Copini Beauty: How Two Friends Turned a Shared Lip Trick into a Global Beauty Club

Camille Roe S.
Nov 17
6 min read

Editor’s note: Reform Beauty rebranded to Copini Beauty in October 2025.

Copini Beauty isn’t another brand adding SKUs to your makeup bag. It’s a global beauty club built on a simple belief—beauty is better shared—where clean, multifunctional formulas are co-created with the community and optimized for the modern carry: Pilates at 8, standups at 10, drinks at 7. The brand’s strategy is as lean as its offering: ship a small number of products that solve real routines; validate decisions with users; prioritize science-meets-nature formulas that wear beautifully without drama.

Chapter 1: The Spark—A Lip Trick Between Friends

The Copini origin story reads like a DM between girlfriends. Casey James, a model and creator, showed Carla McGraw, a product developer, her everyday lip-contouring technique—softly overlining and buffing to create believable fullness. Carla’s category radar lit up. The technique worked, but the market lacked a product that made it easy, portable, and foolproof.

Relationship graph: Casey met Carla through Casey’s fiancé; friendship preceded business.
Founder fit: Casey’s credibility and intuition in beauty + Carla’s cross-category product development (fragrance, supplements, skincare, color) = a build that blends taste, testing rigour, and speed.
Name with a promise: Copini (from French copine, “girlfriend”) encodes the brand’s premise into its identity: share the trick, share the result, share the confidence.

Chapter 2: From Reform to Copini—Rebranding with Intent

The rebrand from Reform Beauty to Copini Beauty aligns the outside with the inside:

Strategic clarity: Move from a descriptive name (“reform”) to a social construct (Copini as “the club”), elevating community from tactic to brand truth.
Category elasticity: A founder-led lip hero can credibly grow into brow, cheek, skin tint, and smart complexion tools under a club-first identity.
Tone shift: Less prescriptive “correcting,” more co-discovering—the brand as a friend who passes on the good stuff.

Chapter 3: Product POV—Fewer, Smarter, Cleaner

Design principle: If it doesn’t earn a permanent spot in a micro-bag, it doesn’t ship.

Multi-use by design: The flagship brown lip contour doubles on eyes and cheeks, seen organically in community use. The built-in buffing brush solves on-the-go blending.
Clean slate: 100% vegan, cruelty-free, and free from common irritants/endocrine disruptors.
Science x nature stack: Shea Butter and Squalane (conditioning, barrier support) with Hibiscus Flower(botanical nourishment) for payoff that feels like care.
Manufacturing choice: Korea for color R&D: superior lab capabilities, progressive iteration culture, and quality systems that hit Copini’s bar—particularly crucial for a lip formula that must be creamy enough to blend yet structured enough not to smear.

Formulation challenge: Regular facial contour wants slip; lip contour wants blur + cling. Too creamy = migration; too stiff = drag and patchiness. Copini’s brief demanded that middle zone.

Chapter 4: The Community Engine—Research Ops in Public

Pre-launch focus group, but make it social. Before shipping a single unit:

Casey recruited ~50 testers via stories and (later) a broadcast channel.
The team mailed samples, then held FaceTime walkthroughs to watch real application, hear pain points, and test messaging.
Finding: many users were new to brown lip contour → build educational content (demos, before/afters, use-cases).

After launch, the loop stayed open:

Ongoing shade-naming polls, moodboards, and “help us choose” content.
Roadmap check: “If the community doesn’t ask for it, we don’t make it.”

Why this matters: It compresses the distance between insight and iteration, de-risks inventory bets, and makes the customer a co-author—raising both NPS and forgiveness when early-stage chaos shows.

Chapter 5: Launch in Real Life—Velocity Meets Vulnerability

Funding: Self-funded to protect decision speed, taste, and truth until product–market fit solidified.
Reality at T-0: Website unfinished, Shopify payments hiccup on launch morning—classic founder fire drill.
Demand signal: Sold out within three weeks. Great headline, real operational pain. The lesson: in indie beauty, “sold out” can stall momentum if restock windows are long.

What they’d change next time

Slow the sprint just enough to stage PR seeding and influencer sampling ahead of the store switch-on.
Build a deeper first buy to soften stockouts, within cash-flow reality.
Accept that perfect is a mirage; ship the best available version, then sharpen in public.

Chapter 6: Competing Up the Curve—When a Giant Releases “Your” Product

When a much larger brand launched a similar lip concept, it stung—and then it helped:

Emotional truth: It’s hard to watch as a small team.
Strategic reframing: Category awareness ballooned; Copini leaned into education, community intimacy, and brand voice—the moats that scale can’t instantly copy.

