Ellis Brooklyn

Ellis Brooklyn is a clean American fragrance and body-care brand founded by Bee Shapiro, a former New York Times beauty columnist. Based in Brooklyn, New York, the company makes eau de parfum, perfume mists and fragrance oils built around an idea Shapiro describes as scent being "a powerful, invisible language" for telling a story. It sells through prestige beauty retailers including Sephora, Ulta, Credo and Revolve [6], and remains an active, growing business as of 2025.

The brand pairs a clean-beauty positioning with American-inspired storytelling: its scents carry names such as Myth, Apple Love, Salt and Vanilla Milk, and the company frames the line as "telling our modern American experience through fragrance."

Bee Shapiro created Ellis Brooklyn while pregnant with her daughter, Ellis, after whom the brand is named, and living in Brooklyn [1]. Shapiro spent more than a decade as a beauty columnist for the New York Times, interviewing figures such as Lizzo, Naomi Watts and Hailey Bieber, and trained as a lawyer, graduating from Georgetown University [7]. According to the company, she noticed a gap in the market for sophisticated, clean fragrance around 2013, at a time she characterises as one of opaque, "murky" ingredient lists in the industry.

Shapiro is Taiwanese-American and has spoken about the difficulty of entering a perfume sector with few women and fewer women of colour. "Breaking into the industry was not easy at all," she told Refinery29, adding that she "had to ask a lot of favours within the beauty industry in order to get an introduction" [7].

Sources differ on the founding date. The brand's own site states it has operated "SINCE 2015" and gives a founding date of June 2015 [5]. Trade publication WWD reports the company was founded in 2014 [6]. The earlier date may reflect company formation and the later one the market launch.

Ellis Brooklyn positions itself as clean, fine fragrance with transparent ingredients. The company organises its ethos around three stated values — clean ingredients, sustainable sourcing and "unforgettable scents" — and lists every ingredient on its product pages. Its scents are grouped into families including aquatic, aromatic, gourmand, musk and woods, and the brand markets them as unisex while also running a dedicated men's sub-line.

Shapiro has been openly critical of absolutist "clean" messaging. She told WWD that when "the clean police came out and were just like, 'everything is bad,'" the conversation lost nuance, and she argues that natural ingredients also carry an environmental cost — noting that rose absolute requires "buckets and buckets of rose petals" [6].

The range centres on eau de parfum, with the company reporting more than a dozen fragrances on its roster, alongside perfume mists, rollerball fragrance oils and discovery sets [6]. Shapiro works with established master perfumers, among them Jerome Epinette, Frank Voelkl and Pierre Negrin, and has said that "creating a scent vocabulary together is more important than any 'creative brief'" [7].

Several scents anchor the line. Myth was the first fragrance Shapiro created; she calls it "the ultimate Brooklyn scent" [7]. Apple Love, Vanilla Milk, Super Amber and Salt feature among the brand's signature releases. In 2023 the company introduced a men's line of two fragrances, Vanilla Man and Worth Avenue.

The company states that its fragrances are "made in the USA, paraben-free, phthalates-free, PETA certified cruelty-free, and vegan" [2]. It says it uses European Union cosmetics rules — which restrict more than 1,300 ingredients — as a baseline, additionally referencing Australian, Japanese and Canadian standards and the voluntary safety testing of the International Fragrance Association.

For sourcing and packaging, Ellis Brooklyn says it abides by the international CITES list governing precious materials and partners with "Ecocert and FSC Certified stock suppliers," describing its packaging as recyclable. Shapiro has framed these choices as basic diligence: "Why wouldn't we choose that paper stock? Or why wouldn't we care about where the cap is coming from?" [6]

The brand's fragrances have won several beauty-industry awards. Apple Love was named a winner at the Harper's Bazaar Fragrance Awards in 2023 and again at the Cosmopolitan Clean Beauty Awards in 2024, and Vanilla Milk received a Bustle Beauty Award in 2023. Its scents have been featured in roundups by titles including Allure, Byrdie, Elle, Harper's Bazaar and Marie Claire, frequently within gourmand, milky and amber fragrance coverage.

Ellis Brooklyn is active. WWD reported net revenue growth of 76% year over year for 2021, and industry sources cited by the publication estimated $30–40 million in sales projected for 2024 [6]. The brand's most recent visible activity includes 2024 awards and continued founder press into 2025. It is distributed across prestige retailers in the United States and internationally, with availability noted at the Australian retailer Mecca [7].