What started out as a social community website for beauty consumers looking for advice and product information is today re-launching as a retail and beauty content destination with more than a half dozen retailer partners—and counting.
Beautystat.com, which realizes on average 250,000 unique visitors per month, has indeed evolved since its initial launch in 2009. Today, it is a seed-funded website with founder Ron Robinson, a former beauty executive in research and development at companies including Estee Lauder, Avon and Revlon, jetting all over the country to meet with brands and retailers about his site’s proprietary search and discovery platform.
“We can give consumers alerts of beauty product deals, exclusive offers and ways to search and discover new and exciting products that meet their beauty needs using our proprietary personalized algorithm. Ultimately, we are helping brands and retailers grow their online beauty business,” Ron said from his Chelsea, New York-based headquarters.
The evolution into retail facilitator happened naturally.
“Our consumers started to ask us where they could buy the product they saw on our site. And with our brand and retail customers wanting to sell product and drive incremental online sales, we came up with this platform.”
Retail partners include Sephora, Walmart, Walgreens, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Amazon.com, Birchbox.com, beauty.com and drugstore.com. Industry sources estimate first-year sales are expected to near $2.8 million.
As the site’s retail partners suggest, a mix of mass, prestige and specialty brands appear on the site, ranging from Olay, Murad, Too Faced Cosmetics, Coolway, eSalon and Cezanne Perfect Finish Keratin Smoothing Treatment.
To use Beautystat’s platform all a user has to do is type in what they’re looking for, hover over the product, at which point data appears with product info and who sells it for what price. Users can also sort by what’s new. BeautyStat gets a commission on each sale.
To get the word out, BeautyStat will be incentivizing site visitors with sweepstakes, contests and giveaways. Consumers will also be asked to leave reviews to help populate the site’s pages and to create more user-generated content that will help BeautyStat grow from an search engine optimization [SEO] standpoint.
“Our consumers want to compare value and get the best price. So we are just allowing her to do that in a seamless manner. We are trying to simplify it,” Ron said.
And now Beautystat is mobile friendly, as one-third of site’s visitors (and growing) access it on a mobile device. The average user stays on BeautyStat for about three minutes per visit, with the most popular searches being for makeup and skin care.
“When the new makeup collections come out we see a spike in visits to those pages. After the spring and fall collections come out, we see skin care pick up,” Ron said.
The site also offers fragrance and body products, as well as beauty ingestibles.
In 2014, Ron said he will continue to seal the deal with several wish-list retailers (Ulta and Bloomingdale’s are on tap) and also secure more international retailers and brands hailing from Asia, Australia and Europe.
