Profile · Founder · Personal Care
Brian Jeong
The self-described maximizer who taught himself an entire industry, then bottled it. CEO and cofounder of Hawthorne.
The self-described maximizer who taught himself an entire industry, then bottled it. CEO and cofounder of Hawthorne.
A man walks into the fragrance business knowing nothing about fragrance. Most people would call that a problem. Brian Jeong called it a research project. In roughly three weeks he ran about 100 interviews across the perfume industry, and at the end of every single one he asked the same question: who else should we be talking to?
Hawthorne sells cologne, skincare, hair care and grooming. But the product men actually buy first is a questionnaire. Answer a set of questions, some of them oddly personal, and Hawthorne returns a kit tuned to your body chemistry and your tastes. The company puts the recommendation accuracy north of 98%.
The questions are not what you would expect. How often do you shampoo. Are you an introvert or an extrovert. Each answer narrows the field. Behind the quiz sits feedback gathered from thousands of consumers, which is the part competitors cannot copy by simply matching a scent note. Jeong's bet was that personalization, done with real data, would beat the spray-and-pray shelf experience that defined men's grooming for decades.
That bet moved Hawthorne from a single online storefront in 2016 to more than 1,000 retail locations, including a presence in roughly 95% of Target stores. The brand has been written up in GQ, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg Businessweek, WWD, Vogue, Complex and Esquire.
We had no beauty experience, we had no personal care experience. We had no fragrance experience.
Most founders fake expertise. Jeong did the opposite. He admitted he had none and went looking for people who did. His starting list was ten names. By ending each conversation with a referral request, that list of ten became a hundred, and the hundred became a standing roster of industry mentors he could call.
It is a deceptively simple growth loop, the same compounding logic that powers Hawthorne's quiz. Small input, asked relentlessly, snowballs into something defensible. He frames the whole posture plainly.
The essence of an entrepreneur is someone who is learning things on-the-go.
Walk down a personal care aisle and count the products designed with men in mind. For years the answer was: not many. The category had been built, marketed and merchandised overwhelmingly for women, and the men's section was a thin afterthought of generic body wash and drugstore cologne sold on the strength of a celebrity name. Men who wanted something considered were left to guess, sniff a paper strip, and hope.
Jeong and Wong did not see a moral failing in that. They saw an opening. If the experience was a guessing game, then the company that removed the guessing would win the customer. That is the whole strategic spine of Hawthorne: not better marketing, but a better way to decide. The quiz exists because the founders refused to accept that a man buying fragrance should know less about what suits him than the brand selling it to him.
It also explains why Jeong's lack of beauty pedigree turned out to be an asset rather than a liability. He was not trying to make a perfume the way perfumers had always made perfume. He was trying to solve a matching problem, and matching problems respond to data and structured questions far more than to heritage and intuition. The outsider asked the question the insiders had stopped asking.
The arc from 2016 onward is a study in compounding. Hawthorne began as a direct-to-consumer storefront, the kind of internet-first brand that lives or dies on repeat purchases and word of mouth. The personalization engine gave it both: a customer who answers a dozen questions and receives something that actually fits is a customer who comes back, and tells a friend.
Capital followed traction. By late 2021 the company had raised roughly $12 million in a fresh round, lifting its total funding to about $30 million. That money paid for the harder second act of any consumer brand: getting off your own website and onto someone else's shelf. Hawthorne crossed into mass retail and landed in more than 1,000 doors, eventually reaching the large majority of Target stores in the country.
Each channel feeds the other. The retail presence sends new shoppers to the quiz; the quiz data sharpens the assortment that earns more shelf space. It is the same who-else-should-we-talk-to loop Jeong used to learn the industry, now running at the scale of a national brand.
Most founding teams meet late and learn each other's edges under pressure. Jeong and Wong did that learning in middle school. Phil Wong runs creative and brand at Hawthorne, the taste and the look; Jeong runs the business and the operating engine. The division of labor is clean partly because the relationship is two decades deep, with a high-school clothing label and a shared adolescence of sneakers and skate culture behind it.
That history shows up in the product. Hawthorne reads less like a lab brand and more like something built by two people who genuinely care about style, because it was. The consulting rigor Jeong brought from Booz, BCG and BCG Digital Ventures gives the company its spreadsheet discipline. The friendship gives it taste. The combination is hard to manufacture and harder to fake.
Jeong and his cofounder Phil Wong did not meet in a boardroom. They met at twelve, bonding over basketball, sneakers, skateboarding and style, occasionally skipping class to shop at Stussy and Supreme. By high school they were running a clothing line stocked in boutiques in downtown Soho. The partnership that runs Hawthorne is older than most of the company's customers' wardrobes.
Jeong's resume before fragrance reads like a deliberate tour of how things get built and sold. A 2004 internship in Senator Hillary Clinton's office. A BA from Princeton. An MBA from Wharton. Stops at the U.S. Department of State, Booz & Company, and Boston Consulting Group, including its digital venture arm, where the work centered on new ways to buy, sell and learn about physical products. Then he and Wong noticed that the personal care aisle had been built almost entirely for women, and that the men's side was a guessing game. Hawthorne is the answer they wrote.
He calls himself a textbook maximizer, someone who would rather fully commit than hedge. His favorite line belongs to F. Scott Fitzgerald: there are no second acts in American lives. Read one way it is fatalism. Read the way Jeong seems to read it, it is a reason to make the first act count.
At the end of each of these meetings, we would always ask that person, ‘Is there anyone else we should be talking to?’
Look across the whole story and the same instinct keeps surfacing. The Senate internship, the consulting years studying how physical products get bought and sold, the hundred cold interviews, the quiz that never stops asking questions: each is a version of the same move. Find the people or the data that know more than you do, ask better questions than anyone expects, and let the answers compound.
It is a quieter founding myth than the usual one. There is no lone genius with a finished vision here, no eureka in a garage. There is a maximizer who decided that not knowing something was a temporary condition rather than a verdict, and who built a company whose core product is, in the end, a very good question asked at scale. For a brand that sells the way a man presents himself to the world, that is a fitting engine: Hawthorne does not tell you who you are. It asks, and then it listens.
The Hawthorne partnership predates the company by about fifteen years. Jeong and Wong have been building things together since middle school.
His earliest line of work was politics, not products: a 2004 internship in a U.S. Senator's office.
He does not call himself ambitious. He calls himself a textbook maximizer, which is a more honest word for the same thing.
Fitzgerald's “there are no second acts in American lives” - a warning he treats as fuel.