that quickly became a real company.”

While the industries may seem totally different, Shields said entrepreneurship and entertainment are actually quite similar.

“There’s so many more similarities than I ever thought. Part of it is, you’re only as strong as the team around you,” she said. “I realized I had to surround myself [with] the experts in the field.” 

Perhaps, similar to an audition, Shields said in both entrepreneurship and entertainment, sometimes you have to hear the word “no,” but that doesn’t mean you accept it — Shields said this was particularly important to remember in the midst of fundraising for Commence. 

“It was eye opening to me because you get so many more ‘nos’ than you do get ‘yeses’ and that’s very similar to entertainment,” she said.

However, for Shields, the business side of things feels a little less personal.

“You audition for something and you don’t get it, it’s a personal affront, but this is business,” she said. “You have to have trust but you also have to have perseverance…trust in the team that you’ve placed around you, commitment to a vision that you know is the right vision.”

It’s this vision, her deep connection with her Commence community and embracing this era of her life that will lead Shields and the brand forward.

“I’ve given my power and what I am to so many different people over the years and this period of time for me feels like a celebration of myself and what I’ve accomplished,” she said. “Spending time appreciating what I have and what I am individually is a huge gift, and I want other women to feel that way. I don’t want to feel guilty for wanting to look beautiful. I used to need to look beautiful for other people. Now, I want to look my best but for me.”