Tabitha Brown Knows Her Assignment
Updated: 1 day ago
From Donna’s Recipe at Ulta Beauty to the multimillion-dollar fragrance business she built with her husband, Tabitha Brown has turned authenticity into an operating principle. As she prepares for her next chapter, she is thinking just as carefully about what deserves her name as she is about what comes next.
By Danika Berry
“I’m embarrassed to show people how my closet look with perfume everywhere,” Tabitha Brown says, laughing.
Within minutes of sitting down with Black Beauty Founders, we are talking fragrance like old girlfriends, swapping notes on the scents we love, the bottles we collect and the very real possibility that there may be such a thing as too much perfume. With Brown, the conversation moves easily that way. One minute we are laughing about her fragrance obsession; the next, she is explaining customer acquisition, margins, product testing and why a founder should know exactly where her customer shops before chasing a major retailer.
That ease is part of Brown’s appeal. Millions of people know the Emmy Award-winning host, actress and entrepreneur for the warmth and humor that can make a social media video feel like a conversation across the kitchen table. What becomes clearer when talking business with her is how much discipline sits underneath it.
Brown knows her customer. She studies how they spend. She tests what she sells. And as her businesses have grown, she has become increasingly particular about which opportunities deserve her name.
When Brown joined Black Beauty Founders from her home in Los Angeles, she was still recovering from a recent medical procedure and had spent much of the previous six weeks away from her usual public schedule. For someone whose relationship with her audience has been built in large part through consistency and presence, the time away has required a different kind of discipline.
Brown sees the pause as part of the work.
“I understand who I am and who God has purposed me to be,” she says. “When you have been chosen for an assignment, as I have, I know my assignment very clearly.”
That sense of purpose runs through nearly everything Brown has built, from Donna’s Recipe, the vegan hair-care company she cofounded with Gina Woods, to the multimillion-dollar fragrance business she created with her husband, Chance Brown. The categories may be different, but the filter remains remarkably consistent: Does it feel like her? Does it serve the people who trust her? And does the business make sense behind the story?
Her family remains her refuge. Her husband, her children, Choyce and Queston, her father and her sister are the people she describes as safe spaces, concerned with her well-being rather than what she can produce. Faith serves a different purpose.
“There’s no place like just being in that room, me and God, and allowing Him to deposit in me what I know He wants from me,” she says.
Brown talks about business with much of the same language she uses to talk about life: alignment, intuition, trust and discernment. There have been opportunities that looked right on paper and still did not feel right to her, and experience has taught her to pay attention to that distinction.
THE INSIDER EDITThe Business Behind Beauty, Straight to Your Inbox.The cover stories, launches and founder moves shaping Black beauty, before everyone else. |
How Donna’s Recipe Began
For all the polish that now surrounds the Tabitha Brown brand, Donna’s Recipe began with a problem that was deeply personal. As Brown grew out her natural hair in 2018, she noticed thinning in the back after an injury left her sleeping on her back for an extended period. Newly vegan and paying closer attention to ingredients, she became uncomfortable using products whose labels she could not easily understand.
She began experimenting with oils herself while searching for a solution that aligned with the way she wanted to live. Then Gina Woods called and invited her to lunch with an idea for a hair oil. The timing still feels significant to Brown. Their shared vision became Donna’s Recipe, beginning with hair oil and biotin gummies before expanding into the broader hair-care assortment now sold through Ulta Beauty.
The name Donna came before the company. Brown had jokingly named her growing afro during one of her cooking lives after noticing that it was standing straight up on top. Her audience embraced the character, but what began as a running joke eventually became something commercially powerful: Donna gave the business an identity already connected to Brown before a product ever reached a shelf.
That distinction matters.
Brown has little interest in attaching her name to products disconnected from the way she actually lives. Vegan and cruelty-free are non-negotiable, but her standard extends beyond formulation. The product has to make sense coming from her, and its price has to make sense for the people who helped build her community.
“I know my fan base. I know my customer,” she says. “I want them to be able to support me without hurting themselves.”
That customer awareness influences the economics of product development. When a raw material pushes costs too high, Brown says the team may search for another supplier. In other cases, they are willing to accept a thinner margin rather than compromise the formula or move beyond the price their customer is comfortable paying.
Testing Before She Scales
Quality, however, is not negotiable.
Brown spent five years working in contract manufacturing before her entertainment career took off, an experience that made her particularly attentive to the difference between laboratory results and how a product performs on the consumer it was actually created to serve. She still tests products herself, often for months.
