Discover Beauty Better
Birchbox, a New York based subscription service that ships customer beauty samples for $10 per month, has already launched more than two years since September 2010. Birchbox seeks to help customers discover and buy beauty products online and to help brands discover suitable customers. “Discover Beauty Better” is the theme of Birchbox and Birchbox always devote itself to it.
Birchbox’s immediate success highly depends on its special business strategy. The main business-level strategy of Birchbox is differentiation, an integrated set of actions taken to produce goods or services that customers perceive as being different in ways that are important to them. Birchbox always makes customer feel different when they are having Birchbox’s beauty services. And now Birchbox is becoming a powerful customer acquisition tool for beauty brands and products.
During these years, Birchbox achieved lots of success in American beauty industry. Currently, Birchbox considered expanding its business internationally.
Birchbox focused on “prestige” segment of the beauty market, where price points varied considerably in different brands and categories. Seasonal changes, style trends and product innovations are the main reasons for growth in this sector.
Birchbox always does something different from other beauty business company. As its core, Birchbox was about three things: a subscription service, original editorial content, and an online shop. Those things worked together. By offering editorial content, Birchbox could help subscribers understand how best to use samples, at the same time, encouraging them to purchase full-sized products. Birchbox offered “beauty profile” questionnaires to new customers, learning about customers’ beauty needs and preferences. Each month, customers would receive a box containing four to five samples that corresponded with their preferences. If a customer satisfied a sample, she could purchase the full-sized product from the online “Birchbox Shop.” All of these procedures made their customers achieved unique services and experienced that they couldn’t get from other companies.
Birchbox was a new company that didn’t have a long history. To achieve its goals, Birchbox need to attract customers first. Birchbox focused on offline recommendation, online word of mouth, and media coverage. To increase influence among consumers, Birchbox paid a PR firm to bolster its press coverage and then hired a PR lead in-house. In addition, Birchbox spent roughly $10,000 per month on Google adWords and Facebook ads to present its products, thus attracting customers all over the world. Currently, Birchbox started out with a monthly roster of articles and videos, and daily blog posts. Birchbox’s extraordinary bright pink box packaging also attracted customers’ attention a lot.
A good operation system is essential to a company’s success. Birchbox’s operations depended on two logistical