The Lip Bar's Melissa Butler: "Beauty doesn't look like one thing"
Unlike many beauty entrepreneurs, Melissa Butler, founder and CEO of The Lip Bar, wasn't a makeup or skin-care fanatic. Butler started her professional career at Barclay's, and her entree into beauty was driven by being frustrated with how women were judged by their looks -- this was especially true on Wall Street. "I oftentimes was having to show up for myself in a multitude of ways, thinking about what my hair looked like, what my makeup looked like, and also, ultimately, thinking about what my core work performance was," she said on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "In thinking about how I showed up and what beauty meant to me, I became incredibly frustrated -- frustrated with the beauty industry, its lack of diversity, not seeing people who look like me. [It] really was just this idea that beauty was linear. And I was like, 'Wait, no'. Beauty doesn't look like one thing. It looks like all things, and I'm included within that." In many ways, The Lip Bar, launched in 2011, was the opposite of what was prevalent in beauty at the time. "I very vividly remember the beauty industry and the media essentially putting the Kim K. look on a pedestal. That Kim K. look was supposed to be aspirational for every single woman in the United States. Meanwhile, only probably 2% of the women in the country look like her," said Butler. "It's like, 'Well, if she is the standard of beauty, then how am I to be made to feel?' That's something that I was questioning -- I was questioning it for myself, for my friends, for my family and just everyday women." The Lip Bar, which first debuted with lip products, launched with unexpected colors like purple, blue, yellow and orange. "We didn't even have a single red or nude lipstick... [That was] really to say I'm making a statement that beauty is a matter of self-expression," she said. Ten years later, the once DTC-only Lip Bar has expanded beyond lip to complexion products, launched in national retailers like Target and Walmart, and doubled its sales every year for the last four years.