Lip Service
by WIN Admin — published in Press Releases
How did you get the idea?
I was in Belfast on a night out and got a drink sent over to me. The barmaid told me to take care because drink spiking was rife in the city. When I got home I did some research on drink spiking detector kits and thought there was nothing out there that would be attractive for women to use, so I had a plan to couple the idea with a lip gloss product.
What was the development process like?
I contacted the company that manufactures the detector kits and they did a bespoke design for me and now make the product we sell in the lip gloss package. For the gloss itself, we looked into products from China but found the tones weren’t right so we sourced a manufacturer in the UK who worked with us to develop the colour range.
How did you increase exposure?
We blogged our product heavily and on the back of that we got an interview with an Australian television news channel which led to an Australian distribution deal in January this year. Through a PR campaign we got people blogging about us and the sales just took off. Now we are stocked in Superdrug and Tesco in the UK.
What was your financing means?
A friend invested £16,000 for a 40 per cent equity stake, with the rest of the financing coming through a bank loan. In total I raised around £54,000 to set the business up.
What next?
We can’t compete at the moment with the largest fashion players so I decided to concentrate our efforts on lip gloss. In future, not all our products will come with a testing kit. We’re aiming to launch a quality collagen lip gloss at the middle to upper middle end of the market and we’ll be looking to bring out seasonal product ranges.
Source: smallbusiness.co.uk