Pharrell Williams: From Music to an Entrepreneurial Empire

Even in a nation that had grown accustomed to “challenging times,” few months in recent memory were as dire as November 2020. Some 4 million Americans contracted Covid-19 that month, more than most countries had reported for the entire year. Refusing to concede the November election, former President Donald Trump was instead filing lawsuits to overturn it. The number of demonstrators killed while protesting the death of George Floyd by police had risen to six. Some 3.6 million people were out of work. Prices for everyday necessities were climbing. And, that month, the CDC suggested Americans cancel any holiday travel plans. It was probably the worst time imaginable to launch a new brand—but that was exactly what Pharrell Williams was doing. The artist, songwriter and producer had already invested countless hours in Humanrace, a venture that would kick off with a skin care collection, though Williams envisioned extending it to a range of products. Already envied for his perennially youthful glow, Williams was pretty sure that his starter pack (rice powder cleanser, lotus enzyme exfoliator and humidifying cream) would go over well. As for the timing, however, even the experts had advised him to wait. “We launched in the middle of the pandemic, against a lot of people’s advice,” Williams recalled. “A lot of the advice was: ‘Man, you shouldn’t do it.’” But Williams knew something that the MBA-equipped experts apparently did not: The frightening news tumbling out of a depressed and divided country had created a longing in people to pamper themselves, to find comfort in routines that would make them, however briefly, feel better. “When people are down and things are feeling weird, sometimes people turn inward,” Williams told Adweek. “What if you could offer people something that really did help them? Give them something that really works? We bet on that.” And as is usually the case for Williams—Adweek's Brand Visionary for 2022—his bet was a good one. Humanrace went live on Nov. 25, 2020, via a website that sold directly to consumers. Within hours, the Instagram page had 26,000 followers. By the end of day one, the entire stock sold out. But Humanrace’s launch is more than just the story of a business deal that worked out. In a sense, it’s also a tableau of Williams himself: a man who has deftly maneuvered an enviable reputation in the music industry into the realm of entrepreneurship, all while keeping a hawk’s eye on his personal brand and using a keen read of popular culture as his guide. “As a musician, your name is your brand and your product is the work that you do,” Williams said. “My brand boils down to authenticity. To me, everything is just about being honest and in trying to express that in the most accessible way possible.” The beat of his own drum Williams, now 49, has been expressing himself for a long time. His musical career kicked off in 1992 when he wrote the lyrics for Wreckx-N-Effect’s song "Rump Shaker," which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Together with high school friend Chad Hugo, Williams started the Neptunes, a production team whose signature twist—“a mixture of brashly synthetic keyboard sounds and off-the-wall polyrhythmic percussion,” as Complex described it—became a kind of hip-hop analog to Phil Spector’s wall of sound. Throughout the 2000s, the Neptunes added the secret sauce to hits for everyone from Britney Spears to Justin Timberlake. Rap legends including Jay-Z, Nelly and Snoop Dogg have Williams to thank for many of their chartbusters. After CeeLo Green took a pass on a tune called Happy, Williams performed the song he’d written himself—and turned it into the bestselling single of 2014. As a writer, producer and performer, Williams now boasts no fewer than 13 Grammy awards. Earlier this year, he and Neptunes partner Hugo were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2003, Williams began the first of what would become many forays into the fashion world. When Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo, renowned maker of diamond-encrusted bling, introduced Williams to Japanese fashion designer Nigo, the two started streetwear brand Billionaire Boys Club. BBC was essentially an American riff on Bape, Nigo’s Tokyo emporium that sold his trendy, limited-edition T-shirts. BBC was so well received that it led to sub brands Icecream and Billionaire Girls Club. In 2003, Williams began the first of many forays into the fashion world. Williams doesn’t regard fashion design as a departure from his musical talents, but rather as an organic extension of them. “I have always seen fashion and music intrinsically linked in the same way that space and