Chapter 7: Operations Map—Where and How Copini Ships

Manufacturing: Korea (color).
Current shipping: Australia, U.S., New Zealand, UAE.
Why not broad EU/UK yet: Cost-to-AOV ratio from Australia can break value perception; the brand is pacing expansion until service levels and shipping economics protect the experience.
North Star: Global retail via the right wholesale partner when ops and marketing cadence can sustain demand.

Chapter 8: Division of Genius—How Two Founders Share the Work

Carla McGraw — Product & Strategy: Translates vibe → briefs → labs → launch; structures projects; co-leads creative direction.
Casey James — Community & Creative: On-camera engine, content cadence, community feedback loop; co-leads creative decisions and supports shoots and details.

They often start together, finish together: Carla frames; Casey gives it pulse. Editing and a surprising amount of execution is still in-house—by design for taste-control.

Chapter 9: The Human Layer—Grief, Grit, and the Myth of “Effortless”

Six weeks before launch, Casey lost her mum. That context matters: founders are people before they’re press quotes. The brand shipped anyway—with imperfect pages and very real emotion behind the scenes. The takeaway they share candidly: you will never feel “ready.” Sometimes, courage is simply continuing.

On the day-to-day, Casey names context switching as the hardest part: nurturing a personal channel, a brand channel, product timelines, and growth all at once. The answer isn’t hustle theatre; it’s sequencing and eventual delegation to A-players who elevate the vision, not just execute tasks.

Chapter 10: The Roadmap—What’s Next (and Why)

Copini’s roadmap is narrow by choice:

Color system anchored in multi-use neutrals (the “your-face-but-sharper” palette).
Brow and skin that behave on the move: a brow hold you can apply without a mirror; a complexion solve that feels like skincare.
Founder wish item: a slim, on-the-go concealer concept—pen form factor with built-in brush—designed for micro-bags and quick fixes.

Guardrail: Every launch must pass three tests—(1) Ease, (2) Multi-use, (3) Clean—and justify why it deserves space in a tiny pouch.

Chapter 11: Brand Identity—Australian Ease, Global Relevance

Even shoots outside Australia carry a sun-kissed, undone polish: beach-adjacent textures, movement over still life, skin over studio, and copy that sounds like a friend—not a lab report. The visual code is intentional: if the product claims “easy,” the brand must look easy.

Chapter 12: Lessons for Creator-Founders (A Practical Playbook)

Operate from your native advantage. Make the product only you can credibly bring to life—your routine, your edge, your taste.
Build research ops in public. Use broadcast channels, testers, and live walkthroughs; test usability and messaging, not just shade.
Pre-seed before “add to cart.” Micro-cohorts of creators and community leads create proof and pace.
Engineer the inventory curve. Plan a slightly deeper first buy than your gut says (within cash constraints), and line up restock windows.
Tell the messy truth. Share the BTS; it builds trust and buys time.
Sequence your energy. Content cadence is a revenue lever—protect it, then hire better-than-you operators to scale.
Stay self-funded while you can. Taste is fragile. Keep control until your demand and cadence are repeatable.
Differentiate beyond the object. Competitors can match a stick; they can’t match a club—rituals, language, and belonging.

Sidebar: The Formula Brief (Deconstructed)

Use-case: Overline, blur, set—no lip line migration.
Texture: Cream-to-blur (non-greasy), low drag, non-drying.
Wear: Survives coffee; fades evenly.
Ingredients: Emollients (Shea, Squalane), botanical support (Hibiscus), clean of usual irritants.
Tooling: Built-in brush for buffing edges so fingers stay clean in transit.
Edge cases: Brown must avoid “shadow-moustache” effect on fair skins; undertones must read contour, not color block.

Sidebar: Distribution Math for Indies (What Copini Got Right)

Launch where shipping cost supports perceived value (AU/U.S./NZ/UAE).
Hold EU/UK until service levels and landed price won’t break the experience.
When the category heats up (a giant enters), don’t chase; sharpen story and education.

Closing: The Club We Want to Join

Copini’s power isn’t a single stick; it’s the system—women sharing what works, founders who listen, and formulas that behave in real life. The brand’s promise is pragmatic and optimistic at once: no gatekeeping, no heavy bags—just clean, clever essentials shaped by the people who use them.

Copini BeautyBeauty is better shared.

Copini Rebrand Celebration Party: