Monthly Beauty Subscriptions are Impacting the Beauty Industry

Two years ago I was jokingly pestering my mom each week about sending me stuff to college. Whenever someone at the sorority house would receive a care package from home, I would walk up to it and take a selfie with a pouty face and send it to her with captions like “still don’t see one with my name on it.” Once, she tried to create a care package for me—I think just to stop receiving pouty pictures—and she set it down in somewhere in the guest bedroom and forgot about it for months. After being teased for that and STILL receiving the annoying messages every week, she had had enough. My mom found a loop hole for her needy daughter. She signed me up for a monthly Ipsy subscription. Without exerting any effort my mother now sends me something once a month.

So what does me being needy have to do with marketing? Well, I’ll tell you.

Ipsy is a monthly subscription that people sign up for and they receive a cute bag that’s filled with 5 beauty products that are tailored to their preferences. The bags are relatively inexpensive and only cost $10 a month. Still looking for the marketing connection? Well Ipsy is not the only company doing this. Many companies are selling samples to people. The purpose of these companies is not what most people think that it is. A lot of people see these companies as purely a service/product industry for the end-users of beauty product for the obvious reasoning that we as the consumer are receiving the products. However, they actually serve a larger purpose of being a form of data collection for the beauty industry.

When Ipsy sends out the product samples, they do so with the assumption that the people they send them to will review each individual product. By reviewing the products the bags become more tailored, but it also sends real feedback to Ipsy about the quality and likability of the product to Ipsy, who then sends it to the companies. It’s a really cool system that benefits everyone involved.

The companies also benefit in the exposure of their product to the market. When customers receive small products and really enjoy them then they will be more inclined to go out and purchase the full-size product. Or even better, the person will begin recommending the product to others that ask for recommendations.

These monthly subscriptions are taking over the industry. The top two companies were Birchbox and Ipsy. In the last year Target and even Sephora have jumped on board and started their own monthly subscription. They are boosting sales and helping companies better understand what we as consumers actually want in our beauty products.