Lessons of a Lipstick Queen: Finding and Developing the Great Idea that Can Change Your Life - Hardcover

King, Poppy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743299574 ISBN 13: 9780743299572

Publisher: Atria Books, 2008

Synopsis

Reveals how the author launched a multi-million-dollar lipstick brand three years after high school in spite of a lackluster education and no business experience, a process during which she learned valuable lessons about what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur. 60,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Poppy King is an internationally renowned trend spotter, color expert, and innovative business leader. At the age of eighteen, Poppy started Poppy Industries, when she could not find the type of lipstick she wanted. After ten years at the helm of her own company, she went on to become vice president for creative marketing at Prescriptives. Today, Poppy lives in New York City and has recently launched a new line of lipsticks, Lipstick Queen, available at fine retailers such as Barneys, Holt Renfrew, and Space NK. For more information visit www.lipstickqueen.com.

Reviews

With this breezy business how-to, Australian cosmetics entrepreneur King seeks to empower other women to start their own companies. King launched her business at the age of 18 after a fruitless quest for the perfect matte lipstick incited her to create her own brand. Within a year, she was the sole owner of a million-dollar company, Poppy Industries. King intersperses vague exhortations to daydream and fantasize with snippets from her success story to illustrate her business basics: Keep it real, she says and Watch out for bad omens. She also includes exercises so rudimentary they're almost patronizing. For example, she exhorts the reader to go online and punch in google.com, then start entering different key words that describe your idea. More nuanced content does arrive later, when she breaks down the elements of successful marketing and cold calling, but even this advice is undercut when King reveals that her company eventually failed. One of her last lessons to her readers is how to bounce back from depression, in keeping with the general direction of this book, which offers less pointed business advice than simplistic self-help. (May)
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Breathless, energetic, and somewhat disjointed in chronology. This is the rise-and-fall-and-rise-again story of Poppy King, a young Australian entrepreneur who began a lipstick-only manufacturing company at age 18. It’s told in a series of more than 60 lessons (repeated at the end of each chapter), interspersed with “My Story” monologues, covering every conceivable business question from “Where do I start?” to “How do I find financial partners?” Learn about her successful cold call to a Barney’s cosmetics buyer, her commonsense approach to marketing and public relations, and her do-it-again attitude as she loses her company and starts another venture, Lipstick Queen. Don’t expect facts, figures, statistics, or even lists of resources. Do expect to get engaged, to laugh, and to be inspired by the ups and downs of Business Life 101. --Barbara Jacobs

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743299574
• ISBN 13: 9780743299572
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368