For many beauty brands, red-carpet placement with a major celebrity can take weeks and weeks of planning and cost thousands and thousands of dollars. That wasn’t the case with Good Light and “May December” star Charles Melton, who sported the brand’s The Taste Of Space Lip Milk on the Golden Globes red carpet.
Melton and Good Light co-founder and CEO David Yi have been friends for years and bonded over their shared experiences growing up as Korean Americans in small American cities (Melton is from Juneau, and Yi is from Colorado Springs). Four days ahead of the Golden Globes on Jan. 7, the pair struck up a conversation at the Unforgettable Gala, an Asian American awards event in which Melton was an award recipient, that led to Melton happily wearing Good Light’s latest product in front of an audience of more than 10 million Golden Globes viewers.
“He asked, ‘What are you up to?’ I told him we were launching Lip Milk, and he said, ‘We should do something with it together at the Golden Globes,’” recounts Yi. “This was Charles’s idea off the cuff. He really wanted to be able to be there as a friend. It meant so much. The internet went wild. Lip Milk sold out and instantly became our bestselling product. It’s still going.”
Good Light’s good luck is still going, too. Buoyed by The Taste Of Space Lip Milk, the brand expects to double sales and cross into profitability this year. The $16 product has landed in displays focused on lip products across Ulta Beauty’s around 1,400 locations in the United States. Good Light, a skincare brand that emerged from content destination Very Good Light and is dedicated to tearing down gender barriers, entered Ulta in 2022 and previously enlarged its footprint at the chain to 900 doors.
The Taste Of Space Lip Milk features a raspberry flavor that’s a nod to ethyl formate, a chemical partially responsible for the flavor of raspberries that’s believed to be in dust clouds at center of the galaxy. The product is designed to be a lip toner—Good Light promotes it as “your first step in lip care”—that can help make occlusive lip product work better.
“I saw that a lot of people would have dry lips after using an occlusive. It’s because an occlusive seals your lips. That means that, if your lips are already dry, there’s no hydration to seal in,” says Yi. “This lip care step includes mango seed butter, vegan collagen and vitamin B5. It’s going to prep, plump and moisturize like no other.”
“It’s going to prep, plump and moisturize like no other.”
Prior to The Taste Of Space Lip Milk, Good Light had always made a product available in its direct-to-consumer channel simultaneously with announcing the product launch. With The Taste Of Space Lip Milk, it spaced out (pun intended) the interval between the announcement and the launch to generate buzz. Subsequent to its reveal at the Golden Globes, the product went live on Good Light’s website on Jan. 17.
Along with Melton wearing Taste Of Space Lip Milk on the red carpet, Good Light distributed packages to 200 influencers in advance of the product’s launch to spread the word. In the past, influencer seeding wasn’t been a big part of Good Light’s marketing. Yi figures the brand would generally send out 20 to 50 packages to key editors and friends, but it’s decided to heighten its influencer program and has brought on two team members to handle influencer outreach.
Good Light’s site was the only place to buy The Taste Of Space Lip Milk for a month, and customers wiped it clean of 5,000 units within a week of the product’s launch. Since its debut, The Taste Of Space Lip Milk has contributed 50% of Good Light’s total sales. In February, the brand’s sales were up 141% from January, and its TikTok viewership skyrocketed 257% in the same period. On social media, it’s garnered over 10 million views. Good Light’s online conversion rate climbed 111% from last year.
In March, The Taste Of Space Lip Milk joined Soko Glam’s assortment, and the K-Beauty e-tailer had a month-long retail exclusive on it in advance of Ulta carrying the product. Good Light’s retail network extends beyond Soko Glam and Ulta to Thirteen Lune and J.C. Penney in the United States, Cult Beauty in the United Kingdom, Nykaa in India and Beauty Bar in the Philippines. DTC accounts for a quarter of Good Light’s sales.
“We are not a household name yet, so we need long-tail marketing so we have some kind of recognition and people can tell their friends about it,” says Yi. “When it comes to the Soko Glam community, they love newness, Korean beauty and innovation, so we wanted to be where they are. I hope all the momentum will build and make us one of the most successful lip brands and lip solutions at Ulta.”
Non-lipstick lip products are having a huge moment, and there’s been a parade of them at Ulta and Sephora. In addition to Good Light’s The Taste Of Space Lip Milk, among the recent lip product launches at Ulta are Byoma’s Lip Tide Lip Mask and Lip Oil, Provence Beauty’s Soft Bisous Plumping + Smoothing Lip Mask, First Aid Beauty’s Ultra Repair Lip Balm, Blossom’s Hydrating Lip Oil and Poppy & Pout’s Hydrating Lip Balm.
“We are not a household name yet, so we need long-tail marketing.”
Good Light didn’t time The Taste Of Space Lip Milk’s launch with the trend. The product was inspired by the popularity of the milky consistency of Moon Glow Milky Toning Lotion, Good Light’s bestseller until The Taste Of Space Lip Milk came along. Hydration and skin barrier support have been perennial themes at Good Light, and The Taste Of Space Lip Milk allowed the brand to stretch those themes to the lips.
“Our product development and formulation period is at least two years out. I don’t think I could have ever predicted lips would be so big in 2023 and going into in 2024. It was completely a fluke,” he says. “Because we are such a small indie brand, we can’t take risks following trends.”
Started in 2021, Good Light has raised roughly $2 million in funding from friends and family as well as institutional investors, including IgniteXL Ventures and Fab Co-Creation Studio Ventures. It’s currently in the process of raising seed funding with the goal of securing $2 million to $4 million to fuel expansion. Yi says, “We have a strategy of not only becoming a household name here with gen Z and gen alpha, but we have a very aggressive overseas plan.”
Good Light will leverage its early success in the lip category with future lip products in color and treatment formats. Before that, though, it’s filling a gap in its assortment with a new skincare product slated for the summer. Good Light will unveil a collaboration next year. In the summer last year, customers promptly snapped up 5,000 units of an $85 limited-edition set of skincare essentials and merch affiliated with the Netflix show ‘Heartstopper.”
Speaking of collaborations, Yi says, “We have to be laser-focused on our community. We are queer. We are very Korean American. We want to continue to be extremely discriminating about who we partner with and make it authentically us.”