time are linked, right? There’s no space without time. There's no music without fashion,” he said. Speaking for himself And since there are no brands without promotion, Williams took matters a step further. From the beginning, he departed from the usual celeb-label formula by not only taking an active role in the design process but also modeling the clothes himself. In the 2003 music video for "Frontin’"—a house party to which Lenny Kravitz, Jay-Z and Nigo attend—Williams took center stage in a T-shirt with the Billionaire Boys Club logo. A year later, he showed up at the Spike TV Video Game Awards wearing an Icecream graphic shirt. This kind of casual yet clearly deliberative promotion has since become a signature marketing move. On Snoop Dogg’s Neptunes-produced 2004 hit “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” Williams shouts out his Icecream brand with the line: “I’m a nice dude with some nice dreams / See these ice cubes, see these Icecreams?” No TV spot could have reached a target audience better than that. You’ll see similar cross-pollination taking place within Williams’ other ventures. In 2014, the Adidas Originals x Pharrell Williams clothing and sneaker line hit stores, kicking off what’s since become a long and fruitful partnership. But Williams’ Humanrace brand has its own collection with Adidas, too. In 2014, I Am Other, the corporate umbrella Williams launched in 2012 to oversee his various enterprises, created a T-shirt collection for Uniqlo. And Billionaire Boys Club has partnered with brands as varied as wristwatch maker Bamford London, the New York Yankees and Pokémon. (Williams’ brands are privately held and as such do not release financial figures.) An arbiter of fashion The plausibility of Williams’ fashion projects stems in no small part from his own sartorial flair. Not long after the Neptunes’ royalty checks began arriving, Pharrell bought himself a purple crocodile Hermès Birkin bag, which quickly became his trademark accessory. A kind of internal fashion GPS allowed him to dress down (T-shirts and jeans) and dress up (sherpa jacket, Louis Vuitton scarf) in the same outfit. With the paparazzi tailing him, Pharrell spread his fashion cred simply by getting dressed. In 2005, Esquire added Williams to its best-dressed list, crediting him with “injecting dressed-up luxury into hip-hop style and thereby influencing a new generation of guys to consider more than just a pair of baggy jeans a reflection of their youthful vitality.” Little wonder, then, that Williams has also found himself collaborating with some of the most prestigious fashion labels in the world. Louis Vuitton has retained him to design jewelry and accessories; Colette has done “two exclusive drops” with Billionaire Boys Club. Williams performs with his Neptunes side project N.E.R.D. (No one Ever Really Dies) in Del Mar, Calif., in 2018. And then there’s the storied atelier of Chanel, which rarely signs male brand ambassadors—but it signed Williams. After modeling the house’s pre-fall 2015 collection in a short film with Cara Delevingne, Williams made a surprise appearance as a Pharaoh in gold lamé pants in Chanel’s 2018 Métiers d’Art runway show. A year later, the house invited Williams to design its first unisex capsule: the Chanel Pharrell Collection. It’s hard to imagine Wiz Khalifa or Post Malone being allowed into style sanctums such as these. But according to media and culture watcher Dan Runcie, founder of research firm Trapital, Williams passes with ease because fans have embraced his style and eclecticism from the beginning. “There’s a throughline that you could see with everything that he did,” Runcie said. “There’s a handful of people who were truly able to create a lifestyle around aspects of their business. The brands that Pharrell partners with—the brands that he creates—all tie back into this image that people have had of him.” The man behind the curtain Williams is so much about creation that he’s occasionally withheld his name from his own brands. Bionic Yarn, a company that makes textiles from recovered ocean plastics, counts Williams as its creative director, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find his name on the website. And while it’s widely known that Billionaire Boys Club is Williams’ brand, you’ll have to click all the way to the founders’ page to find his name. These intentional omissions of his name are evidence of something that Williams takes pains to avoid: fans thinking that he’s making a cash grab. “Sometimes what comes along with your name can lead people in a direction to assume, ‘Oh, it’s going to be another one of these?’” Williams said. “Sometimes I like an idea to just be pure—to be what it is. And I’d rather put