Bloom, with its Best4You recommendations aimed at simplifying the beauty shopping experience, celebrated its launch on Aug. 10. Screenshot from bloom.com.
An Aug. 10 national launch in New York City was just part of what figures to be a whirlwind few weeks for the team from Bloom, the Omaha-based online social beauty store that’s looking to revolutionize the way women buy beauty products.
“We are just at the very beginning of our mission to use social interaction to change the way that women shop for beauty products,” Nick Hudson, CMO of Bloom, said in an email last week. “We have a lot of plans to get this message to women around the country.”
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That process got under way with press meetings in New York, where members of the Bloom team met with 65 beauty editors. Starting next month, Bloom will take its show on the road. “We will start to take the message directly to women around the country as we do a media tour,” Hudson said. “Our mission is to help women never to buy the wrong beauty products again!”
As we described in a story in May, Bloom hopes to achieve those aims by personalizing the shopping experience, providing a customer relevant “Best4You” recommendations based on unbiased feedback from thousands of other women who are that customer’s beauty matches. Best4You is a tool that uses an algorithm that combines things like personal profile information and reviews from consumers with similar needs to provide customers a list of customized product recommendations.
The national launch served as Bloom’s formal introduction to the world, but the wheels have been in motion at Bloom for some time before that. According to Julie Mahloch, the founder and CEO of Xuba (the social commerce company under the umbrella of which Bloom was launched), the launch was the culmination of 18 months of work and data collection. By the end of beta testing, Bloom had accumulated some 20,000 users, and Mahloch said the response from those users was largely positive.
“Our customers love the customization, the free, personalized gifts, the fact that they have more freedom and flexibility when using their BloomDollars, as well as our on-staff beauty experts,” Maloch (left, photo from bloom.com) said in a release. “They’ve raved about our customer service, and we have a high rate of customers returning to purchase their entire beauty regimen, to take advantage of the rewards, gifts and promise that they’ll never buy the wrong beauty products.”
Currently, Bloom offers more than 130 brands across all price ranges. The company plans to add approximately 15-20 new brands every month, offering products that include makeup, skin care, hair care, bath and body, tools and fragrances for women.
Mahloch brings to the table an impressive ecommerce track record as one of the co-founders of Hayneedle, among other successful ventures. She was driven to Bloom by a combination of her own dissatisfaction with the current state of beauty shopping and the realization that there was considerable opportunity in the space.
“There’s low penetration in online beauty,” Mahloch said. “Consumers are comfortable buying a lot of other products online, but haven’t purchased beauty online in large numbers yet. As I researched the beauty retail landscape it seemed very confusing, I felt there had to be a better way to give women a more personalized beauty buying experience.”
Bloom is the first of Xuba’s social commerce sites to launch, and Hudson, who brings with him almost 20 years of experience in the beauty industry, believes now is an ideal time for Bloom to, well, bloom.
“The beauty industry … has been slow to take part in the consumer lead retail revolution,” he said. “I was drawn to Julie’s mission of changing the way that women purchase beauty products by harnessing the power of emerging social technologies. Consumers are demanding improvement in the way that retailers work and I think the beauty retail landscape will be significantly different in the next few years.”
