Violet Grey is a place on earth. The Store, as it’s stylized, sits pretty in the cool shadow of the Hollywood Hills, its velvet-tufted interiors furnished for a life glamorously lived. There are also, incidentally, the Shelves, where lavishly marketed cosmetics await worship.
Every shade and texture of blush present is endorsed by a cabal of entertainment-industry-adjacent beauty professionals, whose tastes have been harvested and refined in a hall of fame for rich-lady beauty products. Here’s Melanie Griffith’s favorite face cream; there’s a set of complexion sticks created by Anne Hathaway’s makeup artist.
Violet Grey’s ostensible business is selling things on its Web site and in its single, singular boutique. Ulta, with more than 1,300 locations, delivers powder to the people and happiness to shareholders. Violet Grey can sell a moisturizer to Victoria Beckham, whether investors like it or not. But comparing the two is like comparing apples to rubies.
And now, Violet Grey is for sale. Again. This time, its owner, Farfetch, the luxury fashion retailer that acquired it last year, has decided to exit the beauty business, potentially leaving Violet Grey stranded. If it appears that nobody knows exactly what to do with Violet Grey, that may be because nobody really knows exactly what it is, other than the elusive creation of a captivating person. Cassandra Grey, née Huysentruyt, is a marketer with an expansive, planet-meltingly dazzling vision, a sparkling Rolodex, and a chameleonic tendency to take on the color of her surroundings, wherever she finds herself.
Last name: HIGH-zen-trite. First name: Not “Cassandra,” with its internal ANN that lies in wait for Midwestern accents to bleat across it; Cuh-SAHN-druh, as in rhymes with Jane Fonda. Whether this is a self-styled twist or an intonation assigned at birth is one of many questions I unfortunately must take to the grave. Cassandra Grey declined to speak to me for this story.
I have a theory as to why. Grey, 45, is no Potemkin girlboss, but she does cut a polarizing figure not only in the beauty and retail sectors but also on Olympus, where she holds court. Her personality is authentically whimsical, and her likeness is diabolically stylish. “Did you see her with the pixie cut?” one New York beauty editor asked me recently, almost visibly angry. “It’s annoying how good she looked.” In seated photos, she reliably tucks her feet beneath her like a cat. Or a woman described by a man in a magazine profile.
If it appears that nobody knows exactly what to do with Violet Grey, that may be because nobody really knows exactly what it is, other than the elusive creation of a captivating person.
There is one tale (told on good authority by several sources) about Grey getting sauced and sitting on Steven Spielberg’s lap at a party during the Cannes Film Festival. There’s another about how George Lucas allegedly recognized her from a previous life. A third (unconfirmed) legend concerns a text message that Grey is said to send to people she is trying to court in business: “Are we getting married?”
But the best description of Cassandra Grey came from her friend January Jones, who once described her in an e-mail to Town & Country as “how I imagine an old madame would have been—in the most glamorous sense. Just fabulous, smart, sexy, and cleverly business-savvy, which is key in this town if you want to survive and succeed.”
Cassandra Grey speaks often of her patchwork upbringing. Her parents split when she was young, and her childhood was largely divided between the bohemian poles of San Francisco and the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. “When I was nearly six, I pressed flowers between two sheets of glass and sold them at the art fair for 12 dollars,” she told The Zoe Report.
But her first payrolled job may have been at a children’s clothing store called Small Fries, in Noe Valley. She was 17 and, by her own account, managing the shop and doing the windows. “I think I’ve always been born with an innate sense of marketing,” she mused on the Girlboss Radio podcast. (Grey’s voice is not so much fried as it is pan-seared on both sides; it’s distinctive enough to tempt impressions.) When the store was briefly gripped by the Beanie Baby craze in the 90s, she found herself unexpectedly inspired by “this notion of, sort of, collectibles, and creating scarcity through that.”
There are few jobs that Grey hasn’t worked. She moved to New York, where she modeled for catalogues, assisted real-estate agents on their branding, and sold ads for blogs. She also served as a kind of hostess for supper clubs on either coast and had an expense account.
But it was a chance visit to Los Angeles that set Violet Grey in motion. Grey’s network had expanded to include Jim Berkus, then the chairman of United Talent Agency, who invited her to a dinner at Chateau Marmont, where she met Brad Grey, then the chairman of Paramount Pictures.
