There is a particular customer the beauty industry has spent decades pretending it does not see. He is twelve. He is fourteen. He is sixteen. He smells, exactly as much as his mother is willing to admit. JB Skrub is the first brand I have come across that is openly, capably, and a little affectionately, designing for him.
Today, quietly, I'd like to introduce another of our founding ten.
JB Skrub is a small, founder-led bath and body line for the kind of person nobody else seems to design for: boys who are not quite little anymore, but not quite men. It was built by two mothers who love their sons exactly as much as they admit they smell — Julie Bowen and Jill Biren, joined by co-founder Rachael Field — who set out to make something genuinely good for a customer the rest of the category had skipped. The ingredients are clean and sustainably sourced. The formulas were made with expert chemists. The packaging is bright, simple, and was, importantly, approved by the boys before it shipped.
Why it matters.
Most beauty brands are inventory dressed as identity. JB is the opposite — a real customer, a real gap, a small line built around answering both. The team partnered with formulators on each product rather than putting a logo on a stock white-label. The ingredients are sustainable. The line is short. That is not common. It is, in our experience, the future of the category.
"We're the transportation, cooks, ATM's — we are boy moms."
That sentence is, in fact, on their About page. JB Skrub started where most clean-beauty brands don't — with the customer's mother. Two of them. They were tired of buying products designed for adults and using them on their boys, or worse, products designed in colors meant for adults and ignored by their boys. So they made the products themselves. The line is small on purpose. The packaging was approved by the customer himself before it shipped, which is, in our experience, the most honest product test there is.
What this means, if you're a member.
Members get first access to each new release. The Concierge can build a JB Skrub starter kit for any household with a teenage boy in it — shampoo, body wash, face wash, body spray, the lot — and have it landing the week of, not three weeks late. The team is also working on a small numbered limited edition for the cohort. Details when there is something worth saying.
You can read more at jbskrub.com.
Who's next.
JB Skrub is the fourth of ten. We are building a small founding cohort of brand partners — not a hundred, not a thousand, ten — who are ready to know their customers for the first time, and who would rather grow slowly with us than quickly with someone else.
Six brands left in the founding cohort.
If you make something we should be paying attention to — write to us. The conversation is short, and the seat is for the long term.
Apply for the cohort →Welcome to the family.