In the mid-1990s, Andrea Danielson whipped up a small batch of lip balm on the stovetop for Steve Shriver, who had “larger-than-life lips, and was always searching for a better balm.” Steve fell in love both with the balm and the woman who made it. The two became a young, outdoorsy couple who valued adventure and sustainability, and Steve floated the idea that the kitchen hobby could be a living.
That idea became Eco Lips, the Cedar Rapids company that created the first lip balm to use organic ingredients. As of mid-2025, the company employs about 100 people to produce lip balm, sunscreen, and other personal care products, and its products are sold in more than 40,000 stores nationwide. What started as a way to make a paycheck became proof of a simple idea: that taking care of customers, workers, and the land can be the same thing as running a good business.
Photo Courtesy Eco Lips
The couple started small. With about $5,000 from Andrea’s savings, they bought tubes and labels and began selling the balm to shops around Cedar Rapids. They first built a private-label natural body care company named Raining Rose after their two daughters and sold it about five years later for $1.2 million. Steve then founded Eco Lips in 2003 to fill a gap he saw in both the lip balm and organic markets. The growth has not been a straight line. Eco Lips outgrew the Cherry Building in Cedar Rapids and a space in Marion before moving back into its current Cedar Rapids home in 2021, with the help of roughly $230,000 in state tax credits tied to the expansion.
The pitch was almost modest. Eco Lips positioned itself as a low-cost “gateway” organic product, or an easy, inexpensive way for a shopper who had never bought organic anything to give it a try. “We thought if we could get people to try this lip balm, they’d be more open to organic brands,” Steve told Opportunity Iowa.
The product backs up the claim. The company does not use any petroleum-based ingredients, which not only contribute to pollution, but also do not “deliver any vitamins, minerals, or hydration to help heal dry lips.” Instead, Eco Lips products are certified USDA Organic, Fair Trade Certified, Non-GMO Project Verified, and Leaping Bunny cruelty-free, made from natural ingredients like sunflower oil and organic beeswax. The organic beeswax serves as the base of 99% of the business’s lip balms, and it is ethically harvested, with hives left with sufficient reserves of honey and pollen for every winter. The company was also the first to market with Fair Trade Certified organic baobab oil, hand-harvested from the “tree of life” in Zimbabwe, which is used in its GOLD lip balm.
And in a category where nearly every tube is plastic, Eco Lips built the Plant Pod, which the company describes as the world’s first 100% plastic-free lip balm tube, made from plant materials such as bamboo and tea leaves, or even from potatoes and rice sourced in Thailand. “Not only does it cut down on landfill waste, but it helps reduce your exposure to plastic-based toxins, too,” the company writes. “No microplastics, no phthalates, and no synthetic fragrances—just good-for-you ingredients in better-for-the-planet packaging.”
Photo Courtesy Eco Lips
That instinct to keep its footprint small runs through the operation. The 90,000-square-foot Cedar Rapids plant that it moved to in 2021 runs on renewable energy, and the company has purchased wind energy credits since 2004. Likewise, solar installed at an earlier site in Marion was projected to supply about three-quarters of that location’s electricity. “We’re also 3 times more likely to use 100% low-impact renewable energy in comparison to ordinary businesses,” Eco Lips wrote. At the current facility, Opportunity Iowa reports that fully and semi-automated lines fill more than 30,000 tubes per hour.
Photo Courtesy Eco Lips
Steve credits the discipline of becoming a Certified B Corporation, a designation Eco Lips has held since 2013, with a current B Impact score of 81.6, well above the 50.9 median for companies that take the assessment. “Becoming a B-Corp gave us the framework to understand true sustainability,” he said. “It just so happens, too, that the better we do sustainability-wise, the more money we make, which is crazy.” As Eco Lips described, “We don’t give lip service to sustainability; we live it every day.”
Beyond donating 1% of profits, the company has also backed its community when disaster struck close to home. After the August 2020 derecho tore through Iowa, causing $23.6 million in damage to public infrastructure, Eco Lips pledged $5,000 to Trees Forever‘s tree-recovery program and $2,500 to the Indian Creek Nature Center‘s beekeeping program. “We need our tree canopy back; we need Trees Forever,” Steve said at the time. “We also need to save the bees.” The company also supports SheJumps, which gets girls and women into the outdoors. Likewise, it supports communities around the world through Fair Trade-certified products, offering transparent sourcing that contributes to fair wages and better working conditions. Eco Lips explains, “We create opportunities for organic and fair trade farmers around the world to live with dignity, support themselves and their families, and make a contribution to their communities.”
Photo Courtesy Eco Lips
Steve originally founded Eco Lips in California, but he came home to Iowa for its central location, workforce, lower cost of living, and a community that understood and supported manufacturing. “There’s no better place to be in business than Iowa,” he said. More than two decades in, the work is the same as it was at the stovetop, even though it is now valued between $20 million and $30 million. “It’s still about problem-solving every day to try to get better.”
