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The product that defined the brand began as a solution to a mundane irritation: lip balm that vanished to the bottom of a handbag. Jonathan Teller built the original formula in 2006, and the founding team's bet was that the category — dominated for decades by forgettable tubes — could be cracked open by design rather than chemistry. The answer was the egg-shaped orb, a colorful sphere too big and too tactile to lose, that you twisted open like a tiny treasure. When it reached US shelves in 2009, it did something balms almost never do: it became an object people wanted to be seen holding. The viral lift-off owed as much to celebrity habit as to marketing spend — Miley Cyrus, Christina Aguilera, Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian were all spotted producing the pastel spheres from their makeup bags, turning the balm into a pop-culture accessory just as Instagram was teaching a generation to photograph what they carried. By the mid-2010s the brand had clawed its way to roughly 11.5% of the US lip-care market and was moving close to two million units a week worldwide, outpacing far older incumbents. Not everything was smooth. Between 2014 and 2017 the FDA logged 126 complaints over adverse reactions, and a 2016 class-action lawsuit alleged the balm caused blistering and cracking; the matter settled with compensation for affected buyers and revised packaging carrying safety language — a sobering chapter for a product sold largely on charm. The company leaned on its momentum to expand well beyond lips, applying the same design-forward, naturally-derived-ingredient playbook to shave creams, hand and body lotions and body washes. Through it all the orb remained the engine: proof that a category can be reinvented by rethinking the shape of the thing in your pocket.

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