Sharmadean Reid, Beautystack
Who is Beautystack and what do you do?
Beautystack is a visual and social beauty booking platform. We take social media elements – the idea that you have a username and can ‘like’, ‘share’ and ‘follow’ – and actually merge them with a transactional element of a marketplace that allows you to consume and book beauty.
At VIDA, we define Next Generation Media Brands as having one or more of the following characteristics: Being disruptive, having diverse revenue streams, operating across multiple platforms and meeting the needs of an underserved audience/community. How does Beautystack fit our definition of what it means to be a Next-Generation Media Brand?
If you think about it, a traditional beauty media outlet - such as, let’s say, Vogue - writes an article called ‘top 10 facials this year’. There’s no way for you to then turn that content into a commercial thing that you can then transact from. But that is what we do. Every bit of content that we create on our blog has links at the bottom where you can book things from that content. So, to me, that’s next-generation. Next-generation media has always been about how to shop content, but nobody has ever been, like, ‘how can I book content?’ That’s the thing that we’re excited about. People are so obsessed with the e-commerce market that they forget about the services market. What is there in the service industry for booking stuff? It’s always about ‘let’s shop this dress/shoes/bag’, but also there’s a whole big opportunity around how people can shop experiences.
What’s your ‘why’?
The ‘why’ was because, when I had my nail salon, everyone kept screenshotting the pictures and saying ‘how much is this, how long does it take, what is this?’. I realised it would be so much easier if you could just book the picture they were showing me. All of the booking platforms were utility products, and all social media platforms were geared towards selling products, not services, so that was my insight.
How did you build your brand?
The first thing to do was to put feelers out to see if anyone wanted a product like this. We had a waitlist and such a huge number of sign-ups that we were like, ok, this is something that people want. From there, I started to think about how the technology could be structured to allow social booking. That hadn’t really been done before in this way. Usually, you book something with just an email address and a password - the concept of usernames or profiles doesn’t exist. I wanted to know whether people really cared about booking in a social network environment. Once I figured that out, I just got a team together and started working on it.
Every person in our team is in-house. Hiring is really difficult, and it always will be difficult, but that’s just how it goes. Hiring is the thing that I need to really get some expertise. All the content over the last year was created by us, but recently we’ve been working with some beauty journalists who I’ve known for a long time.
How did you develop your audience?
I just used my own network to do it. We’ve not done any paid marketing to date. My methodology is always just to make stuff, and if people like it, it’s working. If they don’t, then I need to figure that out. I’m not the kind of person who starts building something and then spends ages promoting it, I just like to build it. If it’s truly good, people will use it. We’ve had lots of people using Beautystack over the last year, which is so exciting to see. What I’m excited about for this year is to make it a really intense rocket-ship type of growth. That’s where I’m at – I want to build something people use, but I also want to give them something they didn’t know they wanted, but they’re desperate to have.
We have also done constant events for the last year. I do at least two events per month. I like doing events because a lot of these people work alone and are somewhat isolated, so it’s nice for them to feel like they can come together and meet with likeminded people.
How did you increase your revenue?
We’ll be putting in a subscription model in the future, but for now, it’s just in beta, so we’re not charging anyone. I’m sure we’ll also charge for other services, but we’re getting a lot of brand partnerships right now. We recently did a partnership with Nike that was an incredibly good partnership for us financially. We always have in-bound enquiries, we don’t pitch to anybody.
How have you raised funds?
We raised funds via Index Ventures a year ago. I enjoyed the process, and I enjoyed being challenged about my business.
What’s next?
We’re going to re-launch the service to make it open-access so that anyone in the world can sign up to Beautystack and basically become part of a global beauty community.
