‘It’s a fairytale’: Lipstick Queen’s comeback after $6m business collapse

She was the queen of lipstick who built a $6m business. Then lost it all but now Poppy King is planning an extraordinary comeback.

In the early ’90s, a teenage Poppy King was flicking through the Yellow Pages. Although it was the height of the glossy lip and metallic eyeshadow, Poppy was inspired by the Hollywood glamour of the 1940s and she was after a dark, matte lipstick.

But as she ran a licked finger over the light paper of the phonebook, she wasn’t trying to find a cosmetics retailer. She was trying to find a manufacturer. A factory. Straight out of high school in Victoria, and without even a regular job under her belt, King was about to launch her own lipstick empire.

“I thought about it in a Willy Wonka-esque way,’’ King, now 51, says.

“Willy Wonka doesn’t actually make the chocolate, but he’s there in the factory. He’s designing it and he knows what he wants.

“So I looked for a lipstick factory in the Yellow Pages. And there wasn’t anything listed.’’

So she found a company called Neon Cosmetics in Bayswater, Victoria, and she called them.

“I said, ‘Can you make a lipstick that’s not shiny?’ and they said they could as long as I ordered 1000 units,’’ she says. “And that’s when I had to turn it into a business plan straight out of high school.’’

Now, more than 20 years after both a rapid rise and a crushing fall – Poppy Industries collapsed in 1998 amid an investor dispute – the beguiling queen of lips is about to launch a new line in Australia using the same recipe she first dreamed up as a teen.

“It is nothing short of an Australian small business fairytale that’s about to unfurl,” King says.

Poppy King is planning a comeback to the lipstick business after her original business collapsed.

Artistic flair and a go-your-own-way attitude were instilled early in King.

Her fashion designer mother and Freudian psychiatrist father had few rules and filled the house with bohemians.

With nothing to hold her back, King set about firming up her business plan. It wasn’t long before her tenacity attracted attention – and financial support.

“One adviser (investor and philanthropist Daniel Besen) was impressed with what I’d already done finding a factory and being able to articulate what I wanted to do and why,” she says.

“So he decided instead of just giving me advice, he would become my business partner.’’

 

Poppy Industries was a juggernaut thanks to King’s old-world style and a canny knack for storytelling well before “brand narrative” become the buzzword it is in business today.

Her fire-engine-red lips smiled at us from magazine covers. At its height in the mid ’90s, the company was reportedly turning a $6m profit. Her lippies were snapped up by the prestigious Barneys department store in New York.

King was anointed Young Australian of the Year in 1995.

But by 1998, when Poppy was just 25, it all fell apart.

A dispute with business partners saw the company tumble. There were claims Poppy Industries traded while insolvent, which King denies. (The Australian Securities and Investments Commission subsequently cleared the company of wrongdoing).

King, as the face of the business, was in the firing line.

“Certainly, with it going into receivership, there was a problem. But the problem wasn’t actually the brand, or the spending, or the foundations of the business,’’ she says.

“The problem was a massive dispute. There was not a meeting of the minds on the board with the investors at the time.

“We ended up in a stalemate, which I’m not proud of.”

Poppy King launching her range, Lipstick Queen, at Myer in the Queen Street Mall in 2008.

King left Melbourne and headed to the US.

After a period of soul searching and licking her wounds, she relaunched in New York with an executive role within the famed Estee Lauder company.

Despite a bruising end in Australia, billionaire businessman and philanthropist Leonard Lauder saw King in a very different light. “Leonard Lauder came into my life as a mentor and a friend and a very respected business person,” King says.

“He said, ‘Don’t give up just because you had one rough go, that only makes you better.’”

King soon tried her hand again with the launch of her second brand Lipstick Queen which was also stocked in Barneys and Sephora. This time the product didn’t have her name attached.

“I’m really glad I made that decision. Because 15 years later, I still have access and total complete control over my name,’’ she says.

She sold a stake in 2011 to retail’s Fisher Family, before exiting the brand in 2017.

The next big adventure for the New York based entrepreneur is to launch a new business in Australia in September. Something she wasn’t sure she’d ever do and still feels both excited and unsure about.

“I’m coming back to Australia from a manufacturing perspective, not necessarily from a residential perspective, and I have re-created the original formula,” she says.

“It’ll be under the name Poppy King, so it’s a fairytale. The only thing I could think of that felt really inspiring to me was to do something in Australia again. It’s got that real original feeling to it.”

Hear Kellie Riordan’s interview with Poppy King on the podcast Curveball. Riordan is the director of podcast production house Deadset Studios. curveballshow.com