While I’m fully aware of the fact that one of my recent blog posts was about Sephora, I came across an AdAge article about another cosmetics company that I thought warranted discussing. The article is all about New York-based Slate Cosmetics, which will be the first cosmetics company to launch entirely digitally. The cosmetics won’t be sold at any brick-and-mortar retailers, at least initially, which is quite interesting given that consumers often will want to try new products before they might be convinced to switch over from tried-and-tested favourites.
To overcome this potential problem, Slate is using Looking Glass technology developed by Modiface, which allows the user to upload an image of their face, and experiment with different shades of makeup to find what suits them best.
The brand officially soft launched in early November, and isn’t even selling it’s products yet, so it’s a bit too soon to tell how successful it will be. That said, I think the very limited product offering, seen below, is telling of the extend to which the brand is willing to invest in this test launch.
My opinion on this is that it’s not going to work out well unless the company offers a no questions asked return policy. Even as a frequent online beauty product shopper, I would be highly hesitant to switch over to a brand new product line without some of sort of sampling first. Of course, the Modiface technology is intended to replace this sampling process, but for me, this is not enough.
All in all, this one is just not for me.