At least, this is how it was framed in the Los Angeles Times. Another source says the couple actually met in New York—and that Brad and Cassandra met in Brad Grey’s lap, after Cassandra and her friend Carole Radziwill had fallen there. (Radziwill, the writer and a former Real Housewife of New York, has been a close friend of Cassandra’s since Huysentruyt; the two used to party on an exclusive echelon together. Once, Cassandra took Radziwill to a high-stakes poker game and got a friend to drive her home in his Maybach.)
On their third official date, Brad flew Cassandra to Paris, and within weeks, she had tattooed BG on the inside of her wrist. It was inevitable that they would be married at Brad’s mansion, once owned by Frank Sinatra, with J.Lo and Brad Pitt in attendance, among others.
In her early career, she served taste-makers. Now, she was one. Grey’s 2011 wedding brought her into the white-hot center of the entertainment industry, where she became her own figure of renown. Outside the cultural borders of Hollywood, she was not famous; within, she was infamous. A video she starred in, produced by Italian Vogue, was titled “The Princess of Bel-Air” and went viral enough to achieve cult-film status among studio executives. There is no better evidence of the film’s quality—and the influence of its subject—than the fact that it is impossible to find, having been thoroughly purged from the Internet. (There are scars, including a tweet that commemorates the release date.) Even the Condé Nast Library seems to have misplaced it. I ended up having to interview an Angeleno who had seen it; she told me, “It was like that Linda Evangelista quote about not getting out of bed for less than $10,000 as performance art.”
“It did not turn out like I expected,” Grey told The New York Times afterward. “But I’m not afraid of creative mistakes, and I’m sure I’ll make more of them.”
In her early career, she served taste-makers. Now, she was one.
At the time of the Times piece, she had her sights set on a vintage-clothing business and dressing suite where friends, including Victoria Beckham, could gather inspiration. (Grey called it a “style incubator.”) But soon, her gaze began to wander above the neckline. She told Forbes that the idea for Violet Grey was based on a business plan she had written for a curated boutique, informed in part by her husband’s love of a bygone showbiz era. It was the heat of the female-founded start-up boom—Glossier and Bumble would launch a year later—and Grey was incubating herself as a hatchling beauty executive. In “The Princess of Bel-Air,” she reportedly listed her heroes as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Net-a-Porter founder Natalie Massenet.
Magazines such as Allure had awarded beauty products based on dermatologists’ feedback and editorial discretion but had yet to collect them in one place and vend them to the public. After raising $2 million in seed funding, Cassandra founded Violet Grey with the executives Tiffany Bensley, who came from the Row, and Ariella Feldman, who went on to Meta. She appointed the makeup artist Robin Black as its creative director, whose blog, Beauty Is Boring, had a gloss that Grey appreciated.
Violet Grey turned 10 this year, and Grey has been visited by a new vision: a creative agency co-founded with Sienna Miller, according to Puck. Since 2019, an Instagram mood board called madamegrey_parfum has hinted interminably at a forthcoming fragrance; there have been conversations about an entire Violet Grey product line, though it has not yet materialized.
After Brad Grey died of cancer at age 59 in 2017, she left Holmby Hills, selling their house for $70 million, and began wandering east with her eight-year-old son, Jules. First, it was to a smaller Richard Neutra house in Silver Lake, then it was back to New York. Her current partner is the D.J. Samantha Ronson, whom she met more than a decade ago; she even remembered confessing her infatuation to her husband. “I had never had a crush on a girl before,” Grey told Jamie Lee Curtis on the actor’s podcast about friendship. “And then we saw each other a few more times in passing … ”
“You hired me to D.J. your husband’s birthday party, too,” Ronson playfully corrected her. “Like, it wasn’t just in passing!” The two shared a laugh. “That is true,” Grey said.
Cassandra Grey does have a doctrine: it’s called the Violet Code. When a product is being seriously considered for a spot on the Shelves, it is first disseminated by the retailer to certain members of a loose committee, many of whom are L.A.- and New York–based beauty professionals. A testing group, which might number fewer than 10, tries the product and completes a questionnaire. In 2022, the brand appointed Sarah Brown, a former Vogue beauty editor, to uphold the code and direct the Violet Lab, the internal standards department that upholds the code. (Brown declined to be interviewed on the record for this story, other than to say that Violet Grey “is very special and in my opinion entirely distinct, as well as completely uncompromising.”)
