The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview with lilah b. founder Cheryl Yannotti Foland now on iTunes and Spotify.
GLOW JOURNAL: You grew up on the East Coast and you have described yourself as a “crazy, high strung, oldest child, overachiever, type A, fast talking New Yorker,”- but I would like to go back to the very beginning of that oldest child’s life. What is your very earliest memory of beauty?
CHERYL YANNOTTI FOLAND: That’s a great question. Growing up I was quite a tomboy. I was a competitive swimmer all the way through school- actually, all the way through university. So my biggest desire in terms of beauty was always to make sure that I took care of my hair well enough so that the chlorine didn’t turn it green! So it was always all about these special treatment shampoos so that my hair didn’t look green.
But outside of that, we didn’t really wear a lot of makeup early, myself and my sister, when we were young, but I do remember having every flavour of the Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. Now, I’m going to completely give away my age, but I collected every single one of them. I think strawberry was my flavour. To me, that was beauty.
My mom loved fine fragrances, so I always loved smelling her, smelling her on me after she would give me a hug or I sat next to her. At a young age we would wear either her fine fragrance or, as a kid, I used to love Anais Anais.
That’s how simply beauty was for me as a kid- a tomboy, type A student, I’d just throw that Lip Smacker on and that’s about all I ever did. Beauty was not in my head back then at all.
I understand that prior to working in beauty you had a career in finance, but when you were younger, when you were that tomboy, what did you think you were going to be when you grow up?
I think that I had grandiose dreams of… I loved interior design, rearranging furniture in the house with my mom. I love animals. I love dogs. I thought maybe I’d be a vet. And I think that all of these ideas were in my mind, but were not necessarily possible. Being the oldest child, it was impressed upon me to think responsibly and to think about what you really can have a solid career in. And I’m not necessarily sure that becoming an interior decorator or designer would have actually over really well- at least not with the first born.
Being born to a nurse and a lawyer… I wasn’t going to be either. So I went to the next best route and I went to school for business and ended up in finance. I guess I was decent at numbers as a kid. So that was the choice that I made.
But even still to this day, I love design. I think a little bit of that creativity comes out, obviously, with my brand. So in some ways I’ve ultimately, as an adult, gotten there in terms of my design dream.
I think that’s so often the case with people that are in the creative industries, that your skills can apply to a number of different disciplines.
I agree, I agree.
So you spent upwards of 20 years working in finance, more specifically in private equity, and around half of that time was actually spent working in the prestige and mass beauty space. I have a couple of questions about this time. Firstly, were there any lessons that you picked up during that very early part of your career in finance that you find you’re still applying to your work now?
Yeah, absolutely. I think that I learned a lot about discipline and attention to detail. It was very much a structured environment. I think that everything I do today, and even along the way in my career, I think just the core foundation of the understanding of finance business, how things run and the analytics around it has really helped me to shape exactly what I’m doing today.
I do really, truly believe that it was the journey along the way and the various individual experiences that I’ve taken from each and every one of them that gave me the confidence to go out there and launch my own brand and take a step towards entrepreneurship. So it was a great foundation. A great start. I wouldn’t trade it in for the world.
Secondly, while we’re talking about that time, can you talk me through your role at Arcade Marketing? I thought this was so interesting, and I think it’s interesting for consumers to hear about that side of beauty, the sampling and so forth that goes on before the products actually land on the shelves. They don’t just magically appear, as it turns out.
No, they don’t!
Arcade was a very interesting part of my journey. It was probably about 10 to 12 years into my career within the private equity sector. As part of this team we had identified Arcade Marketing and this business as a company to purchase or acquire. What I was tasked with was really looking at areas to grow the business- different customers, different brands. They’re still around today, actually. They’re very much in need today with the limitations around testers and how customers are going to see, feel, touch and experience a product. Obviously having samples to do so right now, during this time, is very important. But Arcade provides sampling solutions to the industry. Every category from fragrance, to haircare, to colour cosmetics, to skincare. There’s a very strong understanding that once you get a trial use of a product into the hands of the consumer, that they have the opportunity to try before they buy, and that the conversion and the return on a brand’s investment to spend their marketing dollars on sampling is a home run.
