A state champion wrestler left real estate at the top of his game, burned through a dozen gooey prototypes, and listened to his mom’s midnight dream, all to put a tiny tube of organic lip balm into the world that keeps changing lives one truck cab at a time.
By Greg Rollett, Grommet
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The tube of lip balm sitting in the cup holder of a semi-truck looked unremarkable. Standard size: 0.15 ounces. Cool peppermint. USDA-certified organic. Cincinnati-made. But tucked alongside it was a small card, and the card is what matters.
It read: “We believe it’s not only our lips that need to be cared for but the people around us, too. Our hope is that every time you apply your Kind Lips, you’ll remember to say something kind.”
The truck driver’s wife had placed it there herself. She had been married 33 years, and for 30 of them, her marriage had been marked by emotional and sometimes physical abuse. She was not sure a tube of lip balm could change anything. She just knew she had to try.
Three weeks passed without much change. Then something shifted. In week three, her husband came home unusually quiet, a silence that felt, to her, like relief. In week four, he texted her a compliment. It was, she told the man who made the lip balm, the first compliment in over 30 years.
That man is Joshua Neumann. And that phone call, he says, changed the shape of everything he thought he was building.
“It was the clearest confirmation I had ever felt.”
Joshua Neumann, Founder of Kind Lips
From the Wrestling Mat to the Open House
Nobody looking at Joshua Neumann in his twenties would have guessed lip balm founder. They saw a state champion wrestler from Ohio who had studied to become a special education teacher, then pivoted into real estate, then climbed to become one of the top agents in his state. He built a team. He landed great clients. He earned more money than he ever imagined growing up.
And then, at the top of it, he felt nothing.
“I realized that success alone didn’t make me happy, and money wasn’t what drove me,” he says. The more he achieved, the more hollow the scoreboard looked. He was, by every external measure, winning. And quietly unraveling.
One afternoon he sat on his couch staring at nothing, asking himself a question he had been avoiding for years: what was his life actually adding to the world? From nowhere he could fully explain, a thought arrived like a whisper. Start a lip balm company.
The idea was, by any rational measure, absurd. He had no chemistry background, no manufacturing contacts, no CPG experience. But that was almost the point. “Because it was so out of left field,” he says, “it felt like it came from somewhere bigger than me.”
He called his mom.
The Dream That Named Everything
She listened to his pitch, told him he would be great at whatever he put his mind to, and said she had to go. He admitted, years later, that he was “a little butthurt.”
But the next morning his phone rang at 6 a.m. His mom had been awake since 3 a.m., too wound up to wait any longer.
She had dreamed. In the dream, Joshua and his sister were children again, and they had gotten into a fight. He had said something unkind. His punishment: to write “The law of kindness is on my lips” fifty times, line after careful line, while his mother stood behind him to make sure he finished every one. And each time he wrote the sentence, she told him, the words “kind” and “lips” lifted off the page.
She said: “I think if you’re going to start a lip balm company, you’re supposed to call it Kind Lips.”
He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “It was the clearest confirmation I had ever felt.”
Kind Lips was born.
A Gooey Mess and a Better Way
The first prototype was, in Joshua’s words, “honestly terrible.” Soft, mushy, prone to melting almost instantly. He had grown up with chronically dry lips; his mom used to slather them in Vaseline before school because nothing else seemed to work. As an adult, he had tried every lip balm he could find and still applied it twenty times a day without ever feeling like his lips were actually healed.
“Why isn’t there something that actually nourishes your lips so you don’t have to keep reapplying?” It felt obvious once he said it out loud. Making lip balm was not rocket science. Getting it right, though, took batch after batch, ratio adjustments, and a long stretch of trial and error before the formula became something he was willing to share.
“What began as a gooey mess turned into a clean, effective lip balm that actually nourishes your lips and a product that carries a purpose bigger than itself.”
The final formula: 100% USDA-certified organic ingredients, including coconut oil, shea butter, and beeswax. Cool peppermint. Cruelty-free. Made in the USA. A tube so minty they named it twice: Kind Lips Mint Mint.
Kind Lips launched on Grommet in December 2025 and has gathered nearly 200 upvotes from readers who believe in what the brand stands for. Then came the call from Michigan.
The Card in the Cab
When the woman from Michigan first reached out, she framed it as a thank-you. She had found Kind Lips in a boutique. She loved the product. Joshua appreciated the note.
Then she asked if they could get on a phone call.
When she told him the full story, he sat very still. She explained how she had placed the lip balm in her husband’s semi-truck alongside the card that comes with every order: a simple card with a small ask: remember to say something kind. She was not sure it would work. She was not sure anything would work. She just wanted to try.
Three weeks of silence. Then a quiet homecoming. Then a text: the first compliment she could remember in 30 years.
“I’m not an overly emotional person,” Joshua says. “But listening to her, it was the first moment I truly understood how something as small and simple as a lip balm, paired with the intention behind it, could spark real change in someone’s life.”
He has never told that story without it meaning something.
The Classroom and the Calling
Kind Lips has since grown beyond the tube itself. Joshua now runs Kind Lips in the Classroom, a program designed to teach children self-worth, empathy, and emotional resilience before those lessons become urgent. Every session ends with a quote he carries close: “When you know who you are and who you were created to be, you will never want to be anyone else.”
“I don’t want kids to wait until they’re 40, like I did, to finally realize they deserve love, especially from themselves,” he says.
The biggest obstacle in building Kind Lips, he admits, was not sourcing organic ingredients or figuring out packaging or learning manufacturing from scratch. It was internal. “I had created a company built around kindness, yet I struggled to be kind to myself.” That contradiction forced him into what he calls the hardest and most important work of his life: learning to extend to himself the same grace his product asks others to practice.
“The more I learn to treat myself with grace, the more authentic and grounded the mission of Kind Lips becomes.”
Joshua Neumann
Something Created with His Own Two Hands
Joshua Neumann was a state champion in a sport built on strength, will, and the ability to hold on when everything in you wants to let go. He became one of the best real estate agents in Ohio. He could have stayed there, comfortable and prosperous and quietly hollow, for the rest of his career.
Instead he sat on a couch one afternoon and listened to a whisper. He called his mom. She dreamed words lifting off a page at 3 a.m. And he built a brand from a gooey kitchen prototype, a card tucked into every order, and a school program teaching children the law of kindness. It has reached classrooms, marriages, and a truck driver’s cup holder in ways he could not have scripted.
“At the end of the day, my favorite part is knowing that something I created with my own two hands, and a whole lot of faith, is out in the world making someone’s day a little kinder.”
That feeling, he says, is priceless.
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