This is an episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the beauty and wellness industries. More from the series →
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Jess Hunt, now 27, has been creating content for over a decade. She has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, where she got started, and another 184,000 on TikTok. Through her career as a content creator, she met Jenna Meek, formerly the founder of a beauty brand called Shrine, who eventually became her co-founder. Today, the duo runs Refy Beauty. Refy launched in 2020 and hit shelves at Sephora by 2021.
Hunt’s bold, bushy brows provided the impetus for Refy. On set for a photoshoot, Meek watched Hunt doing her brow makeup and asked her for details. Hunt spilled that it took a multitude of products and varying brushes to get her signature look. Together, they dreamed up an alternative, which became Refy’s first product, its $24 Brow Sculpt.
On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Hunt discusses her road to “influencer” in the early days of the role being a career, the founders’ journey to creating Brow Sculpt and the brand’s recent foray into the complexion category with its first concealer. The excerpts below have been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.
On innovating in the brow category
“We launched with our infamous Brow Sculpt, which is award-winning and has so much innovation. … It’s still our No. 1 best seller, which is just crazy to see it stay on that level. … It started off as a drawing on our iPhones and we never expected it to become the product it is today. …
“I loved that bushy, brushed-up brow look, and I didn’t have a product that created that look for me. [Previously] I was using about three different gels and two brushes just to hold my brows in place. It was ridiculous. It was so unmanageable. … So we obviously felt like there was a massive gap for an amazing product like this. …
“It has a brush that twists in with the formula on, and then if you take the lid off, there are another two brushes. So it was essentially combining all three brushes and all these different steps to create this brushed-up brow look all-in-one. As for the formula itself, we had to make that with our lab from scratch. That took so much back and forth. It took nearly two years just to get this formula right. … We knew what we were doing in terms of why we needed each brush, and we were able to get it all clean and nice in one component. It was the formula itself that took so long to develop. I remember the day we got the final formula back, and everyone … was just screaming because we could not believe that we’d finally done it, and the product was just amazing. So, we were very fortunate to launch with such a beautiful product that everyone loves so much.”
The concealer launch campaign
“We wanted to show these concealers off to absolutely everybody and show them on real skin — so often, you see airbrushed images, and [then] you buy a product and think, ‘Well, this looks nothing like that on me.’ … So, we opened up this thing earlier this year called The Refy Project, which was probably my favorite campaign we’ve ever worked on and activation we’ve ever done. We invited anybody — any customer, any part of our community — to come to four locations. We started in L.A., then we did New York, we did Miami and we did London. Our community came down and they were able to be shade-matched. They put on the concealer and we got some gorgeous content [featuring] them. And they were actually our campaign, all of these faces. So in the end, we got well over 1,000 faces. It’s just the most beautiful campaign ever. It’s just real people with this product. It was so rewarding, as well, just seeing them try it on for the first time and look at themselves in the mirror. It was that instant reaction. … The responses were, ‘It just looks like my skin!’ and, ‘I can’t believe how fresh my eyes look.’ It was so empowering to see all of these people come together, be their most confident selves and look incredible. People were making friends in the queues and as they were taking pictures. They were shooting content together. It made me feel super proud.”
Getting started as a creator
“I started at a time when social media wasn’t necessarily a job. It was more just this new, amazing platform — especially Instagram. It was this fun platform where you could post what you wanted to. It was a much easier time to grow back then — you could grow way more organically. It was a much simpler time, I would say. Back then, I had a full-time job — I used to work in the NHS, our National Health Service here in the U.K. [But] I just loved clothes and fashion and beauty. I would always take pictures of myself before I was going somewhere. I’d put an outfit together and post it.
This was probably over 10 years ago, … and at the time, my following was growing, various brands [were reaching out to me, saying], ‘We’d love to send you some clothes for free, would you be interested?’ Obviously, young me thought, ‘Free clothes, how amazing!’ It was so incredible. So I’d accept all these beautiful pieces, and then I would shoot all this content. It was kind of like: The more you posted, the more you got out there. It snowballed, and my following grew.”
