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Long before Instagram and beauty influencers were a thing, there was Doe Deere, who was an active personality on MySpace and LiveJournal in the early 2000s. In 2008, Deere launched Lime Crime, one of the very first online makeup ranges, predating Instagram by two years. While digitally native beauty companies are now a dime a dozen, it was a pioneer at the time. But it has also distinguished itself as one of the most controversial beauty companies ever.
Now about a decade old, Lime Crime is carried at Revolve, Glowhaus (Bloomingdales’s millennial-focused beauty concept shop), Urban Outfitters, Riley Rose, Ulta, ASOS, Cult Beauty in the UK, and more. Its tagline is “Makeup for unicorns,” and its products and packaging tend to be sparkly and whimsical. But how did a brand whose founder dealt with a Hitler costume scandal, a server hack resulting in a class action settlement by customers who allegedly lost thousands of dollars, accusations of cultural appropriation, getting dumped by Sephora after a week, and an FDA warning letter become one of the hottest millennial and gen Z-focused makeup brands out there?
Doe Deere, whose real name is Xenia Vorotova, has a long history of — to put it mildly — online scandals. Along with the aforementioned Nazi costume, she has allegedly sent cease and desist notices to and threatened bloggers for writing bad reviews. In 2012, the brand released a “China Doll” palette, complete with imagery of a white woman dressed in traditional Japanese clothing, followed up by a not-so-apologetic apology from Deere. In 2015, the FDA sent the brand a warning letter about ingredients listed on Lime Crime lipstick labels that weren’t allowed in lipstick formulations. The brand claimed it was a labeling issue and that the lipsticks didn’t actually contain those ingredients.
Since 2015, Lime Crime has been on a mission to clean up its act, which seems to be working, at least if the number of new mainstream retailers it’s landed in the last year is any indication. Last summer, WWD reported that the brand was said to have hired global advisory company Financo to look for potential buyers. A lot of the recent changes are attributable to global general manager Kim Walls (whose function is that of a CEO in all but title), who came on board in 2014 as a consultant after meeting Deere and her husband and co-founder Mark Dumbelton, eventually joining the company full time.
“They were at a point in the life of Lime Crime where they went, ‘Whoa, this is spinning out of control. This is turning into something much bigger than we ever could have dreamed and we don’t necessarily have the background and experience to deal with this,’” Walls says.
Walls grew up in the beauty business. Her father founded skincare brand Epicuren, which she worked for on and off her entire life. She was on the start-up team of a natural health e-commerce site in the late ’90s, did a stint at the Environmental Working Group, and launched and sold a line for babies called Episencial just prior to joining Lime Crime.
Walls says Lime Crime only had four employees when she came on board. The first thing she walked into was the the security breach, so her highest priority was to establish proper customer service. “They had shut down their Instagram, they weren’t able to respond to people, there were all kinds of challenges that fundamentally came down to not having enough people or the right people to handle the challenges that were happening at the time,” she says. Opening up lines of communication was a priority. “In a vacuum, [customers] start creating things, they start making things worse.”
People accused Lime Crime of hiding the security hack and not informing customers in a timely manner. The breach was first officially acknowledged on Lime Crime’s Instagram, and customers received letters later. Walls vehemently denies the brand purposely hid information or that its SSL certificate (the system that ensures encryption on a website) wasn’t valid. She says that once a company realizes there’s been a breach, it’s likely been going on for a while. Once an investigation takes place, a company is required by law to let its customers know the date the site was affected, which is often retrospective. “But the confusion with our fans was they didn’t understand just because it started on a certain day and we were able to, in hindsight, say what that date was, it doesn’t mean we knew while it was happening,” she says. “The nuance in that was lost.”
In December 2017, Lime Crime settled a class action lawsuit related to the breach. According to the settlement document, Lime Crime sent about 104,500 notices to customers who could possibly have been affected. It settled the suit for $110,000, which will be paid out to claimants in an amount up to $44 each and also includes a one-time-use coupon for 15 percent off a Lime Crime purchase for those who want to give the company another chance. As for the site’s security now, Walls says it is “up to the highest standards of PCI [level] one compliance,” which is a system of security standards founded by a group of all the major credit card companies.
The one incident that has been most damning for Deere personally and, by association, for her company was her decision to dress up up as Hitler for Halloween. In a “blogazine” post in 2008, which has been deleted but which can still be seen in this cached version, she listed the various costumes she’s worn through the years. The caption on the Hitler costume read, “In typical bad taste, I was Adolf Hitler. Once again, I was testing how much I can get away with. If you think Hitler is not a very popular figure where you are, wait till you get to NYC. I wasn’t trying to offend anyone in particular; I just wanted to wear the costume. The reactions I got were varied, but I think most people got that it was all in good fun and didn’t get in my face. Yay! :)”
Walls knows this one is a doozy, and says, “I don’t know that the company has ever fully addressed it… Obviously we talked about it when I first started. I wanted to know all these questions before I was going to invest my heart and passion and time into something.” She continues, noting that Deere is of Russian Jewish descent: “When she came to the US as a teenager, she didn’t have the cultural references and understandings of things that a typical American has. Her understanding of Halloween was that this was a time when people dress up as monsters. And in her life and in her history and in her heritage, the biggest monster was Hitler, so she put on a Hitler-like costume and thought she was doing something American, and boy, did that backfire. Having worked with her for years now and being of Jewish descent myself, I can definitely tell you that she is not racist or prejudiced against people in that way.”
Deere tells a similar version of the event on a recent post on her personal Instagram page, where people still regularly call her a Nazi. She responded to commenters there: “As far as my costume goes, yes, I dressed up as Hitler 12 years ago to push back on a crippling fear of Nazis. I’m a proud Russian Jewish immigrant who worked hard and is grateful for everything I have.” Deere was not available to comment for this story.