So at Arcade, I started in Manhattan because I was from the East Coast. I lived in New York and I had no intention of ever leaving! When I started with Arcade, we were focusing on all the big brands in New York, and taking the business from what was predominantly sampling of fragrances, so those scent strips in magazines that you’d peel back and you can experience your fragrance or cologne, and expanding from fragrance into colour cosmetic sampling and skincare.
And it’s brilliant! You have to understand the cost of it and you have to understand that the return on your investment could be tremendous. It’s launching a product at the same time that you are offering a sample. And then how do you actually execute that sample? Do you put it into a magazine? Do you have it in a shopping cart as a smart sample with some of your retailers? Gifts with purchase at retail counters or in store? It’s brilliant. I had a lot of fun. I met incredible people. And to be honest with you, if I hadn’t had this sort of stint, almost nine years with Arcade, I would have never, ever been introduced to the beauty industry. I would have never become so passionate about it. And I would have never launched the brand.
And what was your personal approach to beauty like during that particular time? What is the definition of that “fast talker New Yorker” beauty ethos?
Very interesting from then until now, for sure! A lot of who I was, that beauty consumer from back, so we’re talking 2004 2005, was a completely different consumer to who I am today. The evolution of who I have become in terms that beauty consumer is really what the brand [lilah b.] is all about.
It is a very different philosophy of how your mindset works when it comes to how much product do you need and how much product do you really want to use? Back in New York I was frivolous, crazy, chaotic, and had to have the next hottest new product- probably 90% of the product in my vanity was never used more than once. That was sort of who I was back then. I definitely fussed a lot more, wore a lot more makeup, flustered my hair more. Everything was about more, more more.
When I transferred out to California with Arcarde, I learnt a new way of life. It was simpler, it was easier. It was minimalistic. I don’t know that I would have ever really transformed had I not had this complete cultural difference here. It was just the way people were, it was the better work life balance. It was… everything was just simple and easy. And so with that came this different mindset of “I don’t need all that makeup,” and “I don’t need all those clothes.” That evolution really led to the brand.
But the ethos of that fast talking New Yorker, gosh, has it changed?! It’s a complete transformation.
You’ve mentioned that you moved to California with Arcade, and the intention was to only stay short term- but something like 14 years later and you’re still on the West Coast! I was going to ask what it was about California that you loved, and clearly still love so much, but I imagine it’s got a lot to do with that slower lifestyle.
Yeah, and I have to be completely honest with you. When I first came out here, I signed up for a two year project and I thought “Yeah, I’ll never leave New York. Never, absolutely. I won’t end up fitting in here. This is too slow for me.” And yes, two years in, I started to fit in.
At first I was this crazy fast talking fish out of water. It was very hard, from a business perspective, because I still was very “New York,” both good and bad. I really recognise that the life I was living was not very healthy, in more ways than one- just the pace and everything that came along with it. Out here I felt healthier. I felt lighter. I felt happier. A lot of it had to do with a more paired down, less is more approach to everything in my life. So I became addicted to the lifestyle out here and adopted this new found philosophy of simple and minimalistic. And here I am!
I fell in love with California in and of itself. And then, a few years in, I fell in love with my husband and there was no reason to leave.
So you had quite a big lifestyle change, and obviously your approach to beauty changed over that time as well. At what point did you start to identify a gap in the beauty market and perhaps just become a bit disillusioned with the industry as it stood at the time?
I think it was a combination of a lot of things along the way.
When I was first out of school, Bobbi Brown was my girl. She made it simple. She made it easy. She clearly didn’t have the thousands of skews that she has today, but it was very simple.
It was for my mom, it was for me, it was for my sister. We’re all different skin types, tones and ages, and I missed that. Even along the way, through my years of frivolous spending and being that crazy beauty consumer, I missed the simplicity of it all. I had never, from then until I began to think of the development of what kind of brand I wanted to create, I had never really come across a brand that made me things so simple, easy, elegant, sophisticated and really just truly timeless.
Along the way, obviously with Arcade’s business and growing that business with them, it became a very fruitful career because all of these brands had multiple launches, and their launches were more business for me. It was just a wonderful almost-decade. But during that time and all of this incredible success, it was a true eyeopener to me that consumers are just pushed all of this product. And is it necessary? Do they need it? Is it just confusing and cluttering the world of colour cosmetics in particular even more? It was sort of can I create something with so many things, the different touch points that I had to hit, but can I bring things back to basics, sort of like Bobbi Brown, making things simple again. Making beauty simple again.
It really, truly, was just an evolution.
So you’re starting to look at the market, you’re thinking about all of these things you realise you want to simplify it. Do you recall any one specific moment in which you thought “Okay, that’s it. I need to start this brand.”?
Yes. It was really a career decision. We were about ready to put Arcade up for sale, and the crossroad that I hit at that time was would I stay, would I go back to New York, and what have you learned and what is this little fire in your belly that you’ve been kind of spinning about? I’m not sure that had I not hit that crossroad, then I would have pulled the trigger as quickly as I did. But I was always thinking throughout the last three to five years [at Arcade], I was always thinking about that one brand, that white space. There were a lot of things that I felt about this white space that I could complete. So it was more along the lines of “What do I want to do next?” Having this sort of “Aha” moment of what it would look and feel like. And that excited me.
I do think that, along the way, working with the big conglomerates in New York and sitting around the table with all of these incredible chief marketing officers and creating wonderful launch strategies with their samples was very different than moving out to California and sitting around the table with the most amazing, inspiring passionate soulful founders. They were inspiring. They really excited me. I’m not really sure that I would have had the nerve to give up my 21 year career and say “Let’s go for it” unless I saw just how happy and passionate they were and what they were getting out of the creation of their brands.
So probably a combination of all of the above.
So where to from there? I understand that lilah b. spent something like 18 months in development. Can you talk me through that period?
Sure. That period was a lot of fun. I think that development, while fun and exciting, is a lot of work- and I’m all about the end result. So it’s really seeing the package of what you’ve created at the end of the day. That was just incredible.
But 18 months in development meeting with and interviewing, if you will, various different labs and packaging suppliers- you name it! It was a very interesting road. We’re talking about six and a half years ago now, and there’s not a lot of labs that will pay attention to you when you’re little, itty bitty, tiny. So you don’t have all of the options that a lot of the larger brands do with big budgets and big distribution. Starting off as an indie brand, and I know I’m not the only one that would say this, I think that it [finding a lab] is the number one challenge. I found the most incredible labs and suppliers early on that supported me because they believed in the philosophy of my brand and what I was creating. I also had met a lot of people along the way, while I was at Arcade. I had developed relationships and I had credibility in the industry. So I feel very, very fortunate that a lot of them took a chance on me.
But 18 months! It was creating packaging, creating the formulas of every single product. We launched with a very, very small curated line. At that point it was only 11 skews. It was very tight, but our whole philosophy was along the lines of keeping things simple. It really the first profound introduction to a really simple collection that can still give you a complete, finished look.
I imagine part of the the difficulty as well is because you have such an emphasis on these beautiful botanical ingredients. When you start going to chemists and formulators and you tell them “This is the sort of line of ingredients that we want to hero,” they put it in the too hard basket and say “Okay, well here are some much cheaper alternatives that are far easier to work with.”
