Teddy Tint: a lip franchise, from zero.
Bringing a soft-matte lip tint to a market already crowded with challengers — and turning a product launch into a franchise decision consumers could name.
- Role
- Brand Manager, Lips
- Client
- Maybelline New York
- Market
- Romania, mass
- Timeline
- Launch Q2 2024
№ 1
Lip franchise by value in Romania in its first year on the market — outpacing established stain challengers that had a multi-year head start.
Tints and stains had been the story of the lip aisle for the better part of two years. By the time Teddy Tint was on the brief, the category was five-brands-deep in soft-matte offerings and the Romanian consumer had largely decided which ones she trusted. A straight-line launch — name the finish, set a price, buy some media — was going to produce a forgettable product at a fair price, and nothing else.
The opportunity we chose
The category had ossified around a vocabulary of ingredients: peptides, pigments, hydration. Almost no one was talking about the feeling of the product — the two-second sensory moment between applying and checking the mirror. We briefed Teddy Tint into that gap. Not a better stain; a softness ritual, with a specific texture, a specific gesture, a specific name.
Positioning
One idea, defended everywhere: “the softest thing your lips have worn all week.” Short enough to survive an influencer caption, specific enough to guide the creative, sensory enough to be felt before it was explained. Everything downstream — naming, shade architecture, photography direction, in-store theatre — laddered back to that single sentence.
“A new product is a list of features. A franchise is a word your consumer uses when they talk about you to someone else.”
Launch mechanics
Release week was orchestrated as one event across three surfaces. Seeding went to a deliberately small set of mid-tier creators whose audiences overlapped with dm's loyalty file; paid amplification followed their native edits rather than leading with brand creative. In-store, we built tactile displays — no pictures of lips, just the texture and the shade — and trained dm beauty advisors on the one-sentence positioning so the story survived the hand-off to retail.
Outcome
Teddy Tint closed 2024 as the number one lip franchise by value in Romania, inside twelve months. The result that matters more to me: consumers named the product in unprompted recall at rates usually reserved for two-year-old incumbents. The name had stuck.
What carried over
The process — brief the feeling, then the product; seed before you advertise; train retail on the single sentence — became the template I used for every subsequent launch that year. Repeatability matters more than cleverness; this was both.