The useful thing about Ben Jones’s career is how little it respects the neat borders of an industry. He started in video games, moved into direct commerce, and eventually became the CEO and co-founder of a cosmetics company built with Lady Gaga. On paper, it reads like three careers stitched together. In practice, each chapter taught the same job: find the audience, make the product legible, and keep learning after launch day has spent all its confetti.
Jones moved to Manhattan Beach in 1995 to recruit for a video game company. He found that he was good at recruiting, sales, and connecting people to opportunities. In 2001 he joined JAMDAT Mobile, one of the early mobile-game businesses, where startup life began to exert its pull. Later came Zynga, where he oversaw global publishing, followed by The Honest Company, where his brief included the direct-to-consumer business and customer acquisition.
A game publisher learns that a launch is a beginning disguised as a finale. A digital operator learns that a customer click is only a clue. Those instincts would become unusually relevant in beauty, a category where color has to travel through screens, stores, skin tones, lighting, expectation, and taste before it can become a sale.
The glamorous speed trap
The founding team recruited Jones by the end of 2017. Haus Laboratories emerged with a clear pairing: Gaga’s creative point of view and a CEO schooled in publishing and e-commerce. The company secured venture backing and an exclusive Amazon relationship. When it launched in 2019, it could reach customers across many countries from the start.
That scale was attractive for obvious reasons. Gaga already had a global public. Amazon could meet much of that public where it shopped. Yet prestige makeup asks for something a giant marketplace does not naturally provide: ceremony. Customers want to compare shades, feel textures, talk to someone, and occupy a setting where the product is more than another rectangle beside batteries and dog food.
Jones later described the lessons as numerous. The important one was time. Pushing boundaries in formulation requires testing, iteration, and the dull stretches of work that no launch trailer can accelerate. Celebrity reach did not cancel the ordinary disciplines of a startup. It merely made every assumption visible sooner.
Many companies respond to a difficult first chapter with cosmetic change in the other sense of the word: a new box, a warmer typeface, a campaign with suspiciously expensive fog. Haus Labs chose structural change. The brand name shifted. The visual system changed. The assortment was rebuilt. Formulas were rethought around high pigment and skincare-infused ingredients. Amazon gave way to Sephora. The company did not abandon its purpose around artistry and self-expression. It changed how that purpose met a customer.
A second launch with receipts
The June 2022 relaunch put the brand into Sephora with a new range across color and complexion. The distinction was physical as much as strategic. A customer could encounter the line at a beauty counter, where a foundation shade can be tried instead of imagined. By the end of the planned rollout, the products were headed to roughly 500 Sephora stores in the United States and Canada.
Complexion became a center of gravity. The Triclone Skin Tech Medium Coverage Foundation arrived in 51 shades across six shade families. It developed into the brand’s hero product and collected industry recognition. In the version of Haus Labs that followed the reset, product was expected to hold attention even when its famous co-founder was touring, filming, or otherwise occupied.
Celebrity was still present, of course. Jones has described Gaga as the mind of the brand as well as one of its faces, with deep involvement in creative direction and product. His phrasing is revealing: the team tried to build a brand that could stand alone, with its co-founder as the cherry on top. The metaphor gives the product the larger plate.
It also creates a useful test. Gaga wears Haus Labs for performances, where makeup is asked to survive lights, cameras, movement, and hours. Jones called that the “ultimate benchmark” of performance. The product has to function as merchandise and equipment at once.
The beauty counter becomes software
Jones’s digital background did not disappear when the company moved toward stores. It became more specific. Haus Labs built a Foundation Shade Finder with more than 1.3 million possible answer combinations, then offered discovery sets containing three samples and QR codes for additional guidance. A customer could narrow the field online, try likely matches at home, and use the purchase price structure to move toward a full-size bottle.
This is omnichannel retail without the boardroom perfume. Let the store do what a store does well. Let software sort a broad choice set. Let samples settle arguments between an algorithm and a bathroom mirror. The work is less about making technology visible than making uncertainty smaller.
There is a line from this approach back to games publishing. In both worlds, distribution is only useful when it connects a person to an experience they can understand. Data can tell a team where players stop, where shoppers hesitate, which color families confuse them, and which part of the funnel has become a small bureaucratic republic. The operator’s task is to translate those signals into a better next version.
The comparison has limits, which is precisely why it helps. A game can patch a feature after release. A bottle already sitting on a bathroom shelf cannot download a new formula overnight. Beauty turns iteration into a slower, more material promise. Ingredients must be sourced. Packaging must be made. Shades must behave on more than the small patch of skin used during a hurried test. Jones brought a software-era instinct for feedback into a business where acting on feedback can take seasons. The advantage was not moving instantly. It was knowing what question to investigate next.
Haus Labs retained its emphasis on artistry and self-expression while changing nearly every major operating choice around it.
Global reach looked powerful, but prestige beauty needed touch, trial, advice, and a setting built for discovery.
The relaunch treated testing and formulation as work that could not be compressed merely because the audience was waiting.
The shade finder and samples reduced doubt. Their value was practical, not theatrical.
Pattern recognition, with eyeliner
When asked for advice to founders, Jones has warned against underestimating experience and pattern recognition. It is an unfashionable answer in a culture that enjoys pretending every new company has abolished history. His own career makes the case. JAMDAT taught him the pull of startups. Zynga put him inside global publishing. The Honest Company connected digital acquisition to physical consumer goods. Haus Labs combined those patterns, then supplied a corrective: the old playbook still needs editing when the category changes.
His book choices add a pleasant footnote. He has named Shoe Dog as a personal inspiration and Save the Cat as a professional one. The pairing is almost too tidy: build the company, understand the story. Haus Labs needed both, particularly when its story reached the inconvenient second act where the protagonist must revise a belief.
The rebuilt brand continued outward. After a United Kingdom launch, Haus Labs expanded with Sephora into 12 more European countries in March 2024, bringing its reach at that point to 15 countries worldwide. Jones framed Europe as a critical milestone and emphasized the chance for new customers to see, touch, and feel the products. Three small verbs, each carrying the lesson of the first launch.
By 2025, he was describing a company growing substantially after its overhaul, with the foundation established as a hero product. The more interesting achievement is not that Haus Labs found a comeback. It is that the team turned an imperfect debut into operating knowledge. They allowed customer behavior to edit the original thesis without letting it erase the reason the company existed.
Founders often speak about conviction as if it were a fixed gaze. Jones’s Haus Labs tenure suggests a more practical version. Conviction can hold the destination while changing vehicles, routes, luggage, and the regrettable playlist chosen at departure. A reset is expensive. So is defending a model after the evidence has left the room.
The beauty industry supplied Jones with a new surface, but the craft remained familiar: publish carefully, listen closely, and build another version. Makeup may promise transformation in a bottle. Building the company required the less photogenic kind, done in meetings, laboratories, store plans, shade data, and the admission that speed had been flattering itself.