Sara Bumby has a stubborn sweet tooth. For the longest time, candy and cupcakes weren’t safe from it, especially in the office.
“Candy was a line item in our books, and it was not good,” says the founder of Novare Beauty, creator of Behave-Aid merchandise, and president of beauty brand consultancy First Impact New York. “One day, I found Trader Joe’s cupcakes at work, and I said, ‘That’s it.’ To get our habits under control, we decided that, if we were going to do our own brand, it would have solution-based products made for us. I developed the formulas to keep my snacking under control.”
Novare Beauty’s first product is a lip moisturizer called Kiss Your Cravings Goodbye that’s designed to freshen breath, smooth puckers and diminish hankerings for junk food. Priced at $20 for retail and available in three varieties – peppermint, wintergreen and cinnamon – it contains a natural blend of plant extracts, essential oils and conditioning agents, including lemon balm, white tea, and sweet almond, jojoba and sunflower oils, and is intended to be a behavioral modification tool, not an appetite suppressant.
“It helps you recognize that you are thirsty. Most people are thirsty, but you snack mindlessly because your body can’t tell the difference between thirst and hunger. If you recognize that you are thirsty and you hydrate, you will lose the desire for junk food,” says Bumby. “It helped us get back to work.”
Bumby has certainly been doing a lot of work. Kiss Your Cravings Goodbye hit the market in February, but she realized quickly its packaging needed to be retooled to convey a message focused on wellness and nutrition. It has moved from a white, angular component to a cylindrical component with a black cap and white base. On the exterior box, information has supplanted images. The term “Behave-Aid” is prominent and a graphic of a bitten lip has been eliminated.
“It helps you recognize that you are thirsty. Most people are thirsty, but you snack mindlessly because your body can’t tell the difference between thirst and hunger. If you recognize that you are thirsty and you hydrate, you will lose the desire for junk food.”
“This is for people who are struggling to stick to diets, cleanses and healthy lifestyles,” says Bumby. “We should be selling it to the nutrition and wellness market because the people in that market want a product like this. This doesn’t belong with lipstick and lip gloss.”
Walter Craven Design Studio assisted with the redesign, and input from Bruce Worley Jr., president and CEO of Better Sales and Brand Management Group, a retail strategy firm responsible for growing Novare Beauty’s mass-market distribution, and Karen Nathanson, president of What’s Hot Inc., a sales team handling independent boutiques, was important to the early evolution of Kiss Your Cravings Goodbye.
“I don’t think we understood the value of what we had, and it really took somebody else looking at the product and saying what it is and what it’s not that made a huge difference,” relays Bumby. “We were really trying to make it fit in the beauty space.”
The wellness and nutrition orientation opens Kiss Your Cravings Goodbye to a broad group of consumers concerned about the effects of poor eating on their bodies. Bumby refers to its audience by their psychographic characteristics rather than the typical demographic traits of age, income, location, education and so on.
“I don’t think we understood the value of what we had, and it really took somebody else looking at the product and saying what it is and what it’s not that made a huge difference. We were really trying to make it fit in the beauty space.”
“They’re the ones making active efforts to be healthier, whether they’re 25-years-old or 55- to 65-years-old,” she says. “It’s the person who’s joined the gym or busy moms working and juggling a family, but still trying to make better choices.”
Kiss Your Cravings Goodbye has launched on Amazon through a third party, although an Amazon storefront is set to debut soon, and at a number of spas and gift stores. Bumby envisions the product at chains like Pharmaca, Harmon and Walgreens as well as apothecaries.
“My personal goal for Kiss Your Cravings Goodbye is to see a display of our products when I walk into Walgreens or Harmon and have people understand how they can use them to make healthier choices,” she says. “I love the experience of going into the store and seeing our [First Impact] clients’ products, so I’m really excited to be able to do that with these products.”
The lip moisturizer is only the start for Novare Beauty, which gets its name from the Latin word for “fresh start” or “make new.” The firm is building upon its Behave-Aid franchise, and is expected to branch into color cosmetics and haircare.
“There’s plenty of choices out there in standard skincare. That’s not what we do. We are here to address holes in the market, and it isn’t always going to be about wellness and nutrition,” says Bumby. “It may look disjointed at the beginning, but I promise we have a big-picture plan.”
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