The Lip Bar has worked its way to becoming a household name. After launching the brand in 2012, Melissa Butler had dreams of taking it to new levels and to redefine beauty. In ten short years, she has done just that and more. There is a long way to go still, but with her newly announced $6.7M in her latest funding round, the entrepreneur is excited to take TLB to the next level. 21Ninety spoke with the woman behind the brand all about her journey and the significance of this funding. Check it out below.
Zayna Allen: Melissa, let’s talk about your success with The Lip Bar. We’ve seen your success grow, what do you attribute the success to?
Melissa Butler: That’s a a good question. A lot of people wanna be entrepreneurs right now. Entrepreneurship is… it’s sexy. It’s like everybody wants to be a boss and people are looking for that singular answer, like, ‘how did this happen?’ And unfortunately, I don’t think there’s one specific thing. It’s everything. It’s consistency and my belief about myself, my belief about the business, the problem that I was solving, the community that I was building. So it’s a relentless pursuit of changing the way people thought about beauty. That’s how I got here, you know, 10 years later.
ZA: When you talk about changing the perception of beauty, what did you want to change about the perception about of beauty, especially Black beauty, when you first got into the business and has that changed from then till now?
MB: Not really, unfortunately. I think that in 2012, when I started The Lip Bar, literally, our model from day one was challenging the beauty standard. And what that meant for me at that time was sort of giving people the license to know that beauty doesn’t look like one thing. I wanted so desperately to challenge the beauty standard because I felt like we were operating under this guise that you had to look a certain way in order to be perceived as beautiful. And I think that that scope has widened a little bit. It’s slightly changing and it has like evolved a little bit over the years, but we are creatures of habit unfortunately, and it is rare that we are able to look at a human and look at that human for exactly who they are without that comparison.
It always brings me back to dogs, for example. There are so many breeds of dogs, right? And we have grown accustomed to that. We think that there are lots of cute types of dogs, but we don’t extend that very same mental capacity to humans. We’re not like, ‘hey, all of us are a little bit different and unique in our own way, and that’s also beautiful,’ we’re like, ‘mmm. But if she was this complexion, if she had this hair type, et cetera, et cetera.’ So it’s changed a little bit, but I think we still have a little work to do.
ZA: Let’s get back into the success of The Lip Bar. You all just announced $6.7 million in the most recent fundraising round. Let’s talk about the initiatives that you plan to use these funds for.
MB: We out here! We raised the money because I built The Lip Bar in such a scrappy way, almost too scrappy, and as an entrepreneur, growth is your goal post. And I’ve been able to grow it in a really meaningful way with very little. And my goal was to sort of take this new fundraising and wonder what would happen if I put significant investment in marketing, in people and my team, in processes and systems so that we can turn this small business into a medium size business and ultimately an enterprise level business?
The ride has been beautiful and oftentimes small business owners are sort of working with what they have and creating magic out of nothing. And I wanted to stop operating from a place of lack and really start operating from a place of abundance. I’m 10 years in this thing, I’ve already proven myself, I’ve done the internships, I’ve built the plane in the sky, you know, I’ve done all of those things. Now it’s time to put fuel on the fire and see how far and how wide it goes and grows.
I’m really excited because when you’ve been in it and you have a loyal customer base and you finally get your team right, it’s then just a matter of capital. Oftentimes founders think, especially earlier stage founders think, that money is the thing that solves their problems. And that’s frankly not true. But in our case, we had the product, we had the loyalty, we had the stores in terms of distribution, we had the story. Now, capital is the thing that’s going to be that difference in small business versus big business.
So yeah, that 6.7… We about to put it to work.
ZA: If you were to go back in time 10 years ago and tell Melissa from 2012 a lesson or a story from Melissa in 2022, what would you say? And then also I’m gonna challenge you a little bit… What would Melissa from 2012 think of Melissa from 2022?
MB: Melissa from 2022 would tell 2012 Melissa to never stop believing in herself. I would let her know that it’s okay to not do things the way other people do them because when you’re starting out, you know that you are underfunded or you don’t have all of the resources like a lot of the big businesses that you’re looking at as examples. Y’all are not the same and so oftentimes you can easily get defeated by thinking about what you don’t have. And I would just remind her that none of that sh*t matters. The only thing that matters is your confidence. So if you keep approaching business with confidence and trusting yourself and being unafraid to put yourself out there, there’s nothing you can’t do. I needed those reminders when I was younger and just starting out because I was sort of questioning if I was doing this right.
What 2012 Melissa could probably tell today’s Melissa… I would probably remind 2022 Melissa to never stop being naive and creative, when you are so new and fresh and your eyes are bright and you know nothing, you are unafraid to take risk because you don’t know any better. And so today, because I am sort of like a vet and a pioneer in this space of talking about inclusive beauty and authentic beauty, I sort of know the rules. I know how the industry works, I know the things that I’m supposed to do and not supposed to do. Like I’m following some of the rules that just work in beauty. Whereas starting out you don’t know any rules, so you just do whatever the f*ck you want. I would remind today’s Melissa that there’s still some room to explore and experiment and not follow the beauty rules.
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ZA: I absolutely love that. Moving forward with the Lip Bar, what are the newest products? Let’s talk about some of the new things that we have on the shelves!
MB: Man. So we have a lip called Rich Auntie. The name is fun and it’s a liquid matte lipstick, so it goes on like a gloss, but it drives matte and it lasts all day. And the goal in building Rich Auntie was basically to create another version of Boss Lady.
So Boss Lady is our best selling product in the entire company. Like literally since the day it launched, it’s a blue based red that works on every single complexion. Everyone has worn it from Taraji to Michelle Obama to Jill Biden. It’s been a fantastic run. And we were like, okay, what’s so special about this is that it’s so universal, everyone can wear it. And what if we created that universal pink? That’s where Rich Auntie walks in the door and really like rises to the occasion. It has sold out three times. It just launched in July and we cannot keep it in stock. It is literally sold out right now. We’re hoping that we can get it back in stock in a couple weeks.
We just extended our tinted moisturizers and our concealers, so we’re known for our fast face. Our fast face is designed for people to sort of get that, you know, ‘I woke up like this’ look in five minutes or less. And we do that by having very flexible products like our tinted moisturizer that is going to give you a slight cover up while also giving you SPF and moisture. We launched this product last year and people loved it so much, but everyone was saying that they wanted a couple more shades. So we had a crazy shade extension that just took place a couple weeks ago. So that’s sort of like, what’s what’s happening at The Lip Bar.
Next year we’re launching a ton of new products. We got some eyeshadows launching, we have a mascara launching in two weeks. So we have a lot of innovation in our pipeline. People will just have to keep following up with us.
ZA: I was just about to ask what the future of the Lip Bar is going to look like. What else are we looking forward to from The Lip Bar even if it’s outside of product? What growth do you see in the future for your company?
MB: We’re gonna double the business in 2023. I have no doubt about that.
We launched Thread, which is a secondary brand for BIPOC, and it’s really a form of like true beauty expression. It’s called Thread because the idea is no matter who you are or what you look like, your shape, your sexual orientation, et cetera, at the end of the day, we’re all humans and we’re connected by a thread. So I’m excited to continue building that business as well as TLB.