An Authentic Life

While it appears that Jen Auerbach has been living in the lap of luxury over the last few years, in reality, the young mom and business owner has just been trying to survive. Already on her fourth cup of caffeine as we chat one morning, she explains, “I’m too tired to crop my life or be anything but real.” As the owner of Clary Collection, the small-batch beauty line she co-founded with musician Adriel Denae, she’s as resolute about posting candidly on Instagram as she is about displaying her products’ ingredients on the front of each bottle. After living a very complicated life, the blunt and uniquely beautiful entrepreneur has scaled back in order to discern what is important to her: simplicity, sisterhood, and giving back to the communities in which she finds the space to be creative.

Claire Foth

Claire Foth

Authenticity is synonymous with Auerbach and Clary Collection, whose staple products include all-purpose balm, body oil, face serum, and renewal oil repair. After starting the company in Auerbach’s kitchen as two sleep-deprived mothers in search of safe beauty products for their children, the line has grown beyond their comprehension. It was as if one day Auerbach turned to Adriel and said, “We’re starting a business,” and the next day they turned around and Clary was in 200 stores nationwide and a few boutiques in Singapore and Paris. While they spent years perfecting the formula and testing it on friends, neither had any idea how big Clary would be.

Claire Foth

Dropping out of school at age 15 may have worked well for Auerbach, but she wouldn’t encourage everyone to do it. Prior to producing organic beauty products in her Belle Meade backyard and becoming wife to The Black Keys lead singer and producer Dan, the witty and wisebeyond-her-years Auerbach hailed from the seaside town of Southampton, England, where she was born, and Australia, where she was raised. Moving around every six months made Auerbach durable and gave her the gumption to embrace every situation she found herself in. “You can throw me anywhere, and because of my upbringing, I’ll survive,” the chameleon jokes.

Similar to Auerbach’s musician husband, who is an introvert, harmonizing perfectly with her extroverted nature, her mother and father also had complementary personalities: “My mum was a midwife and Suzy Homemaker type, and dad an adventurer with his own painting company,” she explains. The couple bought rundown properties, like the houseboat Auerbach was raised on, and renovated them. She credits her parents for her business savvy, independence and extreme work ethic. At age 77, her father, a war baby, will paint Auerbach’s house, weed the garden, and clean the gutters. Similarly, she went straight from the hospital after giving birth to her son early to attend her stepdaughter Sadie’s school play. Auerbach is a doer who will not stand still.

Claire Foth

After her older sibling left home, Auerbach went on a house renovation tour around the world with her parents. At age 15, the family moved back to England, when she famously gave them an ultimatum: her parents wanted to buy a home in Tasmania and teenage Auerbach was not going to leave friends. Being the industrious person that she was, she asked her boyfriend’s dad, who owned a mortgage company, for a job as a receptionist, and asked her parents to allow her to stay in their apartment for a six-month trial period. Not only did Auerbach not burn the house down, she thrived on her own under the guidance of the older girls at the office and peers like London-based journalist Amy Hanson, with whom she co-founded UK charity Small Steps Project in her early twenties. The charity provides emergency aid, shoes (a requirement to attend school in countries like Cambodia, India, and East Timor), food, and liaisons to education and employment to children living on municipal trash sites around the world. Auerbach, whose soft spot is for children after her own experiences of fending for herself as an adolescent, flew around the world managing projects and raising money for Small Steps while most people her age were attending fraternity parties.

Claire Foth

“After a Skype call with Amy, who was introduced to me by a friend and had already visited trash sites in Cambodia, I said, ‘Fly to Sidney, I’ll raise some money, and we’ll go to Cambodia together,’” Auerbach remembers. The two flew to Cambodia and visited a burning trash site the size of a high-rise apartment building where children picked plastic over a 12-hour period to earn a dollar. Despite the horrific circumstances, Auerbach felt like her calling had revealed itself, which is to connect face-to-face with other humans.

While Clary donates often to organizations, Auerbach admits she misses the hands-on work. “I will say to my husband that I really miss working on trash sites and he’ll respond, ‘Your charity is at home now because you’re providing people with products that help them every day,’” Auerbach says, smiling at his consistent support.

