Edgy Nail Polish Brand Kester Black Is Launching A Cosmetics Line

Embarking on a new direction in business requires equal parts foresight and courage. Kester Black founder Anna Ross has both in spades.

After seven years building a nail polish brand known for edgy colors, eye-catching aesthetics and planet-friendly formulas, Ross stepped into the color cosmetics realm by adding lipstick to its assortment in late 2019 and now plans to expand from lipstick to a complete color cosmetics range. The early performance of Kester Black’s lipstick gives her confidence it’s onto something with makeup. In the first two weeks the lipsticks were on the market, they accounted for almost 40% of the brand’s website sales.

“Lipsticks just seemed like the next logical step for color,” says Ross of Melbourne-based Kester Black’s entrance into cosmetics. Logical doesn’t mean easy. Learning an unfamiliar product category carried challenges, and it took three years of development before Ross was satisfied with a lipstick enough to release it. The lipstick is priced at $36.

“A friend of mine who works in product development told me, ‘You only get one chance to launch lipsticks, so they better be incredible.’ I am so glad she said that to me,” she says, adding, “I got an amazing formula that lasts all day. It’s not sticky, and it doesn’t dry your lips out.”

Ross is no stranger to a business pivot. In 2012, she was a fashion college graduate with a fledgling jewelry line when she began researching nail polish as a way to adorn her baubles. Failing to find nail polishes that were both cool and vegan, she decided to make and sell her own. Sales of the nail polish swiftly outperformed sales of the jewelry, tripling the revenue of Kester Black within three months. And so the brand, which is named for Ross’s favorite New Zealand vacation destination, changed its model.

Back then, the stakes were decidedly smaller. Today, the brand is most widely recognized in its antipodean homeland, but its distribution has gone international. It’s made inroads in Europe, where it has a presence at United Kingdom’s Liberty, Germany’s KaDeWe, Sweden’s Nordiska Kompaniet and Netherlands’ Nourished Nederland. Kester Black has robust sales in Malaysia, too. In the country, it’s available at the retailers Fashion Valet and Robinsons. Ross has deliberately held off of pushing her brand into the United States until it moved beyond the nail niche. She believes a broader offering is essential to appeal to a retailer such as Sephora.

“Lipsticks just seemed like the next logical step for color.”

To test the cosmetics waters, Kester Black presented a capsule collection of six matte liquid lip colors. “We picked shades we knew would sell well and appeal to a broader audience. Kester Black is known for fun colors, but we knew that nude shades would sell better. We will launch more vivid colors later when the sales volumes increase,” says Ross. To stoke buzz for its lipsticks among its nail polish customers, the brand unveiled them with $58 limited-edition gift sets that paired the lipsticks with nail polishes matching them.

Influencer partnerships were also leveraged to spread the word, and the lipsticks will be featured in the U.K.’s Cohorted Beauty Box early this year. Ross says, “My gut feeling is that people are brand loyal when it comes to lipsticks, and we think that, once people try them and see how great the formula is, they will consider switching.”

The initial results at retail have been promising. Liberty and Nourished Nederland have enlarged their orders of the lipsticks. However, Ross concedes Kester Black’s cosmetics have been a tougher sell to other international stockists. She says, “In larger retailers like NK in Sweden, for example, nail and lips are on different floors of the store. With six shades [of lipstick], they wouldn’t give up any of their existing space for it.”

Behind the scenes at Kester Black, Ross is shoring up the brand’s infrastructure. She’s been setting up warehouses in Europe and the U.S., and establishing global e-commerce sites. Ross says, “We’ve been doing all this work just to make sure we can scale. Since we launched our U.S. website, we’re almost generating as much revenue off it as we are in Australia.”

“We’ve been doing all this work just to make sure we can scale.”

She attributes the surge in Kester Black’s U.S. traffic to a search engine presence generated by the brand’s blog. Kester Black hasn’t engaged in paid advertising in the U.S. “We have some very exciting things on the table for 2020 with new major retail partners and, of course, new products. So, we aren’t actually looking to make our U.S. play until the end of the year,” says Ross. “Until then, we will keep an eye on that website and see if we can find out more about our customer from there.”

Kester Black is keen on building one market at a time. Until last year, its growth was fueled by reinvesting profits. Last year, Ross secured outside funding for Kester Black, selling a 3.5% stake in the company to an undisclosed private investor. Although she declines to reveal the amount Kester Black secured, Ross shares the funds will be put primarily toward product development and fortifying its position in the U.K. A natural, vegan mascara is in the works and slated to premiere in the near future.

As Kester Black expands into a complete color range, Ross believes the brand’s design focus and ethical production will help distinguish it from its cosmetics competitors. On top of its vegan formulations, Kester Black is certified as being cruelty-free, carbon-neutral, Halal and a B Corp. Ross says, “[The B Corp process] was really hard, but worthwhile, and that accreditation essentially dictates how we run our business today.”

Customers don’t have to be hunting for socially-conscious brands, though, to be drawn to Kester Black. “What’s fun about Kester Black is that, first and foremost, it’s a design brand. You get beautiful packaging. You feel good when you receive it in the mail. It’s fun. The color is always great, and the product is fabulous,” says Ross. “We don’t want to ram [the fact that we’re] vegan down people’s throats because we want people to buy it because it’s a fantastic product and the brand is great. And, then, we want to slowly introduce those people who are not vegan or not thinking about ethical purchasing…[to] that concept in a really positive way.”