Blake Brown was Target’s largest haircare launch on record. In its first three and a half weeks on shelves, the brand generated close to $5 million in sales and $16 million in media impact value. The products scored well in consumer testing. Customers liked them. By every early measure, the launch was working.
Then came the brand exposure risk no one had a plan for.
Blake Brown is the hair care brand built and owned by actress Blake Lively. In August 2024, just as the brand hit peak sales velocity, Lively filed a lawsuit against her co-star and director Justin Baldoni, alleging he orchestrated a coordinated media campaign against her during and after the release of their film “It Ends With Us.” Baldoni countersued. Both sides took the dispute public. A brand that had nothing to do with any of it got pulled into the wreckage.
By mid-September 2024, weekly sales of Blake Brown at Target had dropped more than 87 percent from their August peak, according to Puck’s reporting based on two internal sources. By mid-2025, a source close to Target told Puck the brand was on track to generate less than $15 million in total annual sales. A $100 million brand had become, in that source’s words, “a non-conversation.”
Nothing in the formula changed. Nothing on the shelf changed. But the story around the name on the bottle changed twice. And that is the part worth understanding, because the same dynamic is sitting inside more businesses than their leaders want to admit.
Two Phases, Two Different Causes
Most people treat the Blake Brown collapse as a single event. It was not. It happened in two distinct phases, each with a different cause. The difference matters if you want to draw the right lessons from it.
Phase one began in August 2024, when negative press coverage started circulating around Lively during the film’s release. Her legal filings alleged that Baldoni’s PR team had orchestrated a deliberate media campaign to damage her reputation. Whether that allegation is ultimately proven, the timing of the coverage and the sales decline aligned. Lively’s own legal team acknowledged the brand had suffered sales declines of 56 to 78 percent, according to Fortune’s reporting on the case filings. A founder’s personal conflict became public, the brand caught the damage, and no coordinated strategy was in place to respond at the speed the moment required.
Phase two was different. And in some ways, it was worse.
As the legal battle continued into 2025, Baldoni’s legal team made public allegations that Lively had attempted to pressure Taylor Swift into publicly supporting her, with the threat of releasing a decade’s worth of private texts between them if Swift refused. That allegation changed the character of the story entirely. Lively went from a founder whose brand had been damaged by someone else’s actions to a public figure accused of leveraging a friendship as a weapon. Swift’s fanbase responded accordingly. The remaining consumer goodwill collapsed.
Here is the distinction that matters. Phase one was done to Lively. Phase two grew, at least in part, from her own legal strategy. A move made inside a courtroom became the story that finished the brand outside of it.
That is not a PR failure. That is what happens when legal strategy and communications strategy are not the same strategy.
The Warning Signs Most Leaders Miss
Blake Lively did not wake up one morning to a collapsed brand. The warning signs were present for months. Most leaders facing similar exposure miss the same signals in their own businesses.
The first signal is when your name starts appearing in stories that have nothing to do with your business. If a personal dispute, a former partner, or an unrelated controversy starts pulling your name into coverage, your brand is already in motion before you have made any decision to defend it.
The second signal is when your legal team and your communications team start giving you advice that contradicts each other. That contradiction is not a personality conflict. It is a structural problem. Two advisors solving for two different outcomes will produce a strategy that serves neither.
The third signal is when you find yourself making public moves without knowing how they will land. If a court filing, a press statement, or a leadership decision goes out without anyone in the room asking what it looks like to the outside world, you are already operating without a plan.
The fourth signal is silence from people who used to speak. Customers, partners, and allies often go quiet long before they go public. By the time the absence becomes visible, the damage is already accumulating.
If any of these are happening in your business right now, the exposure is already underway. The question is what you do about it.
The Gap Where Brand Exposure Risk Lives
When a crisis hits, two things typically happen. A PR firm drafts a statement. A lawyer sends a letter. Both responses have their place. Neither one is enough on its own.
The PR firm thinks in headlines. The lawyer thinks in liability. Neither one is focused on the space between those two concerns, where public perception forms, where narratives solidify, and where the decisions made in the first 48 hours define what is possible for the next 48 months.