Her reasoning is practical. Standard laboratory testing can establish safety and stability, but Brown is primarily building products for Black hair, and she does not assume every traditional testing benchmark tells the complete story of how a product will perform for her customer.
An early Donna’s Recipe conditioner illustrates the point. The reports came back well. Brown’s hair told her otherwise.
“Donna is thick, and she soaks up conditioner,” Brown says.
The formula went back for additional moisture.
That attention to performance helped lead to the Sweet Potato Pie collection, an idea born from a question every crowded beauty category eventually forces a founder to answer: What makes this unmistakably ours?
Brown’s solution was to move closer to what people already associated with her.
“Everybody knows me for food,” she says. “So I told Gina, ‘We can do desserts for hair.’”
The concept allowed Donna’s Recipe to address the moisture needs of textured hair while building a product world immediately recognizable as Tabitha Brown. It also demonstrates something larger about the way she approaches entrepreneurship. She is less interested in entering a category simply because there is room to sell than in finding a way to enter that feels specific enough to belong to her.
“Do I want to compete, or do I want to compete in a way that is so authentic to me that there’s really nobody else in the category?” she says.
It is an unusually useful question in an industry where founders are often encouraged to identify white space before they have fully identified themselves.
SHOP HER STORY Dessert for Your HairThe Sweet Potato Pie Collection from Donna’s Recipe: shampoo, conditioner, leave-in, hair butter and hair cream, all vegan and made for moisture-loving textured hair. |
Why Founders Should Know Their Customer Before Retail
Brown’s approach to retail is similarly pragmatic.
For many emerging beauty founders, major retail placement remains one of the industry’s most visible markers of success. Brown understands the appeal. She also believes founders can mistake distribution for readiness.
Before entering major retail, she prefers to have one to two years of direct-to-consumer history. That period gives a founder something more valuable than simply proving demand. It creates data.
Brown studies what shoppers buy at full price, what requires promotion, how shipping incentives affect purchasing behavior and where orders originate geographically. Those patterns can tell a founder not only what a customer wants but where that customer may be most likely to shop.
Her question for founders pursuing major distribution is simple: How do you know your customer even shops at that store?
The answer should come before the buyer meeting.
Once Donna’s Recipe entered Ulta Beauty, Brown saw the value of having both sets of information in the room: the retailer’s understanding of its shopper and the brand’s understanding of its own customer.
When the company was developing its Whipped Vanilla Cream collection, for example, the original packaging paired white bottles with brown lettering. Ulta recommended black type based on how the product would read on shelf and what its team had observed from comparable packaging. Brown and Woods considered the recommendation alongside their own brand identity and made the adjustment.
Listening to the retailer does not mean relinquishing control. Brown believes founders should arrive with enough knowledge of their own business to evaluate advice rather than automatically accept it simply because it came from a major retailer.
Her experience has also given her a more realistic view of what happens after the celebratory retail announcement. Inventory, manufacturing capacity, working capital, forecasting, placement and marketing can become far more consequential than getting through the door in the first place.
“Some people think that’s the end-all, be-all,” Brown says of major retail. “But sometimes it might be your end-all, be-all because you went in too quick.”
It is a topic she returns to with the perspective of someone who has experienced beauty from multiple sides: employee, manufacturer, founder, celebrity, direct seller and national retail partner.
Building Fridays with Tab & Chance
Brown has carried many of those same lessons into Fridays with Tab & Chance, the fragrance business she created with her husband.
Which brings us back to that perfume-filled closet.
Brown grew up around her mother’s fragrances and describes herself as a longtime perfume obsessive. Building a fragrance company, however, introduced a different business challenge: how do you convince someone to purchase something online that they cannot smell?
Rather than rush immediately into traditional fragrance retail, Brown and Chance began by selling directly to their community. Samples gave customers a lower-risk way to experience the scents. Travel sizes followed, creating another entry point before customers committed to larger bottles. Brown also used HSN as both a selling platform and an opportunity to understand how consumers outside her immediate digital audience responded to fragrance through storytelling alone.
SHOP HER STORY Her Business. His Business. Their Business.Fridays with Tab & Chance: her vegan eau de parfum with bergamot, cocoa and vanilla, his with spicy citrus and warm musk. Wear them alone, or wear them together. |
“You gotta be a really good storyteller,” she says.
Brown has one considerable advantage in that department: herself.
