Welcome to the first Brand Managers Letter! For those of you that don’t know me, I am Sam, Senior Brand Consultant for bellabox. Along with Brand Managers Natalie and our newest recruit Vanessa, we work with all of the brands to source the goodies in your little blue box. Each month, I will take you through some of the products and tell you a little of how they ended up in your box. Some come from down the round and around the corner, and others have travelled have travelled vast distances to end up in your box!

The theme for this month was, of course, Innovative Beauty. Our job was to find interesting products that had new ingredients, or were just a little bit cool and ahead of the game! So we set to, working with our current brand partners and sourcing innovative products from new brands, both here and overseas. Here are a few examples of different items in the April box...

Tricks and tools

Our first product to go in the box was Lash Card, which you would have read about in Lauren's Editor's letter. I'd been reading about this for some time, and thought it was something we really needed to try. Our Singapore office had been thinking the same thing, so I called Alice - the lovely owner of Lash Card - and she created a sample just for us! We flew them - and the full size products for our online store - over all the way from Hawaii.

Hair care

Marc Daniels Blonde Serum contains Blue Cyprus Oil, which is a very interesting oil extracted from the native Australian Cyprus tree. When it was discovered 10 years ago, it was already hailed as a major advancement in beauty due to its unique cobalt blue colour and antibacterial qualities. However, the use of the oil is not as wide spread as expected, as an ongoing legal wrangle over rights to the unique extraction process has slowed production. So we were very excited to bring you a product containing it!

Fragrance

Lady Gaga Fame is an innovation within the perfume industry, as it is the very first black perfume to be created. In the bottle, the fragrance appears as a black liquid, but when it comes in to contact with oxygen onced sprayed, the formulation becomes clear. It is built differently to the traditional pyramid perfume structure; instead, notes rise from the perfume at different rates, and smell different if you rub them. While it not exactly as shocking a fragrance as you would expect from Lady Gaga, it is a fruity floral that can be worn by many - not just those who walk around in plastic dresses with their undies showing. Or frocks made from meat!

Skin care

Cellilux was sampled by our sisters in beauty, bellabox Singapore, and they raved about it product and their subscribers did too. After seeing the similarities to Glam Glow (which has been getting a lot of press lately) we gave it a go. You see some pretty funny things at the bellabox office sometimes - Thompson chasing balloons, very serious discussions about lip liners, and heated analysis of what we will order for our office Friday lunches... But me sitting at my desk, typing with a mask on at 11 in the morning would definitely rank up there as one of the strangest. The glacial water and nutrients in the mask draw the impurities to the surface of your skin, and after trying it myself, I knew it had to go in the box. You might have a few spots brought to the surface as a result, but better out than in I say!

We also found many more amazing products, some local and international, that will be coming to you in a future box, so stay tuned! Want a hint? Let's just say that there is an amazing lip product from Korea that I can't wait for you to try…. Sam