Honoured on the Forbes 50 Over 50 list in 2024, Brooke Shields, who has worked since she was 11 months old, talked about the most challenging chapter of her career: founding and leading Commence, a hair care brand for women over 40. The interview starts at 42:42 in this Forbes video.
A community before a brand
Commence began during the pandemic as an online community. Shields wanted to know what women over 40 were going through, and kept hearing the same thing: that past a certain age they were reduced to menopause and felt they had lost their value. Marketing, she says, targets either the young woman at the bar or older people, with nothing in between. When those women told her they felt invisible, she answered: “I feel exactly the same.”
What they wanted was solutions, especially for hair that changes with age, from texture to thinning and grey. Shields chose a few “hero” products instead of a long range, such as a plant-based instant shampoo, without aerosol, that contains hyaluronic acid. Having sold other people’s products all her life, she insists on efficacy: being famous does not make her an expert.
“I haven’t asked for your advice”
She invested her own money, then raised outside funds, a process she calls “torture”. Some investors, mostly men, felt the need to tell her what she was doing wrong, ignoring more than 50 years of reinvention. One day she told one of them: “I haven’t asked for your advice, I just asked for your money.” The biggest lesson, she says, is that “this is just business, it’s actually not personal”. Some of those who turned her down have since come back.
She now sees “Brooke Shields” itself as a brand that must be maintained, through acting and writing, because it opens the doors the company needs. But the products must speak for themselves: the brand is not called Brooke.
No single peak
At 21, a journalist asked whether she worried she had already peaked. She felt sorry for him. Her answer today: “I’m going to forever peak.” Hollywood treats age as a disadvantage, she says, but she refuses to see it that way: she now has belief, energy and experience, and she is “not knocked over easily anymore”.