“It had this caliber of editorial one might see in Vogue,” said Carrie Barber, a former art director at Violet Grey and the founder of Make Beauty (now stocked there). Barber sees Grey as a mentor-slash-genius. Other employees saw a counterproductive tension between beauty and commerce. “Leadership really thinks that revenue is a by-product of art,” another former employee said. “There’s a fundamental difference in the way an investor will look at the business. Anyone who’s going to put money in is going to want a return on that investment.” One former employee, who declined to chat using the koan that if they didn’t have anything nice to say they shouldn’t say anything at all, directed me to Violet Grey’s page on Glassdoor, the employer-review aggregator. There are only seven reviews, and most use the word “toxic.”
In 2018, when Shiseido acquired a minority stake in Violet Grey for an estimated $5 to $10 million, the company was generating a reported $5 million in annual sales. Around this time, Grey brought in the fashion executive April Uchitel, formerly of DVF and the shopping app Spring, to be Violet Grey’s C.E.O. When Uchitel left, in 2020, Grey assumed the role of C.E.O. (Uchitel declined to speak on the record but shared that she was proud of the work she and the team had accomplished together. “Violet Grey continues to be a powerful launchpad for emerging beauty brands,” she said.) In 2022, annual sales had climbed to around $20 million, according to estimates from The Business of Fashion. Meanwhile, Crunchbase estimated that, between 2013, when Violet Grey was founded, and 2020, the company received about $30 million in investment. Farfetch tapped Grey to lead its beauty incubator before it pivoted away, and Grey told The Cut that she’s taken on an advisory role in Violet Grey, while, of course, remaining its gamine figurehead. On LinkedIn, she is currently part-time.
If Violet Grey has a superpower, it is the ability to elevate brands the way no in-house marketing team could. The retailer’s perch on the corner of Hollywood and luxury beauty, with its cache of movie stars, offers prime real estate for companies launching expensive creams in a crowded market.
Few experts believe that Augustinus Bader’s The Cream would have taken off the way it did if not for Grey’s efforts. Bader is a German professor, whose background in healing burns is studded with tales of minor miracles. After his introduction to the hundred-millionaire class, Bader met Charles Rosier, a French financier, and together they launched one cream and one creamier cream.
According to official lore, Professor Dr. Bader had treated the actress Melanie Griffith following the removal of a basal-cell carcinoma from her nose. One day, she left a voicemail for her friend Cassandra: “I’m calling because I want to tell you about the Augustinus Bader skin-care line.” Bader’s first retailer, with a six-month exclusive, was Violet Grey, and Griffith’s voicemail was adapted for the marketing. “I feel this is a hero product for Violet Grey,” a buyer said when it launched, to which Grey replied, “I feel this is a hero product for the world.” Last year, Rosier told Air Mail that, in 2018, Violet Grey had annual revenues under $1 million a year, and eight months into their partnership, they sold $1 million of Bader alone. “That was all Cassandra, you know,” said a former employee.
Grey’s ability to turn a moisturizer into a must-have is well documented, but her track record as someone who is able to convert investor dollars into more dollars is less established. It is under these circumstances that Violet Grey languishes. “I really hope Cassandra buys it back,” Barber confided to me. Others have stressed that, in order for Violet Grey to see another day, it’ll have to find a buyer—and quickly.
“The cachet is there,” another former employee said. “Is there someone out there who can take the foundation of the brand and make it a commercially viable business at the end of the day?”
But it’s remarkable, and should be an inspiration to us all, how little time it took for Grey to become what she set out to be: an object of simmering fascination, like cherry-red lipstick. Grey’s new life in New York looks several worlds away from her Hollywood existence. The Hepburnish pixie is long gone. Now the chameleon changes its hues toward Manhattan—concrete, palladium, black and blond. With her sharp bob, she almost blends in with the other Upper East Side moms. But there’s something different about her, isn’t there? You can see it in her eyes. Is it anticipation? Creative pregnancy? Or maybe it’s just the smudged eyeliner—it looks almost effortless.
Brennan Kilbane is a New York–based writer. He is originally from Cleveland, and his interviews and essays have appeared in GQ, New York magazine, and Allure, where he was recently on staff as a features writer
