Intro
When I was a kid I had an obsession with princesses. My parents were not fans of this, so my sister and I would spend hours pretending that we were Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor or any number of other famous people. At the age of 7, I decided that lipstick was the perfect accessory for these characters.
I’ve never been able to shake my obsession with lipstick – it was an essential part of my daily fashion wardrobe for years. Today, however, even my favourite lipstick brand no longer has the same charm as it did when I was a kid. The good news is that there are now several good options available which are both affordable and stylish enough to please most women.
The bad news is that they aren’t exactly cheap either – you can expect to pay between $30 and $50 per lipstick depending on brand and flavour.
So what’s the problem?
Well, aside from the fact that they are not terribly flattering on dark skin tones (which we cover in detail in this post) they also leave visible stains on your teeth and lips (sometimes lasting up to 24 hours!). You also need to contend with serious staining if you use regular lip glosses or eyeliners instead (which also leave stains).
What you need is a powder formula designed specifically for dry-to-normal skin types which will not stain your teeth or lips – but won’t be too thick either so won’t weigh down your lipstick either (in fact it will add some extra coverage). A good example of this is Park Avenue Princess Lipstick . It costs $35 for 0.15 fl oz (a little over 1/4 teaspoon) and is available in five shades: Pink Sugar, Coral Reef, White Sandalwood, Lavender Meadow and Avocado Oasis . Notice how it doesn’t stain your teeth or lips – but adds a little extra coverage to them too!
What do you think? Will you pick up one of these stashing devices?
Park avenue princess lipstick
Your product is your life. You are responsible for making it a better one. If you can’t make it better, then you’re not doing enough of what matters. The next chapter in your journey should be all about the magic of making your product a better one, and what you can do to make that happen.
Park avenue princess lipstick
If you are a female entrepreneur and you are looking for venture capital, about half of the businesses funding startups are women.
That’s all well and good, but now that we’ve found out that Facebook is allocating around one third of its funds to startups (in contrast to just 20% of venture capital which is directed at tech companies), we should also try to figure out why. What is it that makes women who are looking for funding more likely to succeed?
I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about this question since I got my first investor in the early days of my start-up Kettle, and I think the answer is actually very simple: all those cute little park avenue princess lipsticks.
I know what you may be thinking: after we talked about park avenue princess lipstick, I had nothing left to talk about! But consider this: if you take an equal amount of money from every single woman in America who is looking for venture capital, you will only get 0.2% of those dollars back. And if you do that with 0.2% going back to the female founders getting funding, then you will get no single woman going on stage with her new venture capital fund-raising pitch — because there aren’t enough women enough in America who want to put their money into startup ventures.
So here’s a question: if this affects us so much, why hasn’t it been more widely adopted? The answer might lie in the fact that investors tend not to look at women who are trying to enter a traditionally male domain like software engineering — but on the other hand there is no shortage of people who say they don’t care whether they ever see another product designed by a woman (which makes sense as so few products designed by men are successful). So maybe investors just don’t see it as important because they don’t really need it from their portfolio companies — or maybe we should be raising money from different kinds of investors anyway!
Park avenue princess lipstick
The first theme park in the United States opened in the town of Saratoga Springs, NY. It was called Saratoga Springs and it was the first of its kind in the world. The park is where a number of famous people have had their pictures taken; and most famously, Theodore Roosevelt is said to have been photographed there. But at that time, what really caught people’s attention was the fact that all of these famous people were dressed in very specific clothing: black dresses and black hats with lace trim.
But what they were wearing did not match at all: they wore white lace dress, open-toed shoes and white hats with lace trim. That’s right — this was a fashion disaster! But it wasn’t until much later that someone figured out why: no one knew how to make lace!
It took many decades for everyone to start buying lace again. And even then, only well after it had been made by machine (and only for a few years). Today, we wear dress shoes worldwide — but only a minority wear long-ish dresses and hats with lace trim (and even those few who do wear those kinds of shoes don’t care for them).
This is one reason why brands fail: because they fail to truly understand their market; worse yet, because their attempts to understand their market are opaque or ill-defined (as is often the case with startups).
In his book “The Lean Startup”, Eric Ries explains this further as follows:
“The problem is not simply that some markets are not big enough or interesting enough for entrepreneurs to solve with startups.”
He goes on to say “Rather, our problem has less to do with being too small than about being too big or uninteresting enough.” He argues “There are many products that make great ideas…but they don’t work well because there isn’t some simple way to test them.” Eventually everyone will be forced into going through an iterative process which involves trials and errors before getting things right. And then eventually everyone will start using what works best for them — which will cause businesses not just to fail but also make mistakes along the way:
“Marrying your product idea with your customer’s experience can be more valuable than anyone’s experience alone.” – Walter Isaacson (author of Steve Jobs)
Park avenue princess lipstick
A single example of this is the park avenue princess lipstick, a lipstick by the same name that is available for sale at Park Avenue for $28. (Park Avenue is a luxury department store in Manhattan). When you look at it and ask someone what it’s called, they will say: “It’s called park avenue princess lipstick.” So now we have to change that.
We are not talking about changing brand names here: we are talking about changing the way people think about our product and business. We need to change the way people think about our product and business.
The first step is to understand why we created this product in the first place. We did so because we wanted to satisfy one of our customers who said she wanted “lips that stay on all day!” It was an enormously ambitious goal — but one designed not only to satisfy her, but also do so in a highly attractive fashion. The way we achieved it was through a combination of things:
• Aesthetic appeal
• Comfort
• Versatility — being able to apply lipstick without having to worry about reapplying every two minutes; taking it off without having to worry about washing your face or worrying if you color your lips too much; feeling confident when wearing it; etc.— all these factors combined made park avenue princess lipstick an exceptionally attractive product that our customer wanted us to design and make
So, now, instead of thinking about how we can improve aesthetics, comfort and versatility, let’s turn our attention towards improving aesthetics, comfort and versatility through implications on other aspects of the user experience (e.g., usability or functionality)
This step may seem pretty obvious, but making a change like this doesn’t happen overnight — especially if there isn’t any pushback from users or customers (and particularly if there isn’t a clear reason why this needs fixing). If you don’t have any customers or users yet then you should definitely look into it more seriously before going ahead with it: as soon as you start making changes related directly to what users want — let alone indirectly — then you are putting yourself at risk for losing your existing customers and users (or even getting into serious battles with them). Don’t do this unless you are completely sure that these features will make your customers happy: if not do something else instead . . . .
Conclusion
As with all of my posts, I’ll focus on the idea and not the reality (at least not just yet).
As I said in the title, I’m going to leave this one for a few days.
There is a lot of interest in Park Avenue Princess Lipstick — people want to know if it will exist and what it will look like. So, let me tell you about it…