How To Pivot Your Make Up And Personal Care Business To D2C

Contemplating the idea of going D2C with your makeup and personal care business? Still wondering if this is the right step and the right time to make the transition? Not sure if your brand will survive in a new market without intermediaries?

Well, let us break to you that there could never be a more opportune moment to take the leap of faith. 

With the markets opening up to new business models and the success of direct-to-consumer brands breaking all previous records, this is the time to plan and execute your direct-to-consumer strategy! 

Dont take our word for it, look for yourself;

• 55% of buyers choose brand websites over multi-brand retailers

• 3X growth in D2C India market value from 2020 to 2025

• $ 27.5 billion is the expected growth of India’s beauty and personal care industry

• 80+ D2C brands are operating in India in the beauty and personal care segment

• 122 Mn+ is the estimated number of online beauty shoppers by FY 2025

• 491% is the average growth rate of the D2C brand Mamaearth in the last year

Source: Yourstory, Business Today

You now know how D2C is striding, right? The simple reason behind the stupendous growth is convenience, personalization, hassle-free return and refunds, direct communication, better prices etc.

Before we delve further, let us first understand the direct-to-customer business model. 

What is the D2C business model?

A direct to consumer business model does not involve the intermediaries like those in traditional retail businesses. The direct to consumer model facilitates the brands to eliminate the middlemen and sell directly to the consumers using multiple sales channels like an online store, mobile app, mobile website etc.

When enterprise ecommerce brands sell directly to the end customers, they save the middleman’s margin and are able to sell their products at a much lower rate to their end clients. Also, selling directly to the consumers, gives the brands a better sense of control over their business and its day-to-day activities like manufacturing, marketing, supplying, order fulfilment etc.

Why transitioning to D2C model is the right choice for  and personal care businesses

The D2C business model is here to bring disruptive ecommerce changes and unlock new growth opportunities for enterprise brands across all industries. Enterprise businesses that are looking to expand to tier II and tier III cities can penetrate into the largely untapped market through direct-to-customer business models. Embarking early or at least timely on the D2C journey can help businesses accelerate their growth and carve a niche for themselves in the ecommerce landscape. 

When makeup and personal care brands eliminate the middlemen, they are not only able to boost their profit margin but also offer better price benefits to their customers. Brands can make data-driven decisions and scale their businesses with strategic marketing planning in a D2C business model. 

Benefits of going direct to consumer for beauty and personal care brands

• Makeup and personal care brands can reduce their fixed costs and CapEx by going D2C

• Boost profit margins by eliminating the middlemen 

• Quickly build a strong presence in the market without middlemen tie-ups

• Be free to experiment with new business strategies and business models

• Better control of brand’s visibility and identity with no interference from intermediaries

• Leverage omnichannel ecommerce by adding multiple customer touchpoints to meet customers on their favourite channels

• Offer personalized buyer journey combined with personalized deals using insights from the customer data

• Improve interactions and engagement with their customers 

With 58% of buyers preferring to buy from direct-to-consumer websites because of better prices, it is no wonder that enterprise ecommerce brands are finding the D2C model a rewarding option. Going direct to the customers unlocks new growth opportunities for businesses.

How to build your makeup and personal care D2C business 

Are you ready to find the holy grail of building your own D2C business and multiply your revenue growth? StoreHippo brings a step-wise guide to get you started with your direct-to-customer business in no time.

Here is how you can launch your business in a cost-effective way:

1. Choose a tech partner that primes your brand for success

To build an enterprise ecommerce business, makeup and personal care brands need an ecommerce platform that offers flexibility and scalability in managing ecommerce operations. The platform or the tech provider that you choose needs to be futuristic and have in-built D2C solutions that help you go to the market in record time. 

We all know that starting early can give your personal care brand a headstart in the highly competitive personal care market where brand loyalties are dependent on a variety of factors. While pricing and product range are important to attract customers, customer experience is the battleground that becomes the deciding factor for brands. And the ability to go to market in record time and tweak your buyer experiences quickly goes a long way in ensuring success for your beauty products brand.

With the lack of factors like scalability and flexibility, businesses can fail to tap into the market as desired. But, with the ready-to-use turnkey D2C ecommerce solutions from StoreHippo, makeup and personal care brands can speed up their go-to-market time and tap new markets quickly. The highly customizable StoreHippo platform gives you full control over your brand and enables you to make tailor-made solutions to engage makeup product buyers. With StoreHippo powering your direct-to-consumer initiative you can align your brand for resounding success in the direct-to-customer arena. 

2. Go omnichannel 

82% of the buyers check their phones before they purchase in-store, making it imperative for businesses to add multiple D2C sales channels for their personal care brand. The customers' buying habits and brand loyalties are shifting at a pace like never before.  Buyers no longer visit just a few channels to look for product options. 

Customers want their favourite brand to be present on the channels they love to frequent during their regular day. Buyers hop in and out of different digital channels and make impulsive purchases irrespective of the platform/channel i.e;  in-store purchases to direct-to-consumer apps to online stores checkouts.

