Serious Lip Balm was created by accident when I and Khara Koffel started making lip balms for colleagues, family, and friends as thank you gifts in 2014. The popularity of our balms blew up and when others demanded their piece of the balm action, we decided to launch a proper business selling lip balms, scrubs, and lotions. Now our products are available online, sold wholesale, and we attend at least a dozen or so consumer fairs across Illinois throughout the year.
The popularity of our products has allowed us to continue to expand our lines. We don’t just sell lip balm. We also sell beard balm, lip scrub, lotion bar, nipple balm, paw balm (for dogs), our serious fix healing balm for dry skin, serious whip, and branded merchandise. Most recently we launched our Serious Bug Balm, which is flying off the shelves and, more importantly, is helping our customers stave off nasty bugs, gnats, and mosquitoes in ways they’ve not experienced before.
Key to our success, in growing the business over the past five years, is our ability to easily and quickly adapt to trends, requests from customers and our quirky dispositions; we are anything but boring. We concentrate a lot of our marketing efforts on social media, primarily Facebook (with 5,700 followers) and Instagram because we can reach large numbers of people relatively inexpensively. We are also open to collaboration, which means we are always willing to learn and grow. Earlier this year, we collaborated with Dear Katie Brown – the glitter queen of cosmetics – to deliver a glitter lip balm, which went down a storm.
We believe strongly in good deeds, acts of kindness, and paying it forward. We are constantly on the lookout for nonprofits we want to support through Serious Lip Balm and our gooddoesgood.com initiative.
What we do and the joy our customers gain from using our products is extremely rewarding, but we are also proud to have been included in the Good as Gold Business Honor Roll earlier this year and to be shortlisted in this year's Local First Springfield Awards in the Emerging & Energized category.
We know there is still so much we can do to improve our business and our communities and so we will continue to work towards our vision of providing people with great quality, all-natural skincare products while making a positive impact on this beautiful world.
If you have any questions about business planning, development, marketing, etc. please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at seriouslipbalm@gmail.com we want to help and support other independent local businesses in the area!