Yes. Yes, and I think that one of my biggest challenges is that I don’t have a chemistry background at all. On the beauty side of the business, I was more on the marketing and product development side. That’s where I played. So I didn’t have that lingo. I knew what I wanted to be in and out of my product formulations when I started to develop the brand six and a half years ago. The US really didn’t have a lot of labs that were as innovative and forward thinking as the EU. The EU regulations and restrictions are so much greater, the banned ingredients there are huge compared to what we practice here in the US. So for me, knowing the clean beauty and healthy beauty was not only important to me, but would obviously be the new norm at some point which we’re seeing it in a big way today, I decided to work with labs in Italy, in Milan. I work with three different labs in Milan because it felt like they were already… they had so many banned ingredients, they already were so far ahead of the curve. And then I really just had to give them my inspiration, which was wanting everything to be not only healthy and clean, but high performance without compromising anything like longevity or efficacy.
And then I obviously had to put a twist into it all and tell them that I wanted every two, three or four different things. So I challenged them long and hard, but I think they’re grateful because obviously we’ve all grown and learned during the process.
Now, an element that I never really spend a tonne of time on in these conversations is the packaging because, you know, packaging is packaging. But in the case of lilah b. the packaging deserves a moment. I imagine most people listening to this will have experienced it, but my goodness, I’ve never come across anything like it. What were your prerequisites and how did you go about creating something that is so luxe?
Thank you. I think a lot of what went into the brand, or things that I truly felt were missing for me as a prestige beauty consumer… there were a couple things. Number one, I know that I spent a lot of money on beauty products that, after bumbling around in the bottom of my bag or my makeup kit for a week or a couple of weeks, would look horrible. You know, they’d break they’d crack, they would look horrible. And they were luxury, beautiful brands that uou spent a lot of money on. And so the first item that I checked off my list was that the packaging has got a look and feel luxe if I’m going to claim that this brand is going to be a luxury brand. I wanted the product to last and I wanted it to feel fabulous. So first and foremost, that’s what I focused on. I wasn’t going to develop something in plastics or anything that wasn’t durable. So I started thinking about what that would be.
Also, growing up in New York in the eighties and nineties, Tiffany & Co.’s designer, Elsa Peretti, was so popular. I loved every piece that she designed, and I tried to collect as much as I could. Every birthday or Christmas I would ask for another piece of hers, whether it was jewellery or a paperweight. Everything about her designs made me happy- they were organic, sensual, free flowing, they just feel so fabulous in your hand even when you’re playing with a necklace of hers.
So I thought about her when I was thinking of organic shapes and designs. I didn’t want hard edges or hard corners. So we custom designed a component that looks and feels like a pebble. We have a small and a large, so I guess you’d say a stone and a pebble. It feels hefty and substantial. It feels like this incredible, sensory experience when you touch and feel it. It really is in line with the inspiration from Elsa Peretti.
But yes, thank you. I love our packaging. We get so much incredible feedback, especially the durability and the fact that you can just wipe it down and it looks fabulous months from when you bought it.
Another element of the brand that has a little bit of a story that I love is the name. Tell us- who is lilah b. named after?
It’s so funny because in every single interview, or if I’m in store with customers or sales staff, everyone thinks Lilah must be my daughter. And I guess she sorta kind of was my daughter. Lilah was my Rhodesian Ridgeback- my dog. Lilah was a huge, huge part of my healthier, new found life here in California. Very soon after I came to California I got Lilah, and she was part of daily runs and hikes and being outdoors and she really forced me to focus on other things and have a better balance. I was always just worried about myself and work, work, work. So she was part of that transformation. Unfortunately she passed away last summer at 10 and a half years, but she’s still a part of the brand that will live on forever.
You launched in 2015. I read that when you first told your husband that you had plans to launch a brand where the goal was to encourage women to pare back they beauty routines, he was a bit skeptical and didn’t quite understand how that could work as a business model. I understand that that would be very confusing to some people! His response aside, what was public reception on launch?