After thirty years of representing business owners in high-stakes disputes, I can tell you the same pattern shows up again and again. The lawyers and the publicists are not in the same room. When they are, they are not speaking the same language. And the client, the person whose name and business are on the line, ends up trying to mediate between two sets of advisors when they should be focused on leading.
That gap is not a theoretical problem. In the Lively situation, it produced a phase two filing that may have made legal sense but had no communications strategy behind it. The brand paid a price the lawyers were not thinking about when the filing was made.
This is not an easy gap to close. It costs money and requires advisors willing to give up turf and to demand that legal and communications work as one team, not two. Most organizations are not structured for it. That is exactly why so few survive a real exposure event with their value intact.
How Ethia Thinks About a Situation Like This One
Ethia is not going to claim it would have saved Blake Brown. That is not the point. The point is that Ethia asks different questions earlier, and in a crisis, the questions you ask before the pressure arrives determine how much control you keep when it does.
Here is what those questions sound like in practice.
Before a legal filing goes out: What does this look like to the public when it lands? What communities does this activate? Who is going to feel attacked by it, and what is their reach? What does this do to the brand by Friday? Who is going to amplify this, and who is going to defend it? If we have to walk this back in 72 hours, what does that cost us?
Before a public statement is released: What is the legal exposure created by every sentence? Where can this be used against us in court? What are we saying that we cannot defend later? What are we not saying that the silence will be read as?
Before any move is made: Who are the stakeholders connected to everyone involved? What audiences are watching that we have not named yet? What loyalty relationships exist that could turn for or against us?
The Taylor Swift fanbase was not an unpredictable force. It was a foreseeable one. A complete exposure map would have named it before the phase two filing was made, not after the backlash arrived.
These are not complicated questions. They are simply not the questions that get asked when legal and communications operate on separate tracks. When they sit in the same room, asking the same questions, with the same client interests in mind, the answers change. And so do the outcomes.
Explore Ethia’s Crisis Readiness Scorecard to see how prepared your organization is right now.
What to Do Monday Morning
This is the part most articles skip. Frameworks are useful. Frameworks are not action. So here are three concrete moves you can make this week, with the people already on your payroll, before you hire anyone.
First, schedule a single meeting with your general counsel and your senior communications lead. Together, in the same room. Ask them one question. If a damaging story about you or this company hit the news tomorrow, what would each of you do in the first six hours, and how would you coordinate? Listen to what they say. Pay attention to whether they have ever discussed it. Most have not.
Second, build a one-page exposure inventory. List every condition in your business right now that could become a public story. Pending litigation. Former partners. Regulatory matters. Key person dependencies. Personal conduct. Digital footprint of senior leaders. Vendor or supplier disputes. You are not solving them today. You are just naming them, so you stop being surprised by your own risk.
Third, identify the three people whose public statements would most influence the market’s view of your business. Customers, partners, employees, investors, regulators. Then ask whether you have any current relationship with them outside of a crisis. If the answer is no, that is your first relationship-building project.
None of these moves cost money. All of them surface gaps. Most leaders who do these three exercises find at least one piece of exposure they did not know they had.
Review Ethia’s Brand Reputation Audit once you have completed the exercise. It will give you a framework for what to do with what you have surfaced.
The Real Cost of Unmanaged Brand Exposure Risk
The math on the Blake Brown story is straightforward. A $100 million brand became a $15 million brand in less than a year. The products did not change. The consumer satisfaction scores did not change. Two unmanaged exposure events, one external and one self-generated, erased 85 percent of the brand’s value.
That is the cost of the gap.
Every business carrying a founder’s name, a leader’s reputation, or a public-facing identity holds that same exposure. The difference between a business that survives its crisis and one that does not often comes down to whether there was a plan before the pressure arrived.
If you are reading this and you do not have that plan, you are not alone. Most leaders do not. The ones who build it before they need it are the ones still standing after the news cycle moves on. The ones who do not are the ones who become the news cycle.
Contact Ethia before your name is the headline.
Sources: Puck, reporting by Rachel Strugatz (puck.news, May 2025); Fortune, December 23, 2024 (fortune.com); Blake Lively v. Justin Baldoni et al., United States District Court, Southern District of New York
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