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Tag: Adore

  • Adore Beauty Looking at International Expansion

    Adore Beauty Looking at International Expansion

    Online retailer Adore Beauty has officially launched a dedicated website in New Zealand. The move marks a return to international expansion after the company put its plans on ice over the past few years to address rapid growth in the Australian market.

    The completion of a warehouse transformation project in late 2018, which tripled fulfillment capacity, meant Adore Beauty was able to provide the same level of service to overseas customers as those in Australia – a precondition for the company’s founder and CEO Kate Morris.

    “Being able to pay in your own currency, having payment methods you recognize, a strong shipping offer…it’s all about taking the parts of the customer experience that people respond to really well in Australia and figuring out how to do that in New Zealand,” Morris said.

    Adore Beauty’s local New Zealand website, which officially launched on Monday, ticks all of those boxes. The retailer is offering free express shipping on all orders over $50, and same-day dispatch for orders placed by 4 pm, New Zealand time.

    According to Morris, the launch so far has gone better than expected, despite the buzz that Sephora is generating ahead of the opening of its first bricks-and-mortar store in New Zealand later this month.

    “It’s not something we get too wrapped up in to be honest,” she said about the arrival of the French cosmetics giant.

    “Anything that goes towards helping the New Zealand customer get the selection she deserves is generally a good thing.”

    Morris added that Sephora’s expansion in Australia has “grown the pie” for the beauty spending. Indeed, the online retailer expects sales to surpass $100 million this year – more than double last year’s sales of $52 million.

    “We’re seeing a bit of a shift in the way that consumers are approaching shopping for beauty online,” Morris said.

    “When we started 19 years ago, online shopping was all about price. The only reason people shopped online was that things might be cheaper, and that was never really what we were about. Then it moved to be a convenient replenishment option, and that was where a lot of our growth started.

    “What we’re seeing now is that customers are willing to go on a journey of discovery completely online. Between the type of content we’re producing now for our Beauty IQ blog and what we’re doing on Instagram, people are buying products online sight unseen.”

    Adore Beauty offers more than 14,000 makeup, skincare and haircare products from brands including Mac, Napoleon Perdis, Kerastase, Oribe, Aesop, Jurlique and others.

  • Adore Beauty to launch New Zealand before Summer

    Adore Beauty to launch New Zealand before Summer

    After putting international expansion plans on ice for the past few years to focus on growth in its home market of Australia, e-commerce business Adore Beauty is ready to go overseas again, and the first stop is New Zealand. According to Kate Morris, Adore Beauty’s founder and CEO, the Australian business will launch a localised website in New Zealand within the next six months. This will be accompanied by a local marketing campaign to increase awareness of the brand in the market.

    “The offering will be more competitive, and we’ll be looking to make ourselves a bit easier to find for New Zealand customers,” Morris told.

    Adore Beauty has shipped internationally since it launched in 1999, but in the past, the experience was less than ideal for overseas customers, since prices were in Australian dollars.

    In January 2017, the company partnered with Borderfree, a tech solution that enabled customers to see different currencies, payment methods and customs and taxes, depending on their location.

    This was always intended as a stop-gap solution to improve the international shopping experience until the business had capacity to think about international expansion again, according to Morris.

    “It wasn’t an area of focus; we weren’t spending any marketing dollars outside of our Australian consumers,” Morris said about international sales over the past few years.

    That has changed, as Adore Beauty recently completed a significant warehouse transformation project with HighJump, which saw its capacity triple to 4500sqm. This will enable the online beauty retailer to support its growing Australian business, while servicing new customers.

    “You’ve got to make sure you keep up your promises to the customers you already have before expanding out and trying to support new ones,” Morris said.

    “Part of our brand is the service level [we provide] and our reliability. Unless we can execute on that wherever we go, what’s our offering? We need to be consistent with our brand.”

    Morris said the New Zealand launch is just the first part of Adore Beauty’s expansion plans. It marks the “reopening of international generally”, she said.

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  • Warm weather chills TSI Holdings bottom line

    Warm weather chills TSI Holdings bottom line

    With unseasonably warm weather at the end of last year dampening demand for winter clothing, Japanese apparel retailer TSI Holdings had weaker earnings for the year ended February 29.

    Its operating profit was flat at about 1 billion yen (US$8.86 million), falling short of a 1.2 billion yen projection. Sales fell about 9 per cent to 165 billion yen against a predicted 167 billion yen.

    Same-store sales, including online data, eased 3.6 per cent, with dips of 8 per cent for November and 4.1 per cent for December. High-margin items such as wool overcoats from mainstay brand Natural Beauty Basic met lukewarm demand.

    During the quarter, the company opened 58 stores for 21 brands, and has been negotiating with domestic and overseas apparel and natural cosmetics companies, leading to partnerships with a Chinese apparel company and a domestic beauty industry company.

    TSI also reports a “drastic shift” from paper media to digital promotion, and is enhancing its relationship with Google. This follows its eCommerce ratio growing from 9.6 to 10.8 per cent.

    Almost all brands’ O2O sites are now on the table, says the group, which is developing smartphone apps. Four brands opened sites – Free’s Mart, Jill Stuart, Natural Beauty and Zio Bernardo. Free’s Mart also became the first Japanese brand launched on the Zalora eCommerce site in Southeast Asia.

    The group’s own eCommerce sites grew 129 per cent year-on-year, from 11 to 20.

    TSI has 14 apparel subsidiaries in Japan and three overseas, and its 63 brands include Adore, Callaway, High Street, Nano Universe and Stussy.

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