It’s this sort of interesting backwards mindset, right?! Sort of what I was trying to achieve all along is “Let’s make beauty simple again,” and I think from a business perspective my husband had a right to be shocked. I said “I want to launch a brand that’s going encourage women to buy less, not more, product.” I’m not really sure how that makes money or is a true model of a business. But I get where he was coming from! I was thinking more along the lines of this new found mindset and what was so needed in the industry.
So when consumers and people out in the industry learn about our philosophy and understand that, because every single product is so multitasking and that you really truly only need a few products, I’m really teaching them to be mindful and thoughtful of their purchases to declutter, to simplify. I really think that everyone wants to do that. I just don’t know that they know how to.
The response has been incredible. As they learn more about the brand, they become more in tune with what the philosophy is all about. I don’t think there’s anyone out there, as fabulous as we all want to look, we all want it to be easy. Who wants to take a makeup artist home with you to apply 50 products?! So the response has been fantastic, more so now than even at launch, because I just think it’s this overwhelming change of mindset. You want cleaner ingredients, you want to know what you’re wearing and why you’re buying it. And are you going to use it? I’m much more mindful about how I’m purchasing these days.
I was thinking about that as well, because something that’s come up quite a bit recently is that now, just based on everything that’s going on in the world, people are so much more considered in their purchases. They want to know “I’m spending this amount of money, so I want to make sure this is a brand that is aligned with the way that I’m looking at the world.”
Yes, yes, absolutely. I think people have a lot more time to take a step back and look at this drawer full of beauty products, and I think it goes for everything. The shoes in your closet! I can’t tell you the last time I put a pair of heels on. It’s the clothes in your closet. It’s the food that you buy.
It’s the food that’s sitting in your refrigerator that now you might see multiple times a day because you’re going in and out of it. Whereas if you’re traveling all the time and you just don’t pay attention to those things. I think that beauty consumers today are very thoughtful and focused. Particularly now when a lot of people are home, what are they really using? What do they really need? Because there’s a big difference between what you buy and what you truly need. You’ve seen this very interesting shift, particularly over the past couple of months, in mindsets.
Which products did you launch with? You mentioned there were 11- were there any that were the real heroes?
Yes! There’s actually two heroes from the original collection.
Our split pan bronzer, which continues to be one of our best sellers. It’s a major multi-tasker. It’s your highlighter. You can contour. You can have a beautiful sun kissed glow. It’s not that muddy, flat bronze- it actually looks like you’re kissed by the sun. It’s super natural and bright and glowy.
Then our Divine Duo. It’s a lip and cheek product and a lot of the shades can actually be worn as a creamy eyeshadow. So a three in one product! It’s super creamy, formulated with aloe, agar and sea algae so it’s really super hydrating and nourishing. It’s kind of hard to make sure you nail every single task, which is the challenge I’ve given to my lab over and over. But how often can you actually put a beautiful pigmented bold a lip colour on your cheek and have it blend the way you’d like it to, rather than just a stain that doesn’t move. So it’s one of our of our biggest heroes.
I’m glad you’ve said that because I wanted to ask you about this. You actually forced me to eat my words a couple of years ago, which is not something I do often, when I first reviewed your product because I had said for such a long time that with multitaskers, they are rarely high performing in all of their tasks- you’ll get a lip to cheek tint, it might look beautiful on the cheeks and feel awful on the lips or vice versa. And then I tried the Divine Duo, and I had to go back on everything I had said! So, a broad question, but how do you do it?!
There’s two things. Number one, I’ve bought multitaskers in the past and they’ve only been able to perform in one way, and we’ve been disappointed in the other claims. I was never, ever going to claim anything with my entire line that I didn’t stand behind as a beauty user and consumer myself. So yes, it was very challenging and it continues to be challenging, as we work through product development and new innovation, to make sure that every product is a multitasker. I said that I was going to encourage women to have to purchase less product, so then they’ve got to have two or three different products in one. I also think that, early on, our less is more philosophy really turned into talking to customers, consumers, lilah b. fans about the idea of three is all you need. Three products, three lilah b. products, and you have a bag full of makeup. And in order to do that, then I really truly have to be able to do so many different things and achieve a beautiful, finished look, because three products really seems a little bit light, but not if there’s two or three different products in each one and that they perform to perfection with every task.
