On September 15, Jones Road Beauty, Bobbi Brown's line, launched its new Wide Awake Brightening Concealer and Neutralizer, $32 each, with a "Hotline" campaign where customers could call a makeup artist for a shade consultation. Molly Sims's brand YISE has sold a Wide Awake Brightening & Depuffing Eye Cream, $68, since March 2024, and ran a "Hotline" campaign of its own for a serum launch earlier this year. On Saturday, Sims posted a video to her personal Instagram, and her opening line was, "This isn't about a name. It's about ideas and the work that goes into bringing something to life. I'm not mad. I'm just incredibly disappointed." Marie Claire counted nearly a million views on that video and comments of solidarity from The Rock and other celebrities within 24 hours.

On Sunday, Brown replied to the accusation from her own account, @justbobbidotcom saying, "We didn't realize Molly Sims has a product with the same name in her YSE beauty collection. This was a mistake. Prior to our launch, a trademark search showed no other ownership of the name. However, we're changing our product name moving forward, and will no longer call it Wide Awake. I would never knowingly copy another product's name. To Molly Sims and her team at YSE, I'm sorry this happened, and we're taking steps to correct it." On Monday, she gave Inc. Magazine a similar statement, saying "out of respect for Molly and her team, we electively opted to change the name," and said Jones Road would "welcome the opportunity to speak with" YISE.

So Sims got what she asked for in about 24 hours. But then the narrative turned without her.

What the post bought, and what it cost

On Monday, Marie Claire had adopted Sims’ framing wholesale, with a headline about "undeniably similar marketing strategies." That's the high-water mark.

The same day, Inc. interviewed a trademark lawyer, Kamanta Kettle of ArentFox Schiff, who referred to Sims’ callout "a very risky move" that "may have backfired," and her reasoning was that "Wide Awake" is about as descriptive as a product name gets, the trademark office has more than 600 entries for it, bareMinerals sold a Wide Awake concealer in 2006, Saturday Skin and Dominique Cosmetics have used it since, and the comments under Sims's own post filled up with people saying so. Ahead of the Kirb, a beauty newsletter then pointed out that YISE's shade names (Sheer Peach, Sheer Honey, Sheer Mocha) sit uncomfortably close to YSL's Luminous Peach, Honey and Mocha. And somewhere between Monday and Tuesday, Sims’ video with hundreds of thousands of views came down.

Sims's brand used to be called YSE Beauty. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board records show Yves Saint Laurent Parfums filed an opposition in January 2024 against her application to register that name, arguing it was too close to YSL; the case went through testimony last year and was suspended in January, and it's still open. At some point since then, the brand became YISE, a change Allure Magazine has connected to the dispute. So the founder who told a million people "this isn't about a name" is, right now, on the receiving end of exactly the argument she was making, from a company with a far stronger claim than hers.

I want to hold two things here, because social media tends to only hold one. Yes, this whole thing is tone-deaf, and a celebrity founder who has been front-and-center to naming disputes, lawyers, filings, quiet settlement talks for the last year-and-a-half should know better than most that they don't get handled via public Instagram callout.

And also someone 20 months into a fight over her own brand's name has a raw nerve about names, and a collision landing in the middle of it would feel like a second hit even though the legal position is nothing alike. That doesn't make the IG video smart but it does make it human, which is usually the accurate explanation for a founder posting something the comms team (hopefully) would have stopped.

Let’s look at where the two of them are on Wednesday morning.

Sims has the rename she asked for and a deleted video. Brown gave up a five-day-old product name, apologized well, and stopped. Every story since has been about whether Sims even had a case to begin with, and the strongest arguments on Brown's side, "you don't own it either," "there are 600 of these," "your own brand name is in a fight with YSL," have all been made by a lawyer, a newsletter and strangers in a comment thread. Brown never said any of them. The closest she came was "a trademark search showed no other ownership of the name.”

And that's the hard part here because Brown had every right to push back. Nobody owns "Wide Awake," and she could have easily said so. Most founders would have, and most CEOs I've worked with would have wanted to. Instead she gave up the one thing that was easy to give up (the product name that was only five days old), stayed quiet on the part Sims was really upset about, the campaign, and let everyone else argue it for her. She lost a name on a concealer, yes, but she came out of the week looking like the grown-up in the room.

What Sims and her team didn't do, as far as I can tell, is play the game forward. So we post the video, Bobbi feels some heat, then what? What turns up when 900,000 people, many of whom work in beauty, go looking deeper as social sleuths are wont to do? Will they easily find 600 other filings, her own shade names sitting next to a competitor’s, and the open case over her own brand's name? What happens to "this isn't about a name" once the thread is nothing but names? All of that was one search away, and she knew most of it better than anyone. It just didn't look relevant from where she sat, because from inside the business every one of those is a separate, defensible thing, and you don't experience your own history as material a stranger will use against you. That's the leadership blind spot, and it's no failing of hers.

Seeing how the story plays forward before she posts is the reason the CCO is in the room.

So before the founder posts, your job is to ask the question she can't ask herself: the minute this goes up, what's the first thing someone throws back at us, and are we clean on it? If the answer takes you more than a few seconds, you probably already know the answer. Going public will get you a fast yes when what you're asking for is small; nobody was ever going to fight for a five-day-old product name. Just know the yes is the cheap part, and the comment thread is where you have to pay the piper.

If you're the one being called out, give up whatever's easy to give up, and do it fast. Don't touch the part that's arguable. And before the founder says the thing that might feel good to say in the moment, look at who's already saying it for her. If the lawyer and the commenters are making your case, let them. It lands harder coming from them, and it costs you nothing.

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