Years before a fragrance company existed, people who met her were already asking what she was wearing. The same dynamic has powered Donna’s Recipe, where Brown’s own hair remains one of the brand’s most visible demonstrations.
“I am a walking billboard,” she says. “My hair is Donna.”
Fridays with Tab & Chance has since grown into a multimillion-dollar business, according to Brown, while giving her another opportunity to study how customers respond to different formats, price points and products before making larger distribution decisions.
The company is now entering another stage of expansion, with new fragrance offerings planned for the holiday season. Brown shared details of those upcoming launches exclusively with Black Beauty Founders, and we will share them in a separate story.
COMING SOON TO BBFSomething Sweet Is Coming for the HolidaysTab and Chance have new body mists on the way for the holidays, and Tabitha gave Black Beauty Founders the first look. Read our exclusive. |
What is particularly striking about Brown’s businesses is how rarely they begin with an abstract market opportunity. They begin with something already present in her life.
Her hair became Donna’s Recipe. Her lifelong affection for perfume became Fridays with Tab & Chance. Even the products within those businesses are filtered through experiences her audience already associates with her, from food to fragrance to the language of family and love.
Yet Brown’s approach should not be mistaken for intuition without infrastructure. As her businesses have grown, she has become increasingly disciplined about the mechanics underneath them. She studies customer behavior, understands price sensitivity, tests products before scaling them and expects the numbers to support the next move.
What she refuses to do is allow those numbers to become more important than alignment.
What She Hopes Her Children Inherit
That same thinking extends to her family.
Brown chose a life in public. She does not assume that choice automatically belongs to her children. Choyce and Queston participate when they want to, and Brown is deliberate about giving them the freedom to decide how much of themselves they want to share.
“If they feel like being in a video or a picture, then that’s when you see them,” she says. “If they don’t want to be involved, then they’re not involved.”
What she hopes they inherit from watching her build has little to do with celebrity.
Her daughter remembers the years before everything changed. Her son was young enough when Brown’s career accelerated that public recognition has been part of much of the life he remembers. Brown wants both of them to understand the work underneath what they see now.
“Whatever your heart’s desire is, God placed it in there,” she says. “And with hard work and dedication, honey, you can have it.”
Tabitha Brown Knows Her Assignment
As Brown prepares to return to a fuller schedule in the new year, with a book tour, film projects, press and new business launches ahead, the connection between the woman and the founder becomes increasingly difficult to separate.
The public knows Tabitha Brown for warmth, faith, encouragement and an ability to make millions of strangers feel as though they have been invited into her kitchen. The entrepreneur underneath that familiar presence is more exacting than the softness might suggest.
She knows her customer. She understands the numbers. She tests before she scales. She listens to partners without surrendering what she knows about her own business. And she has become increasingly comfortable walking away from opportunities that may look impressive but do not feel right.
That confidence did not arrive overnight. It came from building, learning, getting some decisions right and discovering what happens when she ignores the instinct telling her otherwise.
For now, Brown is allowing herself the time to recover before what promises to be another busy chapter. Her audience may wonder when she will fully return, but Brown no longer measures her purpose by constant availability.
She knows what she has been called to build.
Just as importantly, she knows when to stop long enough to hear what comes next.
For Tabitha Brown, that may be the real business of knowing your assignment.
Stylist: J Bolin. Assistant stylist: Tameka Smith. Hair: Shaylin Jones. Makeup: Brandie King.
 | ABOUT THE AUTHORDanika Berry is the founder and CEO of Black Beauty Founders, with more than 20 years of experience in beauty, celebrity and sports public relations. A television producer, she has created and produced unscripted series for OWN, USA Network and more. At Black Beauty Founders, she has written cover stories with GloRilla, Shaina Rainford, Tisha Thompson, Cynthia Bailey, Shontay Lundy, Stormi Steele, Darrell Spencer and more. Her recent press includes Forbes, Inc., Byrdie and Beauty Independent, and her forthcoming book is STOP CREATING THE NO. |
FOLLOW THE STORY
TABITHA BROWN | DONNA’S RECIPE | TAB & CHANCE |
You Might Also Like
QUICK LINKSSHOP THE HAIR CARE ALSO AT SHOP THE FRAGRANCE READ NEXT |
THE INSIDER EDITThe Business Behind Beauty, Straight to Your Inbox.The cover stories, launches and founder moves shaping Black beauty, before everyone else. |
Comments