Black beauty brand Ami Colé’s crowdsourced its next lip oil shade

For Ami Colè, community building is at the forefront of its brand DNA, which is why founder and CEO Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye wanted to do something a little different: its version of March Madness called “The Ami Colé Cup.”

“We center our community online because that’s where our girl resides the most, whether it’s her looking at content reels on Instagram or what is currently going viral on TikTok, she shows up there, so we want to be there with her as well,” Mbaye told Andscape. 

So, with that in mind, Mbaye’s team at Ami Colé tapped into their online community, encouraging them to vote on their favorite shade of Lip Treatment Oil in a March Madness-style competition.

In 2021, Mbaye launched Ami Colé, her clean beauty brand focused on melanin-rich skin tones, offering a skin tint, highlighter, and lip oil. Before launching her brand, Mbaye worked in marketing for L’Oreal and product development for Glossier. Ami Colé’s product line-up now includes a skin-enhancing foundation stick, cream multi-use stick products for lips and cheeks, mascara, eyeshadow, brow pencil, brow gel, and powder. Still, the lip oil—now available in six shades—arguably is the breakout star.

“We truly have grown so much over the last few years, I still pinch myself at how much we have,” Mbaye said. “We really pride ourselves on giving our community a front row seat into the world of Ami Colé. From when we first started to now, we have always given our community an inside look on the brand, specifically through social media. Our community has followed us from when I first started thinking of Ami Colé in my Brooklyn apartment, to now, where we are available at their local Sephoras. It has truly been a humbling and joyous experience to watch unfold.” 

Ami Colé’s head of influencer partnerships, Kamille Greenwood, joined the brand in October and worked closely with the vice president of art development and the head of graphic design to bring the bracket to life.

“March can be a slower month, and we talked as a team, like obviously March Madness is really big for certain people,” Greenwood said. “I’m not tuned in but my boyfriend always has it on, so what’s a fun way for the Ami Colé girls to participate as well.”

The goal was to have fun with the bracket while focusing on what would land in their Sephora cart because the Sephora Spring 2024 sale is happening this month.

“We wanted the bracket to last a couple of weeks to be a short sprint,” Greenwood added. “So we’re like, okay, it needs to last three weeks, so at least 16 shades, we separated the colors into shade families — pinks, browns, and shimmers. From there it became what does our girl like? We know Bliss is a top-selling shade. How can we vary the Bliss shade but not take away from Bliss at all? Just talking with our product development girl and making sure it was on par.”

Greenwood said it was exciting to see consumers interact with the bracket. “It was so fun to watch the numbers go up,” she said. “I had no idea it was going to be successful, we had over 700 votes on certain days and over 20,000 views to our site.”

She also said she was surprised to see the more vibrant shades, like hot pink and some of the shimmers, not be knocked out in the earlier rounds, while mauve didn’t last long with voters. “I feel like darker shades are something that Black women usually focus on so it’s interesting to see these brighter shades went farther.”

The Ami Colé Cup bracket is proof of the importance of listening to your audience because, Greenwood said, internally, the brand made predictions via their own brackets that were nothing like the voting results. “We had like, oh, everyone’s going to choose Eggplant, Eggplant’s going to be the winner. It ended up being something else.”

Brick Red was the winner but will not be available to purchase until 2025. “We have a lot of products already coming out this year,” Greenwood confirmed. “Brick Red will be in the works now, hoping to get the winning color out in 2025. Now that we know the shade, we can start figuring out the formula and the exact shade of brick red we can get.”

When the lip oil launched in 2021 in the shade Excellence, the brand’s signature rosy brown, Black women flocked to it because it was the perfect nude, pigmented without being sticky. Beauty writer Tembe Denton-Hurst dubbed it the “Telfar bag of lip gloss” thanks to its stylish and in-the-know fans – the comparison floored Mbaye.

“Talk about a jaw-dropping moment,” she shared. “It made me feel that Ami Colé was really filling up a void in a beauty industry where representation is necessary and has been lacking for so long. Growing up in Harlem, I was surrounded by the culture. From beauty, to music, to food — I was immersed in it all from when I stepped out my front door. For Black women, lip gloss has always been a right of passage into the beauty world from young.”

She continued, “I remember going to the beauty supply store to get my extra shiny lip gloss in my favorite flavor — it’s pure nostalgia. We all know that feeling of putting on your lip gloss and making you feel like you’re IT, So when I heard that the Lip Treatment Oil was becoming a staple for all of the girls, whether it was being pulled out at brunch or an event, I was over the moon.”

Mbaye considered the praise, confirming she was on the right path.

“I want Ami Colé to be that big sister that always keeps you up on the latest trends and always keeps you in the loop of what’s the best product out right now, and when I heard that headline, it reaffirmed that to me. Lip Treatment Oil definitely took our community by storm. I initially thought that it was going to be our Skin-Enhancing Tint, which also does very well and is loved dearly by our community, however, the girls took the Lip Treatment Oil and ran with it!”