What's New

When I was 8 years old and dressing up for my imagined day, I painted my nails with white out and colored them in with permanent markers only to end up desperately scrubbing the ink and paint off before my parents found out. Was your first experience with painted nails the same? My name is Kimberly Simon and I am the resident makeup artist and product designer here at TKB!  I’m so excited to announce one of our first projects: the sponsorship of a DIY Nail Polish Bar at David Tutera’s April 17 th “ Your Wedding Experience ” in Houston, Texas!  At the event, attendees will dabble in the adventure of mixing their own wedding day nail polish.  For the show, I created 12 unique recipes.  From the fairy tale inspired “Cinderella” blue to a rosy “Blushing Bride”, my favorite is a glittery, white polish recipe named “Bridal Party”.  I created these recipes based on this year’s wedding color trends! Making a custom polish for your wedding is fu...

It is shockingly easy and affordable to work with uncolored, bulk nail polish base to make your own unique creations. Our company started selling the material in early 2011.  I had noticed that there customers were talking about making "Frankenpolish" where they would blend together polishes from different manufacturers -- a half a bottle of an Essie green, a quarter bottle of an OPI gold, and top it off with some Sally Hansen! They were having such a blast but my immediate thought was:  Gee that looks expensive.  They should be working with the uncolored base and add our mica powders to it.  So, we made that happen. As with any DIY craft, it can be hard to scale up from making a few fun polishes with friends to actually running a business.  Among the many problems, concerns and tasks that crop up is coming to see yourself as a manufacturer.  That means understanding that you are working with a material which will have variations "batch to batch" ...

Halloween came and went. While the cat was away the mice played as, apparently, there was a contest to see who could come up with the most creative "recycled costume" while I was out running errands.  It was hard to choose the winner as everyone was so creative! In the meantime, I continue to work on improving our new website.  I managed to make some minor improvements, but each of these areas still need work: Better Search.  The Search Box that came with the website was pretty funky.  If you were looking for something called Blues and you typed in Blue, it would not come up.  It was super specific. We have created a much better Search function.  It looks "simple" up there at the top of the page, but once you start searching you will quickly be in awe of its power!  (or at least appreciate it a little more).  You will be able to better narrow your search by thing such as color and use, as well as price. Shipping of Nail Polish by Fedex On...

Birthin' our New Baby TKBTrading.com 5.0! TKB was founded in December 1997.  Over the years, we have had plenty of .... simple-looking.... web designs. What we lacked in flash and sizzle, we made up for in prices, heart and innovation.  Time has caught up with us though and we really needed to become "mobile friendly".  For this reason we are now launching our new version of "us".  It's a lot prettier! Here are some functional issues and differences between old and new site that customers have asked us to explain.  We will post more answers to questions as they arise! Q: Why the change?  A:  We have to be mobile-friendly for our customers.  Our new site will have other awesome functions, but the mobile-friendly was the main issue. Q:  Is my order history going to come over to the new site?  A:  Sadly, no.  The old site was so old fashioned it did not integrate with any of the new site options we had.  We ha...

My Colors are So Lovely In April, I vended at the Handmade Soap and Cosmetics Guild (HSCG) annual trade show in Indiana. I introduced My Lovelies, a new line of hue-intense pigments perfect for soapmakers. I offered them in both powder and liquid forms.  The powders are best for the Cold Process soapmakers, and the liquids are popular with the Melt and Pour Soapmakers.   All the colors are soap-stable, strongly-hued and non-bleeding. Equally important (to me), I make them!  Did you ever make something so lovely and beautiful you had to keep running back to look at it, even in the middle of the night?  That's how I feel about My Lovely Perfect Blue.  In cold process soap, it just glows. My Perfect Blue The colors also blend very easily into nail polish.  While the colors are not all approved for use in cosmetics in the USA, I'm not a hater of using in them nail polish.  I'm usually pretty high on my horse when it comes to telling pe...

... back in 2010. I thought I'd share that story. Like everyone else, TKB started out in a basement.  That was way back in 1995.  Over the years, the basement expanded into a bedroom and then from a bedroom into a flat.  We were in that flat for a long time.  Van studied for her citizenship exam there.  I would yell to her over the boxes "What are the three Branches of government?" or "Who are our Senators?"  and she would proudly end up educating me about things I long forgot. Every year there was also some kind of "The Great ...fill...in...the...blank" mistake.  There was the The Great Green Disaster of '08.  I won't point fingers at who made the decision to over-burden our shelves with liquid dyes.  Needless to say the next day we laughed at our foolishness as we mopped up about 50 gallons of green dye.  There was The Great Missing Kisses Disaster of '12.  Again, to protect the innocent I won't mention who fo...

2012 has been yet another year of organizing my company.  I've made a lot of progress, enough that about six weeks ago I was starting to become clueless about what the next steps were, and I knew I needed to make more changes. It occurred to me that Fedex had given me a free scale and a printer to improve my shipping so maybe they would also give me free advice. I asked my rep if there was anyone at Fedex who could come to my warehouse and tell me how to set up a more efficient shipping department. Within a week, a very nice man came out, watched what we did and made just a few achievable suggestions: Give the staff specific job duties so that when they come in they just tear into their job. Before that, we kind of shared duties, one person jumping in when another needed help. My advisor pointed out that people are more relaxed when they know what their job is and they are faster and more efficient when they do the same thing over and again. At first my husband was worr...