It’s a lot of fun. It’s very challenging. We launched a couple of new new products earlier this year where we were launching them with two tasks and all of a sudden on my morning run I said “Well, why can’t it do this as well?” And we’d go back to the drawing board for a third task. It’s fun! Pack it all in.
I would love to hear more about that product development process. How long does it take from the conceptualisation of a new product through to it being available for consumers to purchase?
I’d say at a minimum, if you’re fast tracking something, which we try not to do anymore, I’d say it’s probably nine months. I think to give yourself enough time to really nail something to perfection, because you’ll have lots of various different submissions and options to make, I’d say it’s a good 12 to 18 months. So you’re probably working on a pipeline of several different launches ahead of you at least a year or two, a year and a half.
As far as coming up with these new products goes, are you constantly thinking about what is going to come next or do you prefer to work based on demand- or a bit of both?
I think that’s a great question. I think it’s a bit of both. There’s obviously been categories in the line that we had some holes where we were missing, so I would gravitate towards creating something that would fill that hole whether it was an eye product, or we launched a beautiful tinted lip oil last year and we didn’t have anything that really had that beautiful glossy treatment feel. So that was sort of a hole in the collection. I think about what the collection looks like as a whole, what I think we are missing.
But I also get very interesting feedback from either my field sales team or customers in general. And then we’re always looking at what is trending, but really just trying to stay cool and true to who we are, because at the end of the day, I know I’ve mentioned Bobbi Brown, but my desire is to have created a brand that is timeless and ageless. So there’s nothing in my line that, I hope, 10 years from now or 20 years from now, you think… I mean, look, the Bonne Bell Lip Smacker.
I was about to say! It’s funny that you’ve launched a lip oil that has that gloss finish on the lips! You’ve taken it back to day one!
I sure have. I sure have. And I mean, that’s a classic, right? So making sure that everything that we create is something I truly believe in and something that I believe has a really strong vitality, and will last the test of time.
lilah b. was picked up by Barney’s within its first three months, and it was picked up by Net-a-Porter within five months, meaning that it was available in something to the tune of 170 countries in less than a year. How did global expansion of that level, and in that amount of time, change the way that you were operating?
I think the biggest change challenge was volume and product because, as I’ve mentioned, as a small brand you’re launching and you’re trying to hit minimum order quantities from your suppliers. So you’re trying to run the smallest amount of product because you don’t necessarily have this kind of distribution or volume just yet.
But partnering with someone like Net-a-Porter, we have the opportunity to have a greater reach and they make it easy for us. So many different markets was challenging from an inventory perspective, and we also hadn’t had, at that point, a true read of what our heroes were going to be. So the supply chain was very challenging. But it was fantastic. And what happened with Net-a-Porter in particular is you also get to find out where the brand is resonating. Who’s really gravitating towards clean, who’s gravitating towards a luxury clean brand that performs like a true, luxe colour cosmetics line. That was really interesting to see. And obviously that has helped me to make other decisions based on who we partner with and what markets we’d like to expand into internationally in a bigger way.
This leads me into my next question, because you are now stocked here in Australia, through Mecca, as well as all over the world in big retailers like Sephora, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. What are some of the big differences that you have seen between the ways that women from different regions are approaching beauty?
When we first launched the brand in 2015, we saw particularly with Net-a-Porter the strong reaction in the EU. The European beauty consumer was craving that simple chic sophisticated routine. Yhey were very mindful about ingredients, obviously in the EU they are much more strict, much more stringent on ingredients and what is banned and what is not, so [consumers were] really gravitating towards this luxe product, manufactured in Italy. So we initially saw that market was definitely a key market for us.
