Australian beauty and cosmetics ecommerce business, Adore Beauty, is taking on the world with its new globally optimised retail site.
The international expansion strategy, which uses the Borderfree retail solution from Pitney Bowes, allows Adore to offer a localised shopping experience to customers around the world. Although Adore has shipped internationally to a few countries since launching in 2000, this is the first time overseas shoppers will be able to pay in their local currency and receive deliveries through the local postal system.
CEO and founder of Adore Beauty, Kate Morris, told Retailbiz that the ability to provide a localised experience is extremely important for her customer-centric business.
“It doesn’t make sense to be so focused on going the extra mile, for example hiring qualified makeup artists to staff our live chat, but not offering things like local currency,” she explained.
“For us, customer experience is absolutely paramount. Our business philosophy is to put customers first. Before we do anything we think about how to add value for our customers, how to help them walk out of the door feeling confident and fantastic each morning. Everything revolves around that.”
The international expansion comes after strong growth in the local market, with Morris explaining that the business is on track to do about $24 million this financial year.
“That’s pretty much just locally,” she said. “We’ve been really lucky with very strong growth over the last few years…and this [expansion] is one of the things that we’re experimenting with as another avenue for growth.”
With most of the logistical retail challenges smoothed out by the Borderfree solution, Morris said the main hurdle to going global is one inherent in the beauty industry—distribution. “The main challenge is that many cosmetic brands are still distributed on a territory basis,” she said.
“We have certain brands we can’t ship out of Australia. But that’s becoming less and less, and we’ll eventually get to a point where brands become more global.
“At Adore Beauty what we’re really all about is trying to democratise beauty and empower consumers and that’s something they can respond to no matter where they are. Location becomes largely irrelevant.”
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