Jeff Lee. Lawyer's poise, trainer's discipline, pageant coach's eye for a good angle - all in one headshot.
He drafted merger agreements at Wachtell. He ran an empire for a baseball legend. He coaches beauty queens on four continents. Today he sells the makeup you'd take to a desert island.
DIBS Beauty ships blush-and-bronzer sticks, setting spray, and a philosophy printed on the box: ditch the BS. Jeff Lee co-founded it in September 2021 and runs it as CEO. The flagship product, the Desert Island Duos, exists because customers kept asking the same quiet question at the makeup counter - which bronzer goes with which blush? DIBS answered by gluing the right pair together in one stick. Problem solved, guesswork gone.
The brand's name is a thesis compressed into four letters. DIBS stands for Desert Island Beauty Status: the handful of products you'd take if you could only take a handful. It is a deliberately small idea in an industry addicted to launching everything. Lee prefers editing to adding.
He built it with three partners who each bring something he doesn't. Courtney Shields, the influencer whose audience trusted her taste. Ken Landis and Dan Reich, the Tula Skincare founders (Landis also co-founded Bobbi Brown Cosmetics) who had built and sold a beauty brand before. The seed round - $2.6 million - came from those founders and from stakeholders at private equity giant L Catterton.
Desert Island Beauty Status - the makeup you would take with you if you could only take one bag. A brand built on subtraction, not addition.
"Don't follow your passion. Pursue your superpower."
The resume reads like four separate people accidentally sharing a name. Read in order, it starts to look less like restlessness and more like a plan.
Trained at Yale Law, then billed hours at Skadden Arps, Sullivan & Cromwell, and Wachtell, Lipton - the firm ambitious attorneys whisper about. He learned to read a deal, and a room.
Chief operating officer and partner at Alex Rodriguez's AROD Corp, plus president of ARod Productions. He took the job, by his own account, without knowing who A-Rod was.
Since 2002 he has flown the world coaching pageant contenders - poise, answers, the walk, even where to stand. GQ profiled him under that exact headline in 2016.
NASM-certified personal trainer, and the only person to have worked out at every Equinox on Earth. It sounds like a party trick. It became a hiring credential.
He teaches reputation, ethics and leadership to MBA and law students at Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Wharton - the same schools whose degrees line his own wall.
All of it - the deal sense, the operating chops, the eye for a face, the discipline - now points at one company. The through-line was always beauty and persuasion.
When Alex Rodriguez hired him, the degrees weren't the selling point. According to Lee, A-Rod waved off the Yale and Stanford credentials and pointed at something stranger on the resume: the Equinox streak. Every gym, every city, no exceptions.
The logic was that a person who finishes a self-imposed marathon of that size for no reason other than to finish it is a person who finishes. Discipline isn't a line item. It's a tell. Lee got the job.
He carries the team-building lessons from that chapter into DIBS, where his operating principle is almost aggressively human: people should feel important, because they are. The company knows its partners' birthdays. It answers customers around the clock. It throws events in cities the industry usually ignores.
"I don't care about all your degrees. You're the only person who's worked out at 106 Equinox gyms. That shows me you always finish a job."
"I have never made a cent off someone's misery."
Plenty of beauty lines are named after their famous founders. DIBS deliberately is not. It could have been Courtney Shields Beauty; the audience was hers. Instead the founders picked a name that meant nothing about them and everything about the product. The bet was that a brand tied to one face rises and falls with that face - and they wanted something that could outlive any single personality.
That is a strange thing for founders to design against themselves, and it is the most revealing decision in the whole story. Lee is not building a monument to Jeff Lee. He is building something meant to keep working after the founders stop being the interesting part.
He is candid about his own blind spots. He says he isn't naturally inclined to stop and celebrate milestones - a habit he's trying to unlearn. He hires people who disagree with him on purpose, and prizes what he calls spirited debate. For a man with this many credentials, the notable thing is how much he wants to be argued with.
The stated goal is to make makeup simpler, more joyful, and made for everyone - and to build an influencer-born brand durable enough to become a household name. In an industry that treats brands like fireworks, Lee is trying to build a lighthouse. Uncomplicated products, a fanatically well-treated community, and a name that means the makeup, not the man.