How Digital Company Beautylish is Changing the Beauty Landscape

Americans spent a whopping $36.5 billion on cosmetics and toiletries in 2010, up 2.4% from $35.6 billion in 2009, according to the Kline Group. The beauty industry used to be a fairly consistent market with department stores controlling 43% of the business. However, the industry has changed with the various mergers, acquisitions and selling off of well known beauty brands to companies such as Estee Lauder, Revlon and L'Oreal.

Beauty companies and advertisers now realize the importance of increasing their online presence and have shifted ad dollars to have a prominent digital focus rather than traditional television and print campaigns.

Now the consumer has a greater choice, but they also have a greater voice with the cosmetic companies because of technology and social media tools such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and online beauty sites like Beautylish.

Beautylish is a San Francisco based company founded in February 2010 by Vu Nguyen, Nils Johnson and Sameer Iyengar. Their backgrounds are as diverse as their website. Prior to forming Beautylish, Nguyen was a co-founder of Crunchyroll, bringing popular anime shows online. Nils Johnson started his career at Bergdorf Goodman, selling for Calvin Klein. He went on to finance at Deutsche Bank and later founded an international telecom company, Gorilla Mobile. Iyengar came to Beautylish from Google where he worked on bringing music, movie, and TV content to YouTube. Prior to that, he was building medical sensor networks at UC Berkeley and anti-missile defense systems at Lockheed Martin. Ning Chao is the Beauty Director who is considered to be a walking encyclopedia of beauty. Chao was most recently the Senior Beauty Editor at Marie Claire. Prior to that, she worked at In Style, Elle, Vogue, and Glamour. At Beautylish their goal is to improve the way that everyone discovers and learns about the beauty products that they use every day.

Beautylish has created a community where people can go to find out information on products, watch video tutorials, view photos, share opinions and read the latest beauty articles and blogs. Gone are the days when doing business was one-way communication with consumers. When a company had a new product you learned about it generally via magazine print ads or commercials. If you had feedback or a complaint on the product you had to write a letter or call them. There was no public forum to find out if other people had similar or different experiences with a product.

Beautylish brings together beauty bloggers, vloggers, makeup artists, and brands to discover and share the best trends, tips, and products in beauty. Thousands of videos have been uploaded to share information on beauty products, give feedback and address the specific needs of their online community. These videos are created by the Beautylish enthusiasts. Their members feel that Beautylish fills the void that some of the larger cosmetics sites have ignored - the diversity of beauty. Beautylish is not a cookie-cutter approach to beauty and they look to address the specific needs of different types of beauty.

The cosmetics industry is now listening to the consumer and has started partnering with popular YouTube "beauty gurus." Many of these beauty gurus are professional makeup artists while others are self taught. You will find many of these individuals featured on Beautylish.com.

Ning Chao says "I think the Internet has replaced the traditional makeup counter as the go-to destination to learn about beauty. However, other sites have a little of this and a little of that and who has time to browse that much? Beautylish is an online beauty portal where you can find everything you'd want to know about beauty-whether it's news coverage of the latest trends or a video tutorial on how to create a fishtail braid. There's so much beauty information at your fingertips online, and Beautylish makes it even easier to find exactly what you're looking for."

Beautylish has nearly 300,000 followers on Twitter becoming one of the largest social media influencers in beauty.