Featured Startup Pitch: eDivv enables beauty box subscribers to trade unwanted products

By Jon Katz, eDivv co-founder

Elevator Pitch: eDivv.com is the first online platform to facilitate the trading of beauty samples. Through an interactive, negotiation-like platform, users can easily post products to their own ‘shop,’ search for products of interest, negotiate potential trades, and rate their trading partner’s reliability upon the completion of a trade.

Product/Service Description

eDivv is an online marketplace for women that are interested in swapping beauty products. It’s essentially an online platform that allows women to get value from products they have, but will never use. Many women receive multiple samples each month through their subscription boxes and find a few items each month that will end up going to waste. That’s where eDivv.com comes in. Women can turn those useless items into products they’ll actually use!

Founders’ Story

I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last 3.5 years, helping start a sneaker company called Ektio. Ektio has helped give me a great foundation for how to start and build a company. Casey [eDivv co-founder Casey Casterline] is also very entrepreneurial, and when frustration would grow from receiving 20 or more beauty products each month, of which three-to-five she didn’t even want to try, she thought of a solution to the problem. Casey is an avid beauty subscription box subscriber and noticed the market for swapping of beauty products was untapped. So, we decided to take matters into our own hands and start eDivv.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Our marketing strategy is a combination of PR and Facebook advertising. Many of our customers are on Facebook daily, talking about beauty boxes and products they received. We’re able to target these women quite easily through our advertising. Furthermore, we’re taking a strong grassroots approach and finding blogs/forums where people are already trading, and letting them know about eDivv’s services. We’re running a promotion in February offering a free three month subscription to either Birchbox, Beauty Box 5 or ipsy to the person that has the most trades (Divvys) on eDivv.com. This is to encourage trading and user sign up.

Market Opportunity

The market opportunity is quite large for swapping beauty products. The beauty box industry is a massively growing industry, with an estimated 1,000,000 or more women currently participating. However, women in this industry are not eDivv’s only potential customers. Women that shop at Sephora or any other beauty store find they walk out with multiple sample products. Those items can also be posted to eDivv.com and traded.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

Our differentiation is in our user experience and platform. Our unique trading platform allows users to barter and negotiate online, something that’s never been done before. Right now, forums and blogs are the ways people initiate trades online, all of which do not offer the user experience or unique platform that eDivv.com offers.

Business Model

eDivv’s business model can go in many directions. However, we initially plan to sell advertising by selling ‘featured’ item spots on the homepage, creating ‘premium’ accounts, and/or doing pre-paid shipping labels with markup. Down the road, the data we collect on brands will be highly valuable and can be sold to beauty companies.

Current Needs

eDivv is currently seeking Angel/VC funding to expand site functionality, hire a full-time back-end development team, and grow the site’s user base through an increase in advertising and promotion. We expect the company to become an attractive acquisition candidate for a number of different companies once it hits certain milestones.

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