Lee Silvas, president of Beauty Innovations, has spent the past six months settling the company into its new location in Darien and has also been expanding its natural line of personal care products.
Silvas, who lives in Darien, developed the recently launched product line called One Planet.
“We developed it for Asda, which is the name of Walmart in the U.K.,” said Silvas. “It was doing very well and we started bringing that product to market here. We brought it down into Rite Aid Pharmacy and it took off there as well.”
Beauty Innovations is set up as a virtual company even though it has an office in Darien.
“In the context of being a carbon-free company and to keep our costs down and to stay lean and mean,” said Silvas. “We”™ve been lucky in the last year to be one of the companies that is excelling because of the acceptance of not just natural products but 100 percent natural.”
The One Planet line uses natural ingredients and extracts such as sunflower seed oil, grapefruit seed extract, eucalyptus leaf oil, lavender flower extract and olive oil.
Silvas said the line between natural and 100 percent natural is one that product companies dance around all the time, leaving much “natural” information gray in nature.
For non-100 percent natural products, “you can use artificial ingredients in the fragrance or in the propellants,” said Silvas. “We are 100 percent natural. The 100 percent natural category cuts across all grains and appeals to everybody. There”™s so much artificial stuff out there; we wanted to make something that was completely natural.”Â
Beauty Innovations which moved to Darien from Englewood, N.J., at the end of 2008, is a division of Scion International headquartered in Dubai, U.A.E.
“Scion started as a manufacturing company in 1974 for companies such as P&G and Del Pharmaceuticals,” said Silvas. “Over the years, we got into other products and slowly but surely we drifted into the retail business.”
The Beauty Innovations staff in Darien stays very skeletal, comprised of Silvas, Chief Financial Officer Bill Wagner, and Jamie Digiacomo, media coordinator.
“We have a large broker network in the United States of sales people,” said Silvas. “We have a very large manufacturing facility overseas, which we own. It enables us to control the quality and control the production very carefully. We all feel very passionately about these products.”
Silvas said he hopes to see the company continue to develop.
“I think we”™ll grow if we”™re careful about it and keep an eye on doing things that are good for people,” he said.
