The Realities of Establishing a Global Nail Polish Brand

It must have been easy, yeah, right? Establishing a global nail polish business, that is. We told you every day we keep our humour in tack.

While we are brilliant at creating, connecting, and making fantastic nail polish that colour the world of our sisters globally (and humble, very humble lol), we have run into some issues along the way.

As nail product suppliers, the biggest challenge comes from our beloved friends at Australia Post. In short, unless you are certified and trained in how to pack flammable goods, it is against the law to send via the postal service.

Issues can always become solutions, so we worked hard and trained on how to ship nail polish by air and by road in Australia. We still train every two years to renew our status.

But we learned the hard way! In the early days, Australia Post gave us, by mistake, an international contract, and we were shipping our nail polish all over the world for six months before they realised their mistake. They stopped shipping immediately, leaving us with many packages we could not send. Oops!

Because we knew what we were doing, we were blessed, fortunate, and grateful that DHL Express took on our business all those years ago and enabled our fans to continue to buy nail polish online.

Always looking for the rainbow in the grey, this mistake also enabled us to build our business by discovering the world of stockists, so it ended up being a blessing (not that we would have believed that at the time)

For us having a blend of stockists plus direct sales has worked well because our stockists can service the countries we cannot ship to.

To date, however, this is still our most significant challenge because even though we have a great system, we wish that the laws would change so that sending flammable goods in a specific volume via the post internationally. These rules affect perfume and all consumer commodities that are flammable. If UPS changed the laws, we could ship worldwide from Australia to you all… imagine that!

Finally, the biggest thing we have learned is to always live and breathe your brand. We made a mistake that many businesses make, so we felt we needed to grow and expand our range of products. However, creating a range of products aligned with your values and quality is challenging in the beauty industry. 

We have learned to stick to what we know and what millions around the world love the most about us, our nail polish with a thousand personalities. Read Orders & Shipping here.