Custom Cosmetics Brand Shespoke Kicks Off A Series Of Collaborations With A Billie Jean King Collection

Direct-to-consumer custom-blend cosmetics brand Shespoke is recognizing trailblazing tennis legend Billie Jean King with a collection that will kick off a series of collaborations with notable figures.

The collection consists of the Rally x BJK lipstick developed by the tennis star, who won 39 Grand Slam titles during her professional tennis career, available in four finishes—sheer, creamy, balm and matte—and Topspin, a shimmery lip gloss. The products’ shades are rooted in a purple in a homage to King’s signature bold lip. Purple, the color of Women’s History Month, symbolizes equality, dignity and justice. 

The lipstick and lip gloss will each retail for $39. The full five-piece collection is priced at $156. As part of the partnership, Shespoke is donating a portion of the proceeds from sales of the collection to the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative throughout 2022. King, a passionate advocate for gender pay equality, founded the initiative in 2014 to promote workforce inclusivity. 

“At our core, we’re all about personalization,” says Kelsey Groome, CEO of Shespoke. “The notion that beauty isn’t one size fits all is what the brand was founded on.”

Groome, a former investment banking executive, joined Shespoke in August 2020 to help the company grow. Actress Stephanie March and makeup artist Rebecca Perkins launched the concept for the brand at a station inside their former professional makeup studio Rouge, which started in 2013 in Manhattan. The duo met on the set of “Law and Order: SVU,” where Perkins was head of the makeup department and March played assistant district attorney Alexandra Cabot.

Customers loved that they could dream up their own cosmetic creations, and the custom cosmetics station at Rouge took off. As a result, March and Perkins decided to open a standalone Shespoke brick-and-mortar store in the SoHo neighborhood. It hadn’t been open long before the pandemic shuttered retail locations across the country.

When the store’s lease was up in June 2020, Shespoke pivoted to digital. “We took what was a wonderful and fun concept that was rooted in a store in SoHo and made it scalable,” says Groome. “We have built a business model that is really about multichannel distribution. We’re big believers in channel diversification. We’re direct-to-consumer right now, but we are in conversations with retail partners. The consumer who shops in-store and online just has a longer lifetime value.”

Technology is a key component of Shespoke’s expansion strategy. The brand has a partnership with color company Pantone, and a proprietary technology dubbed The Shespeaker that enables customers to fashion personalized lipstick online and the brand to  produce “one lipstick just as easily as 20,000 lipsticks and to do that very quickly,” according to Groome. The technology is designed as a widget that can be dropped into any third party e-commerce website.

The complete customization process and checkout can take place without the consumer leaving the third-party site, but Shespoke produces and fulfills the order. Since moving to an online-only model, Groome says Shespoke’s business is bigger than when it had a store. She declined to disclose provide the company’s sales, but she shares that its repeat customer rate is 25% to 30%. “We’re really good at retaining customers,” says Groome. “I think that speaks to a great product.” 

Called Icon Series, Shespoke’s series of collaborations with icons like King and like-minded brands will drop merchandise at a pace of no more than one release per quarter. Groome says, “We really want to have a concentrated message on how we’re partnering with the icons and be able to make a meaningful impact to these foundations.”