After winning the $250,000 prize at the 2016 Baton Rouge Pitch Night competition last November, Lubricity Labs founder Boyce Clark mapped out a business and marketing plan to help chart the course for his rapidly growing hair care company, which has taken the local market by storm with its revolutionary, all-natural hair smoothing products.
But on the Friday before Mardi Gras, those plans changed, after WAFB-TV aired a story about Lubricity Labs on its 10 p.m. newscast.
“By the time the newscast was over I had 120 orders,” Clark says. “When I woke up the next morning, I had 1,100. Then, 27 affiliate stations picked up the story and things really went crazy. Our website finally crashed when it exceeded 16,000 views per minute.”
In the seven weeks since that segment aired, Clark’s carefully laid business and marketing plans are out the window, as he’s trying to rapidly scale up for an exponential growth he never expected. Lubricity Labs is selling some 150 product kits per day, after spiking in early March at 3,000 per day, and revenues are up more than 10,000%. Nearly 90 local salons have orders in for the products, though they’ve been told they have to wait: The company currently has a 17-day backlog from online orders it’s trying to fill.
“We’ve been working around the clock, making batches of product until three in the morning,” Clark says.
It’s been a whirlwind and it’s about to get crazier, still. Since orders shot up in the wake of the WAFB story, Lubricity Labs has already outgrown its new lab and production space in the LSU Business and Technology Center, where it had relocated just four months ago. Clark plans to sign a co-packing deal later this month with a production facility in Indiana, where his hair therapy products will be mixed, bottled, packaged and shipped. The new arrangement should enable him to produce some 40,000 kits of product.
Clark expects those to go fast. Since his newfound fame, he landed a role as the beauty consultant in a Lifetime channel show called “Balancing Act” that will air nationwide on the cable network June 13-15.
As if that weren’t enough, Clark submitted a test video to “Shark Tank” earlier this year, and was recently informed he made the finals. Last week, he submitted a second video and is hoping to find out soon whether he’ll be featured on the hit reality show as a contestant this fall.
“It’s been crazy,” says Clark, who still has his original group of just four, close-knit employees. “We never expected this kind of growth. But it’s been wonderful.”
Read a recent Business Report Entrepreneur feature on Clark.
—Stephanie Riegel