my brain behind it than my face.” CLICK TO ENLARGE Like many consumers, Williams has seen the cavalcade of celebrity-branded products that hit store shelves with little actual involvement from the celebrities in question. He wants no part of that. Williams is acutely aware that, regardless of how many brands he becomes involved with, his most important brand is still himself. He guards it carefully. When brands dangle cash in front of celebrities, Williams said, some of those stars “are mesmerized by the dollar amount, and they don’t realize the damage that could be done.” “Unlike a lot of other celebrities and influencers we've seen today, he’s clearly more interested in the work than he is in the rewards, the fame and the money,” said Lola Bakare, brand strategist and inclusive marketing consultant. “He’s pure creative. And that’s why I see the diversification of his portfolio as something that I might even expect. It started with music, but he’s always been about creation.” Attitude of gratitude Another key ingredient of Williams’ formula is that—be it in magazine stories, on the red carpet or YouTube videos—he is soft-spoken and genuine, free of the arrogance that’s historically characterized much of the music business and the celebrity class overall. With no prodding, Williams admitted he’s “not perfect”—a possible reference to his co-written lyrics for the controversial 2013 Robin Thicke hit "Blurred Lines," which critics claimed furthered rape culture and whose unrated video was eventually banned by YouTube. “You know,” Williams continued, “sometimes I say things and they don’t necessarily age well.” Even so, this is also the man who, in 2014, appeared on Ellen to advocate for marriage equality. And when the Pharrell of today talks about issues like inclusivity, he is clearly sincere. As WWD has pointed out, Williams was thinking about gender-neutral clothing a decade before the apparel industry was. His stripped-down apparel for Adidas is captioned as “a celebration of inclusivity and equality.” His Humanrace skin care products will work for any skin tone or gender. “My fan base are human beings,” Williams said. “It’s not just a gender-based fan base. These are humans—people with hearts and blood pumping through their bodies.” A similar note of humility drifts into his voice when asked if his four-year residency on NBC music competition mainstay The Voice led him to any backstage deals or taught him any shrewd business moves. Quite the contrary: Being on TV taught Williams about his limitations. He was a coach on NBC’s The Voice from 2014-2017 but said he realized a steady TV gig was ‘not for me.’ “Being on [TV] and being in front of people? And that responsibility of having to be in front of people? And doing it so consistently? Man, that’s not for me,” he said. “I’m very grateful for that lesson.” Besides, Williams has way too much on his plate for a regular TV gig. Looking ahead, there is a rumored collaboration with Tiffany & Co. that he has refused to comment on. There’s the ongoing partnership with Miami hotelier David Grutman, which in 2024 will see the opening of Somewhere Else, a tropical modernist reinterpretation of Morris Lapidus’ famed Beach hotel on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Williams has even involved himself with Web3 by taking the post of chief brand officer for nonfungible tokens brand Doodles. Speaking at VeeCon earlier this year, Williams expressed the hope that a more decentralized internet will lead to social change, allowing people to push back “against governments that seek to limit or strip away human rights.” That’s heady stuff coming from a guy who, not so long ago, was known only as a music producer. But it doesn’t surprise Jimmy Newson, a noted adviser to startup entrepreneurs. “When you think about the type of ventures that he’s going after, he’s looking at the future,” Newson said. “He’s thinking about longevity. Half the stuff [he’s doing], nobody even knows about because he’s more about just getting things done. He’s an action-oriented person.” But as usual, the Brand Visionary said it best himself: “What I've learned about myself is I'm much more of a hermit that comes in and comes out. If you think about my career, I'm the guy that comes from out of nowhere. When things are a bit confused, or people are not sure which way to go? Yeah, that's when I shine the best.” Read about Adweek’s 2022 class of Brand Genius honorees here.

Brand Genius

How Pharrell Williams Transposed His Musical Fame Into an Entrepreneurial Empire

Adweek's 2022 Brand Visionary has created a throughline between all his business endeavors that supports his overall image

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara