Jessica Wright is a multi-tasking, multi-business-owning dynamo. You may remember her from her great guest posts about working together to work for yourself and building your own work group.  But Jessica is just as passionate about lip balm as she is about entrepreneurship. Her cosmetic line Crude, offers nine flavors and 16 colors, each variety hand-blended with a rich mix of fragrances. Recipes are concocted with care, by hand, in their production kitchen.

The word 'crude' isn't one we usually associate with cosmetics.  How'd you come up with that name?

I guess some people are really called to a particular name for their business, but that's never the case with me.  So Crude started the way all of my projects have -- after the R&D period, I crafted a list, checked against competitors and evaluated on a number of factors.  Crude scored high on things like legal differentiation, trademarkability, and domain availability.  Plus, it's a little tongue-in-cheek for a natural, organic cosmetics company to go by "Crude," which I like.  And we took that all the way through the logo, which is evocative of a 50’s gas station.  I hope it makes people think twice about ingredients. 

You've made a very conscious effort to use natural ingredients, recyclable tubes and to avoid artificial preservatives.  Why is this important?

Aside from my personal preference not to clog up my skin with an array of chemicals, I think the future of the self-care market is going to be natural.  As far as recyclable packaging, I really hate waste, so there it's definitely a function over form factor.

Do you plan on expanding your range to include any other cosmetic items?

Yes!  If all goes well, Crude should be releasing a hand balm in the next few months. 

If you weren't running Crude, what would your life look like?

If I weren't running Crude, I'd be running something else like it.  So, probably very similar.  :)

And lastly, describe the type of world you'd like to design.

Above all, any world designed by me would run on empathy.  I think there's no more important principle to teach, because someone with this quality is guided by it in everything else she does.  In the context of business, it means treating your customers impeccably, designing with UI as your top priority, providing service like Zappos, and creating products you'd want to buy and use yourself. 

Image Credits:: Crude Cosmetics

Sarah Von is a Vianza contributing columnist and interview wrangler.  If you follow her on Twitter, you’ll be privy to all sort of tweets about small business, good ideas and, um, cheese.

• Tweet