They Built a Luxury Beauty Brand in Year One — With a Team of Two | Brunel

Why It Matters

Brunnel proves a small, self‑funded team can disrupt the luxury beauty space, showing entrepreneurs that product quality and organic buzz can replace traditional venture capital and influencer spend.

Key Takeaways

• Bootstrapped luxury body care brand launched without external funding.
• Focused on fragrance-driven products filling premium market gap.
• Leveraged trade show networking to secure low-MOQ chemists and packaging.
• Reinvested sales revenue into next collection, maintaining cash reserves.
• Built organic TikTok buzz; avoided influencers and incubator deals.

Summary

The Founder Podcast featured Jasmine Tookes, a former Victoria’s Secret Angel, and Sabrina Canstenfeld, a Goldman Sachs investor, as they recounted building Brunnel—a luxury body‑care line launched in its first year with just the two of them and no outside capital. Their vision combined Jasmine’s deep personal experience with high‑end body oils and Sabrina’s consumer‑brand investment expertise, targeting a premium, fragrance‑focused niche that mainstream dermatologist brands often ignore.

Key to their launch was a disciplined, self‑funded budget: they allocated funds for legal work, trademarks, and a modest minimum‑order‑quantity (MOQ) production run, while reserving capital to develop a second collection before the first even hit shelves. Attending Cosmoprof in Las Vegas allowed them to meet chemists and packaging partners who could accommodate low MOQs and custom formulations, preserving IP ownership. The products quickly gained organic traction on TikTok, generating viral word‑of‑mouth without paying influencers or partnering with incubators.

Jasmine emphasized turning down lucrative celebrity brand deals, stating, “I want to build something real that lives beyond my name,” and highlighted the team’s trust and complementary skill sets as essential. Sabrina added, “Never tell two women it’s impossible,” underscoring their relentless execution that compressed a six‑month product launch timeline despite industry skepticism.

The Brunnel story illustrates that a focused product proposition, strategic trade‑show networking, and disciplined reinvestment can enable a bootstrapped luxury brand to achieve rapid growth and market relevance, offering a replicable playbook for founders wary of dilution or influencer‑heavy marketing.

Original Description

A Victoria's Secret Angel and a Goldman Sachs investor built one of the most talked-about luxury body care launches in recent memory without raising a cent or paying a single influencer. Jasmine Tookes spent two decades on the world's biggest runways turning down incubator deal after incubator deal, waiting to build something real. When she finally met Sabrina Carstensen—who spent years evaluating consumer brands at Goldman—they launched Brunel bootstrapped, profitable, and with a two-person team that pushed their chemists harder than any brand they'd ever worked with.

In this interview, the co-founders of Brunel break down how they built a luxury body care brand from scratch on a lean budget, why organic community came before paid ads, and what it actually takes to get suppliers and manufacturers to take a self-funded brand seriously.

What you'll learn in this interview:

• Why Jasmine turned down 15 years of incubator deals before building her own brand

• How they kept capital in reserve for collection two before collection one ever sold

• Why word of mouth and organic TikTok drove their entire early growth—no paid influencers

• Why the three-oil bundle outsold every individual product on launch day

• The packaging crisis four months before launch—and how sheer persistence solved it

• Why they stayed fully organic for six months before turning on paid ads

• How Sabrina's investor background shapes every capital decision at Brunel

• Why they didn't hire until they were ready—not desperate

• Why their chemists said no brand had ever pushed them this hard

• What Miranda Kerr's 11 years building Kora taught Jasmine about legacy brands

If you're building a beauty or lifestyle brand, trying to grow profitably without burning cash on paid ads before you're ready, or just want the real story behind what luxury brand building looks like on a bootstrapped budget, this conversation will change how you think about product standards, community, and building something that lasts beyond the founder's name.

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CONNECT WITH BRUNEL

Instagram → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/brunel/⁠

Website → ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://brunelbeauty.com/⁠

Jasmin's Instagram → ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/jastookes/⁠

0:00 Victoria's Secret Angel + Goldman Sachs Investor Build a Luxury Body Care Brand

0:53 Why a Supermodel and an Investor Were Speaking the Same Language

2:36 Building the Brand Identity: Timeless Over Trendy

5:17 Finding Chemists and a Launch Date Everyone Said Was Impossible

6:13 How They Self-Funded Without Burning Through Their Launch Capital

7:41 Why Jasmine Turned Down 15 Years of Celebrity Brand Deals

10:48 The Partnership Framework: Complementary Skills and Deep Trust

16:19 Launch Day: The Bundle That Surprised Everyone

19:39 Zero Paid Influencers — The Organic Growth Engine Behind Brunel

22:25 Why They're Not Scaling Paid Ads Yet

29:05 Running a Two-Person Team Without Burning Out

33:54 How Karate and Gymnastics Shape the Way They Run the Business

38:08 Standing Out in the Most Crowded Industry on the Planet

39:41 Pushing Chemists Harder Than Any Brand They'd Ever Worked With

43:02 Season One: 2am Calls, Scrappy Decisions, and Loving the Chaos

46:41 What Brunel Needs to Prove Before Taking Outside Capital

50:16 What Miranda Kerr Taught Jasmine About Long-Term Brand Obsession

53:21 Final Thoughts and Wrap Up

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