A collaboration between two TikTok famous brands, Poppi and InnBeauty Project, brings soda flavored … [+]
In the 80s it was Coca-Cola flavored ChapStick. In the aughts it was Dr Pepper flavored Lip Smackers. For the TikTok era, it’s Poppi flavored lip oils by InnBeauty Project.
In a collaboration launching in Sephora today, the prebiotic, good-for-you soda company and the brand known for its ethical, yet vibrant, take on skincare–both with 6 million TikTok likes and over 1 billion views between them–have dropped the Sips & Lips Duo creating the soda-meets-lip color for the Gen Z era.
The Sips & Lips Duo is made up of two juicy lip oils in shades based on new or popular Poppi flavors such as Raspberry Rose, in a pink tint to match its bestselling flavor, and a festive red based on the newest Poppi flavor, Cranberry Fizz.
According to the co-founder of Poppi, Allison Ellsworth, her product’s awareness amongst Gen Z consumers is around 60%, “Which is wild,” she says during an interview. “Any brand would love to have this type of recognition amongst Gen Z and we did this without influencers or high-gloss content. It’s just me and my team talking about the product. With this authenticity, we managed to break through on TikTok and ended up meeting the consumers where they are.”
Allison Ellsworth and her husband, Stephen, still formulate Poppi’s recipes in their kitchen.
Ellsworth is quick to elaborate: it’s not just Gen Z to which Poppi appeals. She is a mother of three, a millennial, and an ambassador for the brand knows her product is relatable no matter the generation or age.
The hallmarks of this collaboration in comparison to the soda-lip products of the past definitely stand to the values of current times. Poppi is soda, but it’s evolved. It falls into the better-for-you category of foods with less than 5 grams of sugar per serving and ingredients such as fruit juice, apple cider vinegar, and inulin probiotics. The recipes are still formulated by Ellsworth and her co-founder husband, Stephen, in their own kitchen. InnBeauty Project is all clean skincare, all the way. It’s plastic-negative and free of a long list of ingredients deemed harmful to humans and the environment including phthalates, sulfates, microplastics, and sulfates.
The two companies came together through the bond of female entrepreneurs in support of each other. “It was a natural progression and was an extremely collaborative experience, and they created something exactly off our smells and our taste to recreate the full sensation of Poppi,” Ellsworth says. “But it was the amount of people posting Poppi in beauty threads and hashtags, which then went viral, that connected us to InnBeauty. It was obvious they were everyone’s favorite lip gloss and we were everyone’s favorite soda, so we knew right away this was a perfect match.”