Around the time of the breach and with an increasing number of negative stories about the brand coming to light (and before Walls came on board), Lime Crime landed Sephora as a retailer. The arrangement only lasted a week or two before Sephora pulled the plug, clearly spooked by the negative attention. “If you think about the context of that time, retailers had no major experience with what the social media world in makeup was like,” Walls says. “There’s all this love, but then there’s a small population that has a lot of hate… Sephora got an experience with that and I think they weren’t ready for it, and Lime Crime didn’t prepare them properly for what might happen. It was new for everybody.” Walls says that though sales of the products were stellar, Sephora ended the partnership.
But now, in the age of outspoken beauty-brand founders like Kat Von D and Deciem’s Brandon Truaxe, who are vocal and often controversial, retailers have been more willing to carry Lime Crime. In fact, Walls says “inbound requests” numbered in the thousands when she first started. The brand couldn’t immediately reply to or work with retailers due to its many infrastructure issues, but now, with 30 employees, it can. Questions about Deere’s past do still come up, but according to Walls, “It’s the kind of question that gets asked quietly on the side. And I think that people are willing to recognize that it was an honest mistake and it wasn’t coming from a place of bad intentions and it was really a long time ago.”
In 2016, Lime Crime landed ASOS, and in 2017, Cult Beauty, Revolve, Bloomingdale’s, Dermstore, Riley Rose, and Ulta all started stocking it. It is the No. 1 brand in Riley Rose, and the Venus Eye Shadow Palette is a best-seller at Bloomingdale’s Glowhaus locations. A representative from Ulta says that customers “frequently” requested the brand. Walls credits Ulta with introducing Lime Crime to a more mainstream customer.
Lime Crime was also being counterfeited in China (always a sign of popularity and desirability), so Walls was determined to introduce genuine product into the country. Selling a brand directly in China is tricky, because the country requires animal testing. To get around that, it partnered with Revolve to sell to China directly from the US in order to bypass the testing requirements. A Chinese-language version of the Lime Crime website (translated) links directly to Revolve to purchase. Revolve has been a particularly good partnership for Lime Crime; a representative there says it is a “top performer” in color and that more than 50 percent of its Lime Crime sales are to customers in China and Hong Kong. Walls says that Lime Crime has also eliminated about “1,700 listings per month from counterfeit internet retailers and confiscated or destroyed over $2 million in product value last year.” (A Revolve representative says the company was “unaware” of previous Lime Crime controversies.)
Despite its commercial success over the last year, Lime Crime has had some missteps along the way. It briefly posted, then deleted, a picture of a coffin decorated with Hello Kitty designs. And late in 2016, Bustle reported the brand had issues with its now-discontinued Superfoil eye shadows. Customers claimed the pans contained brown spots, which Lime Crime said were due to “glycerin bubbles” and not rust or mold. “The glycerin in the product attracted moisture which created excess water inside the product, leading to condensation inside the package. Some tough lessons there,” says Walls.
Now, the brand sells 102 makeup products and 24 shades of its Unicorn Hair dye. Velvetines, one of the earliest matte liquid lipsticks on the market, are still Lime Crime’s best-sellers, but its Venus eye palettes are also becoming fan favorites. It’s unusual for a makeup company to also be successful in a completely different category like hair, but Walls says that because Deere herself has had wildly colored hair forever, the hair dye is a “meaningful” part of the business. “Because the brand is so closely tied to [Deere], or was so historically closely tied to her as a person, it really just made sense,” Walls says.
But this could be changing. Since these retailers and new, younger customers don’t know (or don’t seem to care) about Deere’s history with the brand, transitioning Deere out of the role of face of the company seems to definitely be in the cards. She used to have the CEO title, but Walls now says she has no title within the company. “She’s on the board of the company. She doesn’t have a title as an employee because she isn’t one. She’s our muse,” Walls says. Deere does still meet with the labs and has a creative role: “By her own design, she has created a brand that is bigger than she is as a person, and that is what she always wanted. That’s always been her goal and it’s still her goal.” While she still makes some appearances at Bloomingdale’s to promote the brand, her blogazine is no longer active and her Instagram is fairly innocuous these days. In other words, she’s keeping a low profile.
Walls is coy on the question of whether or not Lime Crime, which is entirely self-funded by Deere and Dumbelton, is seeking a buyer. The company is currently profitable. She says Lime Crime “is in a time of transition... I’ve grown and sold several companies and that’s certainly part of my history.”
“You don’t even go to market unless you’ve thought through this and you have a credible plan that a buyer will sign off on and accept,” says Arash Farin, managing director at Sage Group, which oversaw the sales of Oribe, Glam Glow, and Vita Liberata. “Private equity buyers almost always want the management team, which may not always be the same as the founder, to continue doing what they’ve done and continue the path of success they have engineered.” As far as the importance of keeping an original founder who is an integral part of the brand’s image (like Steve Jobs or Bobbi Brown), Farin says, “I think in this situation it really depends on what role Doe has played in the company’s growth and frankly who are the people behind her and how deep are the benches. If consumers associate that person with the brand, of course it makes it harder to engineer a successful sale.” In the case of Lime Crime, it seems clear that Walls is the person who has turned the company’s fortunes around. The brand has grown in spite of Doe Deere, not necessarily because of her.
At this point, it would probably be a relief for Deere to sell Lime Crime and start fresh, especially if she’s more of a liability. There’s a popular truism that the internet never forgets, but Lime Crime is probably hoping it does.
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