Premium Beauty News - E-commerce has experienced a real explosion during the health crisis and the closure of physical stores. Where do you stand today?
Quentin Reygrobellet - After the strong growth of the 2020-2021 period, we are consolidating our gains by building loyalty among our members. With a turnover of 50 million euros, we have maintained double-digit profitability, which is quite remarkable in e-commerce. Our growth has slowed down, of course, but at a time when e-commerce is experiencing difficulties, we are lucky to have a differentiating model.
Even if the accessibility of our boxes or our advent calendar contributes greatly to their success, we count on other elements than price: quality and personalization of the service, diversity of the offer, advice, discovery, pleasure and fun. Our mission is to surprise and delight the consumer. This is why today 200,000 women in France are keen to pay 16.90 euros each month without knowing exactly what they are going to receive in return. It is this constantly renewed pleasure that allows us to build customer loyalty and make them want to browse through our online platform.
Premium Beauty News - You are also diversifying your offer, with the opening of a wellness area and limited edition boxes or collaborations.
Quentin Reygrobellet - Diversification is a major pillar of our growth strategy. In the retailing sector, innovation is very much a matter of selecting brands and we are fortunate to be in a period where many new offers are emerging.
We have done a lot of innovation in our formats, with themed boxes and limited editions (lingerie, post-partum, etc.), an advent calendar at an unbeatable price, and partnerships with brands and designers from other sectors. By expanding our offer to the wellness sector, we have remained true to our philosophy of discovery, with a large number of entries - CBD, intimate pleasure, mothers-to-be - with a didactic approach, lots of advice and specific brands. These corners dedicated to discovery are an important element for recruiting new customers. We help them discover new products and new brands, at reasonable prices, by being "niche" without being unaffordable.
Premium Beauty News - Was it the same logic that led you to open a creative studio to launch your own brands?
Quentin Reygrobellet - Beauty Story, our creative studio, is a fully-fledged start-up within Blissim, with a dedicated team. The idea was to leverage the knowledge we have of our customers’ expectations, thanks to the data we have, to meet their wants even better.
Even if we don’t deny ourselves anything, the idea was not to create a retail brand, but to serve market segments that were not sufficiently taken into account. The Imparfaite brand thus celebrates the uniqueness and originality of all women. It is also available at Monoprix and Nocibé. In the make-up sector, Yolaine has several successful products, notably Mousse de Rouge, which is a hit in the United States and Japan. We are going to launch a mascara and a liner based on the data collected via a direct link between our data warehouse and our market analysis tool.
Premium Beauty News - You announced the launch of your German business last March: what is your first assessment of this experience?
Quentin Reygrobellet - Our entry into the German market is still very recent. It’s a bit too early to say how we are doing. We are quite happy with our debut in this mature market where competition in the box market is not strong but where there are already well-established e-commerce players.
We are going to create ephemeral pop-up stores in four cities (Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and Karlsruhe) in partnership with Pick & Kopenburg, a department store that does not have a beauty department and has chosen us as a partner in this sector.
In Germany as in France, we rely on the pillars of Blissim’s success: we are the only player in Europe allowing people to discover beauty, trigger surprise, and guidance, with personalised offers based on a thorough knowledge of our customers.
Premium Beauty News - What are the next steps?
Quentin Reygrobellet - We are going to open our e-commerce site in Germany in 2023, relying on a logistic organization specially designed to be able to rapidly scale up and facilitate our entry into the other countries we are interested in: Italy, Spain, and Scandinavia... Our first steps in Germany are encouraging us to speed up our expansion. We noticed that several brands with which we have been working for some time, but which are not yet present in this country, are eagerly awaited.
Our ambition is to carry on as we have always done: to grow by continuing to bring added value to our customers, while remaining profitable and in control of our destiny.
