A Columbus entrepreneur’s fledgling cosmetics business has just landed two national accounts that could boost the company with a future expansion.
Dawn Andrews, who started garb2ART Cosmetics in her home five years ago, is gearing up after completing plans for a major product launch with national retailer Von Maur, headquartered in Davenport, Iowa. Andrews is also finishing up a deal with the Albertsons grocery chain based in Boise, Idaho.
A wide assortment of garb2ART’s most popular products — including donut bath bombs, sugar scrubs, Soap’n Poufs, and seasonal snowman bath bombs with hand-drawn faces — will be on store shelves in all 33 Von Maur department store locations and online at vonmaur.com early this fall.
Her company’s name originated from a commitment by Andrews to recycle items into art before her business morphed into cosmetics and personal-care products that are made of natural ingredients and packaged in recycled material.
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Von Maur spokesman Brendan Griffith said his company focuses on finding unique products that are new to the market.
“This provides growing companies the ability to offer their product on a larger scale, given our footprint of stores,” Griffith said.
Although the Albertson details are still being worked out, Andrews said both business arrangements portend big opportunities and possibilities for the future, even as her company finishes up its first year in a new storefront along Columbus’ Central Avenue in a building that was once a part of Cummins Engine Plant 2.
The walls of the store feature the company’s wide variety of bath and body products, handmade with natural ingredients and packaged in recyclable or reuseable packaging designed as earth-friendly. However, the store has the original Cummins painted concrete floor, complete with cracks and a few peels.
Andrews loves the character of the Cummins floor and that it has survived to find a new use.
Business start
The small-business success story that is garb2ART began at a time when Andrews decided to flip her life upside down, leaving the security of jobs in radio broadcasting and banking, remarrying and adding to her family, waging a successful battle against cancer, and overcoming the grief of losing her father.
In all of that, Andrews said she learned that life is too short to not do something you love.
After becoming intrigued when finding a unique tube lip gloss in a Florida boutique, she gave the idea her own spin with LipGarb, which is lip gloss with a mirror and wand applicator that lights up. She paired the design with quirky names, something she carried through on all her product projects, and customers became obsessed.
Her first batches sold out in minutes, and more beauty products in the line followed, including nail polishes, lotions and more.
Andrews started production in her own home at the beginning, eventually moving to a store on Washington Street in downtown Columbus and renting an apartment behind it for the production area, where Andrews and her two employees would constantly trip over each other when doing production work.
In October 2017, the store moved to its current location at 1516 Central Ave., where the storefront has a quirky collection of product displays and the back has a large, spacious area for production.
“We love this place,” Andrews said of the new location, where she works with employees Halee Petro, a Columbus East graduate, and Lauryn Akin, a Columbus Signature Academy-New Tech graduate.
Collaborative process
Andrews also has friends and family who stop in to help, among them nephew Kyle Kingen, who attends Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI and is the artist behind the hand-drawn faces and illustrations on her products, including the bath bomb snowmen.
Andrews said the designs and scents are a collaborative process. After a recipe and product idea is created, Petro, Akin, Kingen and others help develop the scent, color and design.
For example, once Andrews had the idea for the donut bath bomb, she showed it to her employees, saying, “OK, here’s a donut, what else can you do with it?”
Merchandise from garb2ART is featured in other locations around Columbus, including the Columbus Regional Hospital gift shop, where Andrews’ bath bombs fly off the display shelves, said Rebekah Walsh, the hospital’s director of volunteer services and annual fundraising.
The gift shop picked up Andrews’ products as an effort to showcase and promote local business owners, she said. And as popular as the products are for hospital visitors, they have also been extremely popular with hospital staff, Walsh said.
“They are at a great price point and make wonderful gifts,” Walsh said.
The lip glosses also sold at the hospital gift shop have been so popular that Walsh offers them as an incentive for in-house hospital fundraising campaigns, she said.
Andrews generously creates a lip gloss with a signature color for the campaign. A recent one was “Generations of Generosity,” and the only way to obtain it was to make a donation.
The idea turned into a hit with employees, who are also fans of the product line, she said.
Family connections
Andrews has been known to have a little fun with product names.
There’s a story behind the deodorant for men with a scent called “Scott,” which is one of the company’s biggest sellers, Andrews said.
One of her children was sniffing the smell of a new scent for the deodorant and said, “That smells like Scott,” she said. So it became “Scott”-scented deodorant.
“Luckily, he’s a good sport,” she said of her husband Scott, who the scent is named for in real life. “We send a lot of this product out and we get asked that question a lot.”
With the additional space of the Central Avenue location, the garb2art crew is no longer trying to figure out where to store large orders on pallets. There is room to keep track of inventory, a more organized production space and enough room to provide an assembly line-like production process, she said.
garb2ART is known for its environmental-friendly packaging and its focus on ingredients that are kind to humans and to the environment. Andrews wants as much of the packaging as possible to be recyclable, and carries that into her store, where most of the product displays are showcased on upcycled items she found among cast-offs.
An old bathtub was dug out of the ground and cleaned before coming a bath bomb and pouf display area — and shelves and bureaus were all refurbished for the store. The one exception is a toilet next to the bathtub which was purchased new, she said.
With the arrival of fall, pumpkin scents are featured, but much of the merchandise being produced for the national accounts is related toward the Christmas season.
Besides the local and the large-account customers, Andrews notes on her website that garb2ART is private-labeling and wholesaling to hundreds of stores across the United States.
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garb2Art’s products are set to be on store shelves in all 33 Von Maur locations and online at vonmaur.com early this fall.
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After Dawn Andrews spent a full year of making her unique line of lip gloss, she quit her day job in 2014 and focused totally on garb2ART Cosmetics.
The company, at 1516 Central Ave, Columbus, includes a full line of body butters, scrubs, bath bombs, perfumes and other products that are created and produced at her Central Avenue location.
garb2ART uses recyclable and reusable packaging and has kept more than 9 tons of material out of landfills.
For more information: 812-344-0203 or email [email protected].
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Age: 41
City of residence: Columbus
Family: Husband Scott; children Larry, 22; Luke, 20; Kate, 8; Brenna, 8; and Maggie, 6.
Education: Left school after eighth grade but obtained a GED at age 21.
Community organizations: Volunteers in Medicine Reverse Raffle Committee and Alliance for Substance Abuse Progress in Bartholomew County Recovery Programs Team Member
Favorite quote: "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." (Originally attributed to Steve Jobs)
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