LIP SERVICE
Local success story Bite Beauty is dominating the natural lip-care market,
Lots of retailers will sell you a lipstick, and even let you try it on first. Here’s one that will make you a custom tube right in front of your eyes, let you clean and exfoliate your lips before testing and give you a snack and a drink, too.
This experiential approach to makeup comes at Lip Lab on Queen St. W., the first Canadian bricks-andmortar home for local success story Bite Beauty.
The five-year-old company carved out and dominated the natural lip-care market. Its founder, Susanne Langmuir, 48, launched the company in 2011 after more than a decade in the cosmetics industry, mainly as a creator of perfumes.
Concerned about chemical use in the industry and wanting to do a consumer-facing brand, she lit upon lips.
“Lips are the most relatable. If you put on mascara and a lipstick, you’re ready,” Langmuir says.
Thanks to her contacts in the industry, Langmuir launched her company with a relationship with retailer Sephora.
From the start, her product lines — lipsticks, pencils, crayons and lipcare products made by hand with natural ingredients and zero petrochemicals — sold well. Sephora continued putting Bite in more stores. Over the first three years, Langmuir’s company experienced 30 per cent growth.
That came thanks mainly to selling through Sephora — the brand is now in 980 of the chain’s stores worldwide. “If you’re in a retailer like that, you’ve got to hang on for dear life,” Langmuir says. Bite’s labour-intensive manufacturing process means one batch creates around 15,000 lipsticks, a fraction of what big name cosmetics companies produce.
In 2012, Langmuir and her team did a pop-up at the Yorkdale Sephora, showing how they make lipstick. Customers loved it. “It was a light bulb moment,” says Langmuir, who then began scouting locations in Toronto and New York City.
An eight-foot-wide space came up in Soho first. In 2013, the company opened its first Lip Lab there. Today, it’s booked solid.
A year later, Langmuir sold Bite to French luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy. The company kept her on under the title of chief creative officer.
“They’ve been hands-off but supportive,” she says of the new arrangement. Stability and capital allowed Langmuir more choice, including moving her head office and production facility to a more spacious location on Caledonia Ave.
Langmuir and her team — now a staff of 120 — found this retail location on Queen, west of Bathurst St., a year ago, and did major renovations.
Customers can stroll in to buy a regular Bite product: there are 78 in total and that will grow to 125 by 2017. Or they can sit at the counter and have a staff member help them choose from 200 pigments — made in house at the “lab” in the back of the store that can be seen through glass walls — for the perfect colour, mixed down with their choice of finish (cream or matte or others), flavour and scent (all natural).
The whole process takes about 20 minutes: longer for putting together two lipsticks. Since you can’t get a service like this for a similar product anywhere else, expect Bite to take a further chunk out of the lip industry.