Inside the Nami Matcha and Fenty Beauty Lip Cravings Kit Collaboration

Aug 11
5 min read

My matcha whisk lives on my counter now, permanently, the way a coffee maker used to before I switched teams entirely somewhere around last spring. So when a green tin showed up in a Fenty Beauty collaboration, my first reaction wasn't skepticism the way it usually is when a beauty brand tries to borrow credibility from a food trend. It was recognition. I already had the tin on my shelf. I already knew the name on it. Watching that name show up next to Rihanna's on the same product page felt less like a marketing surprise and more like a moment I'd been quietly expecting for a while.

That name is Ashley Alexander, and I want to be honest about something before I get into the kit itself, because it colors how I'm reading this whole launch. I've been watching her build Nami Matcha for a long time now, long before strawberry matcha had a hashtag attached to it, back when it was just a small, carefully sourced product with a founder who clearly knew exactly what she was doing and had the patience to do it right instead of fast.

Watching that slow, deliberate build turn into a collaboration with one of the biggest beauty brands on the planet is genuinely one of those moments where you feel a little proud on someone else's behalf, even though they have absolutely no idea you exist. It is nice, in the most sincere sense of that word, to watch something earned actually arrive.

Nami Matcha x Fenty Beauty - Who Would Have Thoguht?

What makes this pairing smart, beyond the obvious color story synergy of matcha green and glossy pink, is that both brands are fundamentally selling ritual rather than product. Fenty built its identity on the idea that a gloss isn't just color, it's a small, repeatable act of self attention, the thing you reapply between meetings or after lunch because it feels good, not because your lips demand it. Nami Matcha operates on the exact same emotional register, just in a different category. Making a bowl of matcha is a ritual before it's a beverage. There's a whisking motion, a moment of stillness, a small ceremony built into something that could otherwise just be caffeine in a cup.

Putting those two rituals in the same box together isn't a stretch the way a lot of beauty and food collaborations end up feeling. It's closer to a genuine overlap, two brands that both understood a long time ago that people don't just want products, they want small moments of intentionality built into an otherwise chaotic day. I think that's the actual insight behind this kit, more than the strawberry flavor or the packaging, and it's the reason this collaboration reads as considered rather than opportunistic.

Watching a Founder's Timeline From the Outside

I want to sit with the Ashley Alexander part of this for a minute longer, because I think it's the most interesting layer of the whole story and the one most coverage of this launch will skip entirely in favor of just talking about the gloss. Building a food and beverage brand from scratch, especially one built around a specific, carefully sourced ingredient like Kagoshima strawberry matcha, requires a kind of patience that doesn't photograph well.

There's no dramatic before and after moment in sourcing relationships, in getting a supply chain right, in slowly building trust with a customer base one small batch at a time. It's unglamorous, repetitive work, and most of it happens invisibly, long before anyone outside a small, dedicated following notices.

I noticed early, mostly by accident, and I kept noticing, the way you do with a brand that quietly keeps showing up with better execution every time you check back in. Watching that trajectory from a distance, seeing packaging get more refined, seeing the flavor lineup expand thoughtfully instead of chaotically, seeing the brand voice sharpen without ever losing its original warmth, gives this Fenty collaboration a different weight than it would carry as a cold open. This isn't a founder who got discovered overnight and handed a lucky break. This is someone whose work was visibly, steadily building toward exactly this kind of validation, and getting to watch that unfold in real time is one of the genuine pleasures of following smaller brands closely instead of only paying attention once they've already arrived.

What Is Actually in the Box?

The kit itself is a tight, well edited little bundle, which I appreciate, because collaboration kits have a bad habit of overstuffing themselves with filler just to justify a higher price point. Here you get a tin of the strawberry matcha, sourced from Kagoshima with that specific, unmistakable balance of natural sweetness and depth that separates good matcha from the flat, grassy stuff that gives the category a bad reputation with people who haven't had the real version yet.

Alongside it sits Fenty's most iconic gloss shade, the shimmering universal pink that made the original Gloss Bomb a phenomenon in the first place, paired with a small, genuinely charming fuzzy green keychain pouch built to carry the gloss around.

The keychain is a small detail, but it's doing real work for the collection's personality. It's the kind of object that photographs well without trying too hard to be photogenic, fuzzy, a little playful, the exact green you'd expect from a proper bowl of strawberry matcha rather than an artificially bright approximation of it. Little details like that are usually where collaborations either earn their premium or expose themselves as a licensing deal dressed up as a creative partnership, and this one leans toward the former.

What keeps this collaboration from blending into the endless churn of celebrity brand crossovers, at least for me, comes back to the story sitting underneath it. So many of these partnerships exist purely as a marketing calendar entry, two brands with overlapping audiences deciding to split a launch date and call it synergy. This one has an actual arc behind it, a founder who built something real and specific over years of unglamorous work, meeting a beauty giant that clearly recognized the same quality I noticed a long time ago without any marketing budget pointing me toward it.

Watching Ashley go from a small, carefully run matcha brand to sitting on a shelf next to Fenty's biggest hero product is the kind of thing that makes we want to root for more collaborations built this way, ones that reward genuine, patient brand building instead of just chasing whichever creator has the loudest following this particular month. The gloss is good. The matcha is genuinely excellent.

But what I'll actually remember about this launch, longer after the limited stock disappears, is the quiet satisfaction of watching something built carefully and honestly finally get the spotlight it earned.

Love,

Rae