Maekaeda Gibbons is the founder of Brown Sugar Babe, a fragrance brand that is making waves in the beauty world, with a projected $10 million in sales for 2024. Prior to starting Brown Sugar Babe, Gibbons worked as a loan officer at Bank of America.
She launched her fragrance brand in 2018 as what she calls a “selfish project.” “When I first started, I only wanted to create fragrances that I was head over heels in love with. I hoped that our customers would yield to my nose and my nose only,” she told Essence.
“Listening to the fragrance community has been the best decision I’ve made,” she admitted. “Including our customers and followers in some of our big decisions has paid off in a major way.”
In 2023, while the world was recovering from the pandemic, Gibbons and her team were working hard to build their brand and they invested heavily in R&D to make a name for themselves in the fragrance space.
“In 2023, we spent a lot of time, effort, and resources on improving the quality of our offerings,” Gibbons said. That helped the brand to become widely successful in 2024.
Although Gibbons’ brand became a hit through social media, she also didn’t forget to build “authentic connections” with customers and industry influencers.
“Collaborating with beauty and fragrance influencers like Kayla Greaves and Roxy has proved to be one of the best decisions we have made as a part of our marketing strategy,” she said.
Today, Brown Sugar Babe products sell out faster than concert tickets, with fans of her product setting alarms for restock notifications, the report by Essence noted. Despite her success, the black entrepreneur said she will continue to work hard to achieve further growth.
“I am very excited to announce we are going to be making a big splash in the home fragrance space during the holiday season,” she revealed. “We are launching a line of home diffusers and giant luxury candles.”
Despite Black women spending $7.4 billion on cosmetic products every year, Black beauty brands only represent 2.5% of the market, research shows.
Indeed, the journey to building a multi-million dollar brand was not smooth sailing for Gibbons. She faced several challenges, particularly in funding the company’s growth.
“Brown Sugar Babe started off as a hobby that I financed with my loan officer salary,” she said. “As the demand grew, it required so much more than I was prepared for.”
But education and mentorship helped. “One of the first and best investments I made was paying to learn what was needed to scale in the form of consultants and mentorships,” said Gibbons.
Even though Brown Sugar Babe started largely due to a need for self-care, the name of the company comes from Gibbon’s love of a certain genre of music, she told PopSugar. “When naming the company, I started remembering some of the happiest times that I had as a teenager and it was in high school when ‘Brown Sugar’ by D’Angelo was popular,” she said.
“For me, fragrance and music have always gone hand in hand, likely because they both can evoke memories, but I leaned heavily on my love of music when first starting Brown Sugar Babe.”