And then in the States, clean was really starting to build momentum. Originally it was organic, natural brands and consumers were always questioning whether or not they would find performance or pigments or would the product last. There really wasn’t anything that was luxe for that consumer in the States, or anywhere for that matter, who wanted to convert from that traditional, conventional colour brand, a luxe, prestige brand that they’ve loved their entire life, who do they transition over to? So that was very interesting to see, that evolution and that behaviour.
And then I think what has happened… I mean, you see it there in Australia, is that women are much more mindful. They’re much more mindful about what they’re buying and what they’re putting in their mouth, on their body, on their face. So as each market really embraces the evolution of clean, conscious beauty, we’re seeing which markets the brand is resonating even more and more in. It’s been really interesting. Mecca has, right out of the gate, been a tremendous partner. We already have a lot of fans there in Australia and New Zealand. So it’s exciting.
Myself included! You have been at the helm of a beauty brand for upwards of five years now and have been really a part of the beauty industry for more than 15 years. Over that time, what have been some of the biggest changes that you have seen within the beauty industry?
A great and interesting question. I would say over the period of 15 years, the most profound change or changes that I’ve seen is the importance transparency. That’s really the demand from consumers, more so than ever. I don’t think that anyone really ever would question a beauty brand, “Why are you launching something? What’s in it?” more so than today. So I think that, first and foremost.
Relevance. Why are you a relevant brand? What do you stand for? Whether it has to do with your story, your products or even who the founder is that represents the brand, the desire for authenticity is bigger and bolder now, more than ever before.
I also think that the popularity of indie brands has been just incredible, whether it’s skincare or colour cosmetics, and fragrance also has that really big indie popularity. It was always that the bigger brands were the names you heard about everywhere, particularly globally, And now people are very intrigued by indie brands that have a true personality and a true point of view that they can really understand and get to know intimately. I think that’s probably the biggest, in terms of the evolution and the changes I’ve seen over the past 15 years.
And what are some of the changes that you think we can expect to see over the next few years?
I think we’ll continue to see the demand for transparency and a focus on healthier ingredients. By way of colour cosmetics, I think you’re going to see a lot of colour brands really marrying colour cosmetics with skin beneficial ingredients. They can’t be empty products anymore. You can’t get away with that anymore. So I think you’ll continue to see a lot of that hybrid launching, particularly in the colour cosmetics category.
I think that a simpler, healthier routine is what, in the next five to 10 years, is going to resonate the most. I can’t imagine that it’s going to go back to what it was pre-clean, because I think today, this is clearly the new norm.
Cheryl, my final question- what is next for lilah b.?
We have a lot of things cooking. Obviously the moment in time that we’re in has sort of put some delays in things, but we have a lot of fun things happening, particularly for next year but even the back half of this year.
We launched as a clean colour brand, focusing on colour cosmetics and really helping you to achieve that beautiful look with your makeup or your colour cosmetics. But earlier this year we launched skin prep products, our Aglow skin prep products, which really move more into the treatment realm and prepping your skin, because obviously your makeup is only going to look as good as your skin does and wonderful and beautiful as your base is. That has been a game changer for us. I think the timing- everyone is stuck at home and they’re loving our skin prep products. But I also think that it’s, once again, bringing things back to basics. Our skin prep is a trio of three products, so once again, three is all you need.
So we’ll continue to expand there, because it’s working. Women are loving it. It’s definitely a category that I was extremely excited about. I was nervous because I wasn’t really sure. We launched as a clean colour brand and I wasn’t really sure how the response would be, but it’s been pretty incredible. So we’ll see expansion more in that category and focusing not just on pigmented products, but also on making sure we’re taking care of our overall beauty routine.
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Photography and styling: Gemma Watts
