About Us

The Story of the Revel Nail Family

The Revel Nail story is a story about two families and how they came together to pursue a dream together that eventually became Revel Nail. The Malone family and the Sutton family are the founding families of Revel Nail, and their commitment to their dream and to each other, and keeping Revel Nail a place that puts family first, is how this story starts.

The story of how these families came together starts in very different places. Phon Malone, our CEO, was born in Vietnam. He came to the USA as a refugee when he was a young child, and was adopted into the Malone family and grew up in the United States, went to Villanova for college to be a Chemical Engineer, and after graduation he began to work in the nail industry on the product development and manufacturing side for the industry.

Keeli Malone and Monica Sutton grew up together in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, and their friendship is the beginning of the connection that would bring together Revel Nail. They each attended Penn State University and their lifelong friendship continued there – they would both graduate and move to Philadelphia for jobs at Rohm and Haas, where they continued to be friends.

Reed Sutton grew up in New Jersey and he also attended Penn State, which is where he met Monica, and that is how he enters the story. He graduated from Penn State and moved to the Philadelphia area for a job and the connection between Keeli, Phon, Monica and Reed all together starts there.

After both couples were married and began to have children, they would go on vacation together, and on one vacation to the beach in Delaware, the dream of starting their own nail brand was born. After his experience in the nail industry, Phon was confident that they could form their own company and be successful.

Keeli and Phon got MBAs from Rowan University in New Jersey, and Reed and Monica both studied for their MBAs at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and the dream began to take shape.

In the beginning, all the work was done late and night and on weekends. The Malones had 3 young children at this point and the Suttons had 4, so there were not many free hours in the day to start a company on top of their day jobs and taking care of the children but often they would combine a social visit with the children playing together with doing work. Many nights there were late night conference calls at the kitchen table once the kids were in bed to discuss what was going on and who was handling what.

Their small business began to grow and they moved from filling product up on the kitchen table to a small, run-down warehouse in Deptford NJ that had more rats than people in the building. At this time Reed and Phon were working full time jobs outside the company and everything was done at nights and weekends. The company was still focused mostly on Gel Polish at the time, and a new product Phon developed called Up2You, which allowed you to create a gel polish out of your favorite Nail Polish color.

Soon they were introduced to Dip Powder by a friend in the industry and they began to make and sell their own powders, and things began to really take off. They moved to a bigger, nicer warehouse with no rats and a lot more space. From there they developed new colors and innovations in Dip Powder, like Mood and Sun Changing colors and began to sell their own brand and to other larger brands that wanted to branch into Dip Powder. Around then www.revelnail.com began to sell Dip Powder to home users, the first place you could buy Dip Powder on the Internet.

The next major step was Phon quitting his job to work full time at Revel Nail. It was a huge leap at the time, the company only had enough money to pay his salary for a month or two, so every dollar was crucial and the company had to go out and make enough money to survive every month.

As the company grew we added another warehouse in the same building we were already in, and then moved again to a larger facility. The company experienced rapid growth as the Dip Powder took off in the Nail Industry, both for the Revel Nail brand and for other brands that Revel Nail manufactured for. At this time Reed quit his full-time at IBM to make the leap as well, and both families were fully invested in the Revel Nail dream.

As growth continued the company brought on more employees to help, and the first place they turned was to family. The company employees several family members and has almost 75 employees now. In April of 2018 Revel Nail purchased a 116,000 sq ft facility in Blackwood NJ that will be its permanent home, with plenty of room to continue growing.

Revel Nail continues to grow as Dip Powder spreads throughout the world and continues to welcome new people to the family all the time, from employees who work there to the 15,000+ members of the Revel Nail Facebook community who share tips, tricks, and most of all follow the #1 rule of the community – Be Nice!

Our most important mission remains to take care of our family – and that includes the thousands of people who trust us with their hard earned money when they buy our products.   That’s why Customer Satisfaction is our #1 priority – if our customers are not happy, they can get their money back.

That’s how we plan to continue to grow our business, and our family, by sticking by the values and principles that got us to where we are today – hard work, family, and putting the customer first. We believe that this is just the first chapter in a much longer story about the Revel Nail family and how it will continue to grow in the future, and we look forward to writing a new page in that book every day