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60 August 2014 | beautystorebusiness.com management experience and huge passion for the Poshly site! Do you have any competitors? We look at the competitive landscape as divided into two groups: beauty media companies and market-research firms. Beauty media companies, such as sub- scription-box companies or beauty editorial websites, tend to be focused on commerce and content, and are pretty tech-light. When it comes to research, Poshly is much faster and more customizable than tradi- tional consumer insights firms. There is no other company combining data and beauty in the way Poshly does. Who is your main customer? On the consumer side, 98% of our members are female, 54% are 35 years old or younger, and they tend to be tech-savvy. And, of course, they are also early beauty adopters. On the brand side, we work with massive conglomerates as well as up- and-coming indie brands. We are very passionate about ser- vicing the whole beauty market; so our offerings are flexible to address the needs and budgets of all brands, large and small. How do you profit from giving product away? Poshly monetizes three offerings: Poshly Giveaways, Poshly Insights and Poshly Precision. Poshly Giveaways are a great promo- tional tool for brands to feature a product launch and get the word out about a SKU or a brand. Poshly Insights is our consumer insights solution. If brands want to learn about consumers, better understand the brand's competitors or retail channels, or have insights to empower the product- development process, Poshly Insights uncovers the trends and statistics to address their needs. Finally, Poshly Precision is our smart sampling solution. Rather than brands sending products out to random con- sumers, we are able to target product mail-outs only to the people who fit targeted demographics and psychograph- ics. For example, if a brand only wants to reach women who shop at ULTA Beauty or professional makeup artists, we can focus samples just to those people. Poshly Precision is an evolution of the sampling business because being data driven delivers higher ROI for brands. How do you provide beauty brands with consumer insights? Would you please give a few examples of how beauty brands use this data? When brands engage with us in Poshly Insights, we do a consultation meeting to get specific about the brands needs, collaborate in crafting any custom Q&As; that are needed, and deliver results in an average of two weeks. The deliverables we provide for brands include a key takeaways deck, supporting graphs and tables, and all the raw data we collect throughout the process. We conclude the project with another consultation meeting or call to review findings. Poshly has worked with dermatol- ogy brands to help them determine which retailers to pursue to stock their new products, magazines such as Teen VOGUE and People StyleWatch to bet- ter understand their beauty readers' interests, big conglomerates such as L'Oréal to help them understand con- sumer trends as they develop cutting- edge skincare and makeup products and more. Poshly Insights cases run the gamut with data about consumer personas, psychographics, demographics, brand loyalty and competition, retailers, media consumption and more. How is Poshly changing the way brands collect and use consumer data? Many beauty brands tell us they're frus- trated by how slow traditional market research is. When they start to work on research with a traditional firm, the cam- paigns often have low sample sizes of respondents and are hard to customize throughout the campaign. We often hear that by the time the results are delivered several months after the start of the research campaign, brand professionals feel that the information is already out of date given how quickly the beauty industry is evolving each quarter. Poshly is a paradigm shift in the mar- ket when it comes to data collection and data access. When it comes to data collection, we can deploy new questions to our platform within minutes, and consumers can begin responding immediately. We enable brands to then access our analyt- ics platform directly—no more waiting months for results. We're also driven by a passion for making data fun, beautiful and effective for decision-making; our insights work is all about delivering to each brand's strategic needs. Brands use Poshly to make decisions about what types of products to develop, how to allocate marketing dollars, which retail channels to pursue, how to position a product against competitors, how to define their target consumers and more. Why is consumer data becoming more and more important to the beauty industry today? We find that beauty professionals are always looking to service their custom- ers better, and they want to be more efficient with their spending and time. Real-time and detailed consumer data are integral to making better decisions about what consumers want. Data also helps professionals get more detailed with their planning so they can make decisions more efficiently. Please tell us about your partnership with Teen VOGUE. Have you partnered with any other publications? Magazines like Teen VOGUE and People have been phenomenal partners for us. Their editors pick giveaway products, which Poshly features, and the magazines promote the giveaways to their readers. We can then cull data from a wider audience of consumers, and empower editors and publishers with information to create more content that resonates with their readers. How does your real-time data work? In the past, when we provided brand clients with market research, it was a PDF or a slide deck deliverable. Our clients started asking us for a more direct- access tool. That's what we're deliver- ing now with Poshly Insights. Brand professionals can sign up for a subscrip- tion to access consumer insights. We structured the platform to be flexible for diverse research needs and for a range of price points so that the Poshly Insights platform is as effective and accessible for upstart beauty brands as it is for large conglomerates. What type of products does Poshly recommend for you as the company's CEO? I'm an avid nail and hair salon customer, so Poshly often recommends nailcare products to me—such as complimen- tary nail polish and nail-polish removal pads—skincare products for dry skin as well as haircare products, such as anti- frizz serum. Does the Poshly of today compare to what you envisioned for it? What is your mission for the future? Poshly has evolved tremendously since I first purchased the domain name! When we started, we were thinking primar- ily about the opportunities to empower consumers, and we fell into the work of empowering beauty brands from profes- sionals in the industry communicating with us about how they could utilize the data we collect to better their product-development road maps and marketing. I am so proud of the work our team has done since we launched in 2012, and I can't wait to con- tinue innovating and moving our vision forward in the future. ■ Liz Barrett is an Oxford, MS-based writer. Her first book, Pizza: A Slice of American History, hits bookstores in September. "Poshly is a paradigm shift in the market when it comes to data collection and data access." P o s h l y _ W h e r e B e a u t y M e e t s D a t a . i n d d 6 0 Poshly_Where Beauty Meets Data.indd 60 6 / 2 6 / 1 4 4 : 4 4 P M 6/26/14 4:44 PM