Lip Service

As I was traveling in Florida last week, I stumbled on the hotel that most of the airlines put their crews up for layovers.  I met a couple of flight attendants who were more than willing to pose for this provocative picture for a free tube of vanilla cherry lip balm.  It seems that spending most of your time in an the atmosphere of an enclosed airplane really dries out the lips and the skin!

A noted skin care expert recently ran the following test:

Supplies used for the test:
 - A 100% cotton t-shirt.
- Water.
- A small cap from a travel bottle of mouthwash that I used as a measuring cup.
I did this test in two different environments: the first in my hotel room in Boston on a sunny 50 degree December day. The second test was performed at 32,000 feet in an airplane…
How I performed the test: I filled the small mouthwash cap half way with water and poured it onto the 100% cotton t-shirt and time stamped it with a sticky note.
I watched and watched until the water spot had virtually disappeared and time stamped it again. I repeated the same exact steps up in the air.
Test results: The t-shirt took 1 hour and 27 minutes to dry whereas at 32,000 feet up in an airplane, it took only 24 minutes.


And skin care guide Canada says:
"Airplane" Skin
Does your skin and hair feel tight or dry when you get off of an airplane? The humidity on a plane can reach as low as 1% humidity on long flights and it can take just a 3 hour flight to sap all the moisture from your skin and hair. So stay hydrated during and after your flight, limit your intake of coffee and alcohol - they just make things worse, carry your moisturizer in your hand luggage to slather on mid flight and before you deplane, splash your face with water and follow with your moisturizer.


Food for thought.
The Pied Piper

Why Did the Pickle Cross the Road II

A Campaign With Juice
By: Tama Underwood, Associate Editor
Issue: 2012jan

A pickle-flavored lip balm promotion is so spot-on that the end buyer adds the product to its line.


In a world of one-off product campaigns and here-today-gone-tomorrow promotions, it’s a nice surprise when a product promotion becomes a regular order on which you can rely.

Last summer, Van Holten’s, a Waterloo, Wisconsin-based pickle manufacturer whose pickles in a pouch are sold around the nation, was approached about developing a dill pickle-flavored lip balm. The company jumped at the offer and began handing out Big Papa Dill Pickle Lip Balms at tradeshows to help make people aware of the company and its products.

The product was such a hit with Van Holten’s customers that it decided to add the lip balm to its product line and sell it in stores. “It kind of evokes the same feeling as our pickles-in-a-pouch,” says Steve Byrnes, president of Van Holten’s. “It’s fun, it’s quirky and we got the same reaction from the lip balm, so we thought it was the perfect extension.”

Does dill-pickle flavored lip balm sound strange to you? “That’s the appeal,” Byrnes says. “It gets a reaction. It’s a novelty. It’s fun, and people who really like pickles are using it. And it’s a really good lip balm.”
January 2012 issue of PPB magazine

ROI Formula

I am trying to find a formula for determining the ROI on brand awareness using Calculated Intangible Values.  I think I remember a formula where you take 3 years of pretax earnings for a company, subtract 3 years of the industry average return on assets and subtract the company's tangible assets. 

Which sounds like a lot or work. 

I know I can work through an ROI based on cost per impression and retention of that impression.  Which leads me to the effectiveness of something like a lip balm used as a promotional product.  The PPAI tells us that recipients of a promo product giveaway - 84% will remember the gift and 62% will have done or will do business with the promo product giver.  Then take a peek at the cost per impression, say about .004 per impression and you  have a pretty impressive ROI for promotional products!

Buy more lip balm, lotion, face paint, sanitizer and sun products!

The recent ppai show was great.  Attendance seemed to be down a little but the ASI Orlando show should be up!
The Pied Piper

What flavor are your lips?

Chris and Lee are baking up a storm in the back today.  And the flavor is Berry, which is our GM's favorite flavor!  They will make enough Berry flavored lip balm to fill 267,000 lip balm tubes waiting in the production area. With QC watching over all like guardian angels, tubes get filled and Then the filled tubes will be Labeled and racked and out the door to one of our clients. 

The hypnotic effect of our automatic filling lines is remarkable. Soothing in a noisy kind of way.

 If our production is any indication, we have had the busiest December in a long time.  Running full tilt, adding people.  Let's hope this is a sign that the economy has turned the corner.  Amen Brother.
The Pied Piper

Stake out your territory

Did you know that the average Human body is covered by 20 Square Feet of SKIN?  Six pounds of skin in fact.  And that we shed or lose of wash all of that skin off every 27 days.....dead cells drift away.
You need a lot of lotion to keep that much skin supple and moist and healthy.  Fortunately, I have a lot of lotion so I am gooooood.  And it is good lotion so I am in fact, great!

And lips.  Lips are very important to me.  Kissing is one of the more enjoyable practices I know of.  Did you know that you will spend 336 hours in your life kissing?  That is if you are average.  And I know some people who are not so average!  Science has proven that our brain kicks in when seeking a lover's lips in the dark to facilitate finding them.  True.

So, keep lathering those bodies and lips and find a little time to overachieve in the kissing department.

The Pied Piper

An Ode to Hyperglycemic Crashes

We welcome Alyssa M today as a new lab technician with a cornucopia of baked goods. 
What she must think seeing cookies at every turn, a cookie tree, spiced nuts and raisins, chocolate candies and a frosted yule log!  I am sure things were different when she interviewed.  So i anticipate the post cookie eaters early afternoon crashes. Fortunately we have Peppermint Lip Balms floating around so we can use them as a pick me up!  To bad we don't make burner balm yet (has caffeine), that would get people moving..
The Pied Piper

You butter watch out, you butter not cry

Butter, it's whats for dinner.  In light of butter shortages in Iceland or Greenland, we thought we better make some butter lip balm and ship it over so they can remember what it tastes like.

 In our plant as we make various flavors and add scents and essences to our products, you can walk through production and think you are in a bakery on some days.  Today Chris and Lee cooked up some butter lip balm followed by Key Lime Pie lip balm and segued into ........


Pumpkin Pie lip balm and Pecan Pie Lip Balm.  You could smell the toasted pecans!

One of the unwritten perks of the job is to find out what the "menu" is and take an olfactory walk around the plant.
The Pied Piper