She left Bank of America to start a fragrance brand with $300. Last year, it made $21 million.

Back in 2018, Maekaeda Gibbons was a loan officer at Bank of America, spending her days evaluating other people’s finances.

She had a problem: an expensive taste in perfume that didn’t match a loan officer’s salary.

So she started experimenting with her own versions of pricier scents, with no real plan beyond wanting something that smelled good, cost less, and maybe she could use as gifts for coworkers and friends. “I had some funds left over after I paid all of my bills, and I wanted to take a risk on myself,” Gibbons told Business Insider.

She took around $300 and went into her kitchen to cook up a scent she could fall in love with.

Gibbons spent about $54 on bottles she ordered off Amazon, and the remaining money was spent on carrier oils, or oils used as a base for fragrances, for testing formulas.

What started as a hobby turned into a paid side hustle once word spread around the office and people started asking to buy it themselves.

Now, Brown Sugar Babe has a flagship store in Atlanta, earned $21 million in gross revenue in 2025, has a cult following on TikTok, and has no outside investors.

Gibbons has never raised outside money for the company, and to her, that fact explains most of how the business actually runs.

The tradeoff, Gibbons said, was speed.

Self-funding forced the business to stay lean and grow slowly, with some ideas kept on the back burner until there was enough capital to pursue them. “As a business owner and even not having the capital, I really had to go off of vibes, and I know that sounds really irresponsible,” she said.

And by “vibes,” she means leaning hard into what customers say they want (she runs surveys asking her social media community what to make next), then figuring out how to pay for it after the fact, not before. “If it meant I had to max out a credit card to accomplish getting the ingredients, raw materials, and vessels that were needed to do that, that’s what I did,” she said.

When Brown Sugar Babe needed to stock up on roughly two years’ worth of inventory and ingredients, Gibbons made several purchases over about three months, totaling about $5.5 million, she said.

She looked into financing the purchase, then decided to pay for it outright over time. “I really wanted to stay safe with our nest,” Gibbons said.

It was extremely stressful at first, but Gibbons said that knowing the raw materials for the next two years were locked in let her focus on execution rather than worrying about supply chain volatility.

Though she’s extremely open to experimentation, there’s one category Gibbons won’t touch: alcohol-based eau de parfum.

Brown Sugar Babe focuses on fragrance oils, which Gibbons sees as a category that other brands have yet to fully capitalize on “There’s a small hard no for several reasons on going into EDP, atomized perfumers or alcohol based perfumes,” she said. “It’s been done and overdone and continues to be done very well by other brands.” A lot of Brown Sugar Babe’s lineup is built around notes pulled from established luxury scents, and Gibbons said so openly.

She just doesn’t love the word people reach for when they speak on it — dupe.

She doesn’t start from a specific luxury bottle and set out to copy it.

In her telling, it starts with loving a scent, then figuring out how to make it louder.

For example, in 2024, Sol de Janeiro sued MCoBeauty, alleging false advertising, trade-dress infringement, and unfair competition.

The company claimed that MCoBeauty’s fragrance mists copied the look and feel of its Cheirosa body-mist line, including the notes, packaging, and branding.

MCoBeauty pushed back, filing a motion in January 2026 to dismiss, arguing that the suit amounts to an attempt to block a lawful competitor.

The case is still pending in federal court.

Gibbons thinks the criticism looks different depending on the brand. “Are you going to be mad with someone who made macaroni and cheese the same way that you made macaroni and cheese?” Gibbons said.

And other brands have started duping her formulas, so she knows what it’s like to be on the other side.

She said that part doesn’t bother her, though. “Everyone needs inspiration,” she added.

Many fragrance brands stay online and skip the overhead of a physical space, but Gibbons wanted a physical touchpoint for customers who valued in-person connection, which she felt her digital presence alone couldn’t provide.

After years of building the brand, Gibbons opened a flagship store in Atlanta in 2025, and the investment totaled about $1.2 million, including construction, branding, and the grand opening event. “Sometimes I want to do so much more when it comes to giving our community something that they will remember,” she said, talking about how she ensures the brand hosts IRL, including live events and pop-ups. “Even bridling my imagination when it comes to our experiences has been a little tough to take sometimes.” Gibbons has also been wrong about how much people want what she’s selling.

Brown Sugar Babe has sold through entire launches more than once, and website crashes are a familiar headache at this point. “Sometimes I go into a lot of our launches with naive glasses because I am always shocked,” she said.