... Lipstick, Powder & Body Paint: The JT Makeup Range

The JT Makeup range is now celebrating a 3 year anniversary since it was launched at IMATS in July 2013. The idea of the range coincided with leaving a long term teaching role at West Thames College and began as an idea with my sisters Deby and Issie. My background has always been in makeup and body painting, so something to do with a glitter range was always an idea to explore. We were sitting around the kitchen table and started playing with ideas. Deby owns a craft company called Inkylicious and started making up some pots of glitter and gold leaf from the stocks she had, next thing a label with the logo was created and we had our first products as testers. Deby helped me source my product containers and a supplier with cosmetic grade glitter, plus printed all my labels and the JT Makeup range was formed.

I was able to take on a stand at IMATS, a very prestigious trade show for makeup artists in July 2013, my sister Issie who works as a sales director came down to London to run my stand. Deby had prepared quite a few products for me including signs and price tags. With limited stock we sold out of everything in the first hour. Luckily we had body painting demos going on and we could talk about the products and courses we were going to offer. We had a list of orders for the next day so spent the Saturday evening preparing products for the next day. We had a successful weekend and it proved it was a worthwhile idea to develop further.

I started freelancing and in between jobs visited makeup colleges to show my range to the students. This was a tester to see if they liked the range. The feedback was positive. In March 2014 the JT Makeup range was available to buy in Screenface. This in turn followed with orders from PAM, Love Makeup & Illusion magazine. The following year I finally launched my website. The products sell very well at Makeup shows & online. The popular ranges are the metallic leaf & the glitter discs. The range has proved popular with makeup artists and have been used in editorial, runway, film & TV productions.