In 2015, beauty industry veteran Kendra Kolb Butler swapped her high heels for hiking shoes, and moved from Manhattan to Jackson Hole, Wyoming in search of open space and serenity. It wasn’t long before the former executive, who held the role of Head of Marketing and PR at Dennis Gross for 12 years, noticed a need for a high-end beauty apothecary to serve the town’s residents and seasonal visitors. In 2015, she opened Alpyn Beauty Bar, a Sephora-like boutique that sells an edited mix of her favorite brands while also providing makeup and skin care services. After the store’s clients began commenting that their skin, which is continuously exposed to the town’s harsh climate, wasn’t responding to a majority of treatments on the market, Kendra investigated the resilient plants that were thriving in the town’s high-altitude, low-humidity environment, and developed a skin care line supercharged with extracts and actives from the local vegetation. The brand, Alpyn Beauty, launched this month with three luxe products designed to hydrate and protect skin.

Company Name: Alpyn Beauty (pronounced AL-PEN)

Founder Name: Kendra Kolb Butler

Launch Date: August 2018

Point of difference: Alpyn Beauty is a sustainably sourced, natural skin care line formulated with wildcrafted and hand-cultivated alpine botanicals that are grown in over 6,000-feet of elevation within the mountains surrounding Jackson Hole, WY. “The natural and clean beauty movement is continuing to gain momentum and we believe that wildcrafting (the practice of harvesting plants from their natural or wild habitat) is the future of the natural category,” said Kendra. “We believe it’s also where we will see the most innovation in the form of new ingredients being discovered and introduced to consumers to solve their skin care concerns.”

Distribution: Products are available in Credo Beauty, Goop and alpynbeauty.com

Marketing/communications: To raise brand awareness, a robust amount of social and digital content is in the works and will be released this Fall. The company has also hired a full service public relations firm to help with marketing efforts.

Collection: The brand launched with three SKUS: Creamy Bubbling Cleanser ($36), PlantGenius Melt Moisturizer ($60), and Plant Genius Line-Filling Eye Balm ($62). The products feature the brand’s proprietary PlantGenuis Complex which consist of five botanicals: wild arnica, wild chamomile, sage, calendula and borage.A fourth product, a brightening serum, is slated for release in January 2019.

Investors: The brand is privately funded.

Best Lesson Learned: “The best lesson I’ve learned so far is to listen to the consumer and what she wants and be quick to respond to her needs,” said Kendra. “Having two stores in Jackson Hole put me directly in touch with consumers’ wants, needs and desires when it comes to women and their skin care purchases. During the formulation process, we took feedback from local clientele to improve and enhance the formulas, tweaking them over and over again, until our study results showed high customer satisfaction.”