Beautytech and its role in shaping the beauty industry

The beauty industry is undeniably one of the most popular in the last half decade. Female Daily is part of the witness to the boom of this industry. As a community platform online in the field of beauty.

Co-Founder & CEO Female Daily Hanifa Ambadar said, there are a number of factors that the beauty market is growing. Global trends, the emergence of local brands, to the invasion of K-Drama and K-Pop culture which resulted in many cosmetic products from Korea trying their luck here. Platforms review such as Female Daily amplify all these things to produce a complete ecosystem.

"Until now what we built in Female Daily was based on user feedback", said Hanifa.

In #TuesdayStartup fourth week of July, Hanifa explains how beautytech such as Female Daily formed the beauty industry, starting from the aspect of the emergence of industry players, the increasing variety of products offered, to changes in consumer behavior for beauty products.

Community as key

Gait Female Daily sebagai beautytech since 2005 cannot be separated from the role of their strong community base. Hanifa believes that the strength of the community cannot be separated from the quality of its members in the early days of their establishment. The business model in the past made them grow organically although on the one hand it took longer for their business to grow.

Starting from a blog, now Female Daily is a platform that has 50 million members with 4 million unique users per month. The size of the community is directly proportional to their influence on the industry. Hanifa gave an example when there is a plan to launch a product from a brand, the product owner will cooperate with Female Daily to hear input from community members.

No need to be surprised if the platform review such as Female Daily can have such strong influence. Because the knowledge of its members about cosmetics and beauty cannot be underestimated. Some are ex-fashion magazines, some have worked in the fashion industry. Being the fastest to accommodate people's knowledge is an advantage.

However, the size of the Female Daily community was not achieved overnight. As one of the first platforms to discuss all things beauty, Female Daily opens itself up and takes care of its members so that it becomes the first choice for beauty enthusiasts. One form is to strengthen the relationship between members and the company.

"We're also at the beginning nutrition Lewat offline events. Even though we online community but that closeness is also closer because of the presence offline events," added Hanifa.

Influence on industry players 

growing beautytech as Female Daily accelerate the dissemination of beauty product information. According to Hanifa, the presence of cosmetic companies helps beautytech because their products have the opportunity to be highlighted to a wider audience and get deeper input about their products.

"Now almost every beauty company has a special person to study all the conversations in Female Daily."

The voices of consumers are not only used as provisions for making the next product, but also reading the tastes and maneuvers of competitors, as well as designing marketing campaigns. According to Hanifa, this is mainly done by local brands. He also added that the current trend in the beauty industry involves consumers in determining the next product.

Changing consumer behavior

In addition to beauty producers, the presence of beautytech certainly helped change the behavior of consumers of beauty products. One thing that Hanifa is most aware of is review has become an inseparable habit of today's consumers. Consumers are also much more hungry for information on beauty products they want to buy.

The younger the audience for beauty products is also suspected to have an effect on consumer behavior. For example, they are selective because they adjust to a limited budget. Then the recommendations and results review be their main handle.

"The second in my opinion is the love for local brands. So now many people support local brands not only because of the locality, but also because of the cool products," said Hanifa.

Challenges still to be faced

Hanifa emphasized that their challenge as an online platform is the wider dissemination of information about beauty. If in the past the source of distraction was still quite limited, now it is much different. Without a differentiating factor, people can no longer linger in one site because there are more and more sources of distraction. Female Daily wants to become an integrated ecosystem of beauty products.

One of these problems occurs when someone wants to find information about a product he wants to buy, but he has to visit another site/application/place to buy the item he is looking for. Therefore Female Daily founded Beauty Studio, E-commerce beauty products that complement their ecosystem.

"So we think about how to user we're not going anywhere else. Exposure, discussion, buy there, give review, become one ecosystem to facilitate customer journeys in Female Daily," complete Hanifa.

According to Hanifa, there is actually one thing they want to complete in the Female Daily ecosystem, namely physical retail stores. Beauty products do depend on human senses. But the pandemic pushed back the plan, which was originally intended to be executed later this year.

In addition, Hanifa also hopes that they can use artificial intelligence (AI) further on their platform. He said the technology could make it easier for users to get recommendations for beauty products that suit their preferences and needs.

"Which is interesting beauty that's a lot of data. So if for example I product review, I found out I like any product, any composition, and any formulation. it's predictable and learnable."