Michelle Phan is an American makeup artist, blogger, and entrepreneur. She created a YouTube channel in 2006, being named the “Beyoncé of the beauty-vlogging world”. She was one of the first vloggers to “gain a mass audience” with 8.8 million subscribers. In 2012, she founded Ipsy, a beauty subscription service. Ipsy is a monthly subscription service that sends 5 deluxe-sized beauty products to you. You take a two-minute quiz based on preferences on brands and products, and pay $12 a month for the “glam bag”.
Phan said the reason she created Ipsy was to “disrupt the beauty industry”. She knew YouTube would become very successful for beauty vloggers and wanted to build her brand after creating a channel. Ipsy’s competition was BirchBox and Dollar Shave Club, but Ipsy specialized in “glam bags”. Ipsy is a platform to for people to express their beauty, inner and outer. She said, “makeup is not a mask that covers up your beauty, it’s a weapon that helps you express who you are from the inside.”
A few years after creating Ipsy, Michelle Phan left the company and named Marcelo Camberos the CEO. Within the first six months of launching the website, Ipsy reached profitability. In 2019, Ipsy made over $500 million in revenue and has millions of people buying their “glam bags”. Ipsy includes makeup tutorials, customer reviews, celebrity content, and personalization quizzes. In 2020, Ipsy has over three million subscribers and continues to grow. The reason subscribers continue to buy products from Ipsy is because of their community, individualism, and empowerment. Ipsy builds a strong community to inspire and encourage customers to be creative and feel beautiful. They also celebrate the individual and what makes them unique. Finally, Ipsy empowers their customers by helping customers’ build their brand and express themselves.
Today, people want to feel beautiful with or without makeup. They also want to feel empowered and trust companies’ to help them feel that way. I think that’s why many customers trust Ipsy and continue to buy their products.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/020316/ipsy-review-it-worth-it.asp
I actually remember watching some of Michelle’s youtube videos! It is really neat to see how she branched out as strictly a beauty-blogger to a complete entrepreneur. I think it was really smart of her to launch Ipsy as a way to build her brand and her presence within the makeup and beauty community and it is neat to see how far it has taken off. Michelle definitely handled her competition well by introducing the “glam bags” to her product. It was a good differentiator and unique aspect to her product that the others did not have.
Wow! As a lover of makeup and all things beauty, I remember having an Ipsy subscription and the joy it brought me every month to unbox mine. I think that Michelle Phan thought of a great way to incorporate her love for beauty, skincare, and makeup, and find a way to make a business out of it, allowing other small businesses to grow from it as well. This is a great business and has become a success!