Love and Rebellion
Dear you,
If there were just two words to describe the inspiration behind Stark, it would be love and rebellion.
Stark was born from a deep love and obsession with beautiful, healthy skin care ingredients… and for doing business in a unique way.
We’re a micro-company fuelled by passion, who love to empower others to make good choices. Not out of fear of using the “wrong” ingredient, but for the love of beautiful, healthy ingredients. There’s true love infused into this company. A love for creativity. A love of freedom. A love of being ourselves, and never compromising on that. A love of being truly inspired, and more importantly, inspiring others. Despite all these gooey feelings, we’re beauty industry black-sheep.
You see, Stark isn't exactly "normal".
There’s all kinds of things that make us rebels. We believe in only using high-quality, vegan ingredients without any fillers. We don’t really believe in skin types, instead we focus on undoing environmental damage to skin. We like unique scents, unique design, unique writing. We don’t believe in false advertising, false claims or making promises we can’t keep. Each of our products is handmade by Stark’s founder, Jess. She’s also the one who answers your emails, writes the blog and web copy (hi!), and does nearly everything here at casa Stark. And that’s exactly the way we want it. Rather, the way I want it. We are stubbornly small, and happy about it.
On top of this, we have a weird business model. In 2015, Stark “consciously un-coupled” (lol) from our retailers, meaning that we’d make a go of marketing and selling our products completely solo. Because we have no “middle men”, we are able to offer premium, luxury skincare, with prices that are quite middle-of-the-road. (But enough to support my family as our reach isn’t huge!) Our prices simply don't need to be astronomical. In fact, as Stark has grown the prices have gone down and the quality of formulation has gone up, which is what we plan on continuing to do. Crazy, huh? I told you. We're rebels.
And because we have no re-sellers, we exist only in cyberspace. In fact...
We are the only web-based natural & indie skincare brand.
Being both tiny and direct-to-consumer means that you’re listened to. Your ideas, wishes, feedback, recommendations, everything is important and makes a huge impact on how and what Stark does. This is the new way of doing business, and sure, it’s a little disruptive, and as a tiny company, it can be scary out here in this massive internet-ocean on our little dinghy. But we like to shake things up (and we’re wearing our floaties, so it’s all good). All we ask is that if you like us? Tell a friend! We're just real people (person, really,) making real things, and we want to do so for as long as possible.
This makes us the black sheep. But we have a feeling you might be as well. And that's more than ok.
Love, Jess