To excel in the D2C game, your personal care business must offer a personalized consistent buyer journey on both offline and online channels. With StoreHippo’s headless architecture,  makeup and personal care brands can add new customer touchpoints using the same APIs and backend logic. You can build your personal care online store, set up social pages with product listings and checkout on your webstore, build apps, PWA stores and other new-age customer touchpoints to engage and convert your buyers better.  

3. Make buying on mobile channels easy

• $425 billion is the forecasted reach of the m commerce market by 2025

• Over 70% of online orders come from mobile devices

The numbers clearly prove how ecommerce is moving rapidly towards m commerce and that there is no better time to leverage mcommerce for your D2C personal care business than now. Personal care orders are mostly “choice+impulse” purchases. When you make buying easy on mobile devices, customers come flocking to your website to buy diverse beauty products. 

And to maximize your m-commerce sales channel ROI, you need to get started with an advanced m-commerce platform like StoreHippo that enables you to build mobile-friendly sites, PWA stores and mobile apps without any coding. 

The PWA stores from StoreHippo look, work and feel just like mobile apps when opened on chrome and can even work on entry-level devices with poor internet connectivity. This helps your beauty product brand to tap far-off markets as well where mobile internet is the only way to shop online. The pre-designed templates, mobile-responsive themes, headless CMS and a built-in mobile app builder from StoreHippo enable you to give an unparalleled shopping experience to your customers on all channels.

4. Offer extreme personalizations

If you thought personalization is enough, think again. The ecommerce industry has now entered  the age of extreme personalization. Customers these days crave hyper-personalisation and 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. To differentiate your D2C beauty products brand from competitors, you need to ace the personalization game and target your buyers with experiences and deals they can’t resist. 

StoreHippo offers the right tools and features to offer extensive personalization to your customers. Built on the decoupled headless architecture, the enterprise ecommerce platform can be tweaked easily at the frontend and backend to implement multi-level personalizations. Makeup and personal care brands can customize their shipping solutions, digital payments, offer localized multi lingual content, personalize their discounts and prices etc. with the wide range of features from StoreHippo.

5. Streamline fulfilment 

Streamling D2C fulfilment is one of the biggest challenges faced by makeup brands. With the retailer-based model, the fulfilment easily gets handled by the network of dealers and retailers. When beauty products brands take complete control of their operations and fulfilment it is essential to have an automated, streamlined and fast shipping solution in place.

StoreHippo offers a comprehensive shipping solution for makeup brands with seamless integrations with the best logistics providers. With 30+ pre-integrated logistics providers, makeup brands can easily streamline their shipping even without the help of their retailer network. Using StoreHippo’s in-built logistics management system brands can import orders from different sales channels and align them for timely deliveries through the automated logistics module. 

6. Brush up marketing across channels

Looking for solutions to market your D2C brand successfully? Well, it is a known fact that marketing can make an average brand a household name in days. To ace your marketing game across channels and maximize your ROI you need to ensure that your brand has the right tools and software at its disposal. After all, you need to popularize your beauty products brand across diverse sales channels and for a broad spectrum of buyers.  

StoreHippo platform has everything that your enterprise ecommerce, direct-to-consumer business needs for quick, smart and successful marketing. StoreHippo enables brands to send unified personalized notifications that can be used to send real-time deals and offers through  SMS, email, website or mobile app to engage and convert customers better. 

The direct-to-consumer makeup brands can build attractive, conversion-friendly landing pages and forms with easy-to-use drag-and-drop functionality directly from their StoreHippo dashboard. Automated email marketing can help brands recover their abandoned cart and improve customer retention. StoreHippo offers a unique set of in-built features like SEO tools, a discount engine, readymade page templates, third-party integrations etc to increase your marketing efficiency.

7. Keep experimenting with product-market-channel mixes 

While transitioning from a retailer-based model to D2C markets, brands face a helluva of challenges. One of them is targeting the right customer through the right channel. Brands need to keep experimenting with the right product-market-channel mix, do continuous A/B testing and quickly tweak the strategy based on data-driven results. 

Suppose the D2C makeup brand launches two different product lines, luxe lipsticks for high-end buyers that buy through mobile channels, primarily high-end devices. The second product line is budget-friendly lipsticks for young college-goers and middle-income groups. By experimenting both these product lines on different markets and customer segments the beauty products brand can identify how to push each product line to different customer segments. The brand might also decide to push both products to both buyer segments during festive seasons when people go over budget or bulk buy for gifting purposes.

StoreHippo with its multi channel solutions, strong reporting engine and easy integrations with high-end analytics and reporting tools enables D2C brands to experiment with different channels and products and leverage the most profitable channels to sell better.

Conclusion 

D2C is the route to hack growth for your makeup brand. With the right data-driven insights and strategies, your beauty product brand can have its sales graph breaking all limits. However, to build a successful direct-to-consumer presence, your brand needs the power of an advanced enterprise ecommerce platform like StoreHippo. Powered by cutting-edge technology and flexibility to build hybrid solutions StoreHippo can build future ready D2C stores for diverse use cases. 

Explore the StoreHippo D2C features and claim your spot as the shining new beauty products brand in the fast-growing fasion and personal care industry. Start your 14-day free trial now.