Following a brief stint in London, during which Auerbach helped to establish an office for Small Steps funded by a Vodafone grant, she made her way back to Australia where she ran charity projects remotely. One day, Auerbach received a fortuitous invitation from a friend in New York City to come stay for a winter in her spare bedroom. In the Big Apple, Auerbach spent three months networking and meeting other like-minded nonprofit people. She was in the midst of crafting a plan to move to NYC when she met her future husband at a bar. After Dan offered to buy her a drink, and she cheekily responded, “I can afford my own!” the pair spent the rest of the night talking.

Auerbach believes they got married because of her cluelessness about— and lack of interest in—his storied music career. “In New York, everyone is a someone, and I’m no VH1-watching groupie,” she quips, remembering how she even forgot his name at the end of the night. Not too long after that, Dan asked that she relocate to Nashville, a city that she’d never heard of. Auerbach remembers getting picked up at the airport six years ago and seeing her Uber driver in a red pickup truck wearing a cowboy hat. Upon hearing her posh English-Australian accent, locals would ask if she knew the Duchess of Cambridge. But while the culture shock was intense, Auerbach found Nashville’s Southern hospitality to be charming. “When we moved into our house, all of the neighbors came by and asked if we needed anything, which, as a big city girl, made me suspicious at first,” she jokes.

In reality, the greatest gift came the night Auerbach met her business partner, Adriel, who became an immediate comfort blanket in her new life. After living in Nashville for a few weeks, she asked her husband for phone numbers of old friends. “I said, ‘Listen, it’s awfully quiet around here, so provide me with some human interaction!’” That day, she sent a text message to fine artist Buddy Jackson, inviting him and a few friends over for BBQ and a game of Texas Hold ‘Em. In walked Adriel that night—proceeding, incidentally, to beat her at poker—with Buddy and her husband, musician Corey Chisel. At 8 ½ months pregnant, with a nonalcoholic beer in her hand, Adriel was a goddess in Auerbach’s eyes. The pair connected immediately, having lengthy conversations around motherhood and their inability to find nontoxic skincare. Not too long after, Auerbach found out she was pregnant and became even more attached to Adriel with her husband on tour and family overseas. “I was scared, but what better environment do I function in than a challenging one?” she remembers.

Auerbach absolutely lights up when speaking about Adriel, who she describes as kindness and warmth personified. “She is everything that I’m not— rational, patient, and good at numbers,” says Auerbach, who, having failed math at school, instead handles the marketing, customer service, and design sides of their business. Like any great team, the pair brings different skill sets to the table. They also have a lifelong bond that comes from Adriel spending 26 hours at Auerbach’s bedside wiping her sweat during the birth of her first child. “She is the godmother of my child and sister for life,” gushes Auerbach, who sees their partnership continuing long after they go grey.

Together, the two wild horses reined in their desires to create a slew of products and instead focused on making a desert island survival kit. With the market already oversaturated, they structured Clary for their own ideal consumer experience: an edited collection of safe, honest, and effective products. The company, which recently became SAFE Certified (meaning everything is scientifically tested and stamped organic), debuted after two years of formula testing.

According to its customers, whose letters Auerbach and Adriel sift through every morning, Clary’s products help everyone from those suffering from eczema to patients undergoing chemotherapy. The altruistic Auerbach says there is no better feeling than looking at those beforeand-after-pictures.

The pair is also passionate about incorporating traditional herbal recipes (based upon the belief that what worked then is still relevant now), and plants inherently grown in the South. “Recently, I was stung by a bee and grabbed a plantain leaf from my backyard, chewed it with my saliva, and applied that to the sting,” she offers as proof of her love for natural remedies. Every Clary product is produced in-house at The Barn, the company headquarters located in Auerbach’s backyard, and former home to her husband’s vintage motorcycle collection. (The pair struck a deal one day that if she could find Dan’s bikes a new home, then she could have the space. Auerbach astutely called the Lane Motor Museum, who agreed to house the vintage Harley-Davidsons.) After bringing in two turn-of-thecentury apothecaries that Dan had purchased from a science lab in upstate New York, The Barn was easily converted into a production facility.

Currently, Clary has three employees who hand-craft, label, infuse, and package all products. Even as the company grows—and despite Auerbach’s fervent desire to replace Vaseline in all drugstores—she insists that the line, made with intention, will stay in-house. “The best legacy in life would be leaving behind a product that helped people for generations,” explains the ambitious entrepreneur. Watch out, Walgreens.