The Ledger
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In-person retail can scale subscription services better than digital advertising
“There's potential to really scale in-person selling subscriptions, because In person, someone can actually tell you what this is versus the two seconds we have to capture your attention on the internet.”
Birchbox's early beta achieved a massive 25% sample-to-purchase conversion rate
“It was like 25% of people were purchasing full-size.”
Birchbox's 2016 struggles stemmed from market shifts, not weak unit economics
“The unit economics were strong, but the market changed. I think that it was a Perfect storm of there being some formidable competition and having, not having access to capital that was limitless. All of a sudden, it was just this question around direct-to-cons…”
Early YouTube vloggers drove Birchbox's growth purely organically without paid sponsorships
“These vloggers were looking for content, and this was once a month something that was content. So they were signing up themselves, paying for it. We really had no involvement.”
Consumers are more likely to use samples if they pay for them
“And we were economics majors and nerds, and we realized that if people paid for it, the actual chance of them using it would go up.”
Benefit Cosmetics became Birchbox's first brand partner for a 200-sample beta
“Well, the first call was with Benefit Cosmetics, who's owned by LVMH, and I remember that call so vividly. It was like pacing around, and it was so exhilarating and so exciting, and at the end of about what ended up being a 30 minute call, he was like, okay, I…”
Beauty brands estimated most traditional free samples were never even opened
“Because one of the things we revealed when we started talking to brands in the early days was that they estimated most samples were never even being opened.”
New competitors paying for samples destroyed Birchbox's zero-cost sourcing model
“Competitors that had launched in the market really changed the dynamic because they started offering money for samples, and brands could not just get the samples paid for, but they could make money on the samples, something that we had never done.”
Beauchamp signed Birchbox's Walgreens partnership agreement right before delivering her daughter
“And I actually signed the paperwork right before I went under to deliver my daughter.”
Birchbox originally acquired its samples for free and sold full-size products
“No, they gave us the samples, and then we would purchase the full size, because it was from the very beginning, it was the full model, which was sampling as the appetizer, and then you can purchase anything you sampled directly from us.”