By Ed Avis
If you’ve ever had a customer complain about poor quality cosmetic contact lenses or a reaction to make-up, the owners of Camden Passage have a message for you: Their products will not generate those complaints!
“We would never sell a product that we wouldn’t let our children use,” explains Tushar Mehta, who co-owns the company with his wife, Anuja Mehta. Camden Passage is located in Collingwood, Ontario, where Tushar and Anuja live with their teenaged son and daughter. “We control every aspect of our products from start to finish.”
The manufacturing process for the company’s cometic contact lenses is certified under the Medical Device Single Audit Program (MDSAP), which ensures everything meets strict medical safety standards. And the makeup, which is manufactured by UK-based Moon Makeup, is ISO certified. All of Camden’s products are FDA and Health Canada compliant.
Anuja and Tushar Mehta, owners of Camden Passage
The Mehtas founded Camden Passage in 2004. They started by manufacturing a line of home décor and housewares based on vintage designs – hence the name Camden Passage, which is an antiques market in London. They sold some products to drugstore chains, and in 2009 they branched into other products those stores could carry, including health and beauty products. That eventually led to a partnership with Moon Makeup in 2017.
“We handle all the North American distribution for Moon,” Tushar says. “Moon has a very similar ethos to us – they follow very stringent manufacturing requirements. They only use ingredients that are cosmetically certified and safe for use. Every year a third-party auditor spends five or six days examining all of their manufacturing standards, so nothing can go unnoticed. If they say they use a particular pigment, there’s a full audit trail from the pigment supplier to the log on the warehouse floor.”
The Moon products Camden distributes in North America range from Moon Glow, which is neon colored makeup that shines under blacklight, to Cosmic Moon, which is makeup in metallic shades. The other Moon lines are Moon Glitter, Moon Terror and Moon Creations.
The company adds a couple of hundred new SKUs each year, and has a total of 2100 SKUs in about 100 categories today.
“We have a fantastic relationship with Moon,” Tushar says. “We’re on the phone with the two founding partners two or three times a week on various levels. They are growing worldwide, and they see the relationship with the costume market as an important part of that.”
Because Camden is the sole North American distributor of Moon, they ensure that pricing to all retailers is consistent.
“We have one price,” Tushar says. “The worst thing you can do is sell a product for 50 cents to one customer and $1 to another. We’ve been in business for 30 years and know how to treat our customers well.”
Camden Passage has sold cosmetic contact lenses for over a decade, but an important change arrived in 2016, when they started to take control of the manufacturing process themselves. They sought certification under ISO 13485, which is the gold standard for medical device manufacturing, and they also pursued the Medical Device Single Audit Program certification. By 2019 they had achieved both.
“That was a big turning point for us,” Tushar says. “That was when we launched the Loox brand.”
By completely controlling the manufacturing of the lenses, Camden can ensure that their lenses are top quality. A key difference between their lenses and many other cosmetic lenses is that the ink is encapsulated in the lens, so it never touches the wearer’s eyes. Substandard lenses have microscopic bumps on the lens due to the fact that the ink is printed on the lens itself; bacteria can build up on the lens because of those bumps.
Another important characteristic of Camden’s lenses is high oxygen permeability, which makes them comfortable to wear.
Camden manufactures about 130 designs of lenses, ranging from natural-look lenses that simply change the wearer’s eye color to elaborate theatrical lenses that can create cat eyes, zombie eyes, werewolf eyes and many more.
“This year we added a line of anime lenses,” Anuja says. “It’s a range of 12 lenses specifically designed for comic conventions and anime in general. We react to the market each year when coming up with new lines. Because we’re a small organization, it’s easy for us to do that.”
Another advantage of being a small organization is that Tushar and Anuja, and other members of their team, know many of their customers personally.
“We actually answer the phones,” Tushar says. “We want customers to know that they’re not just a number. That’s important for us, and it builds a level of comfort for our customers.”
Anuja echoes that idea: “Our customers know that if there is an issue we can be reached and we can make it right. For example, a retailer called recently who needed a product for Mardi Gras, which was starting the next day. So we overnighted it to them for no extra cost.”
