Featured Startup Pitch: My Beauty Matches – Personalized matches and competitive prices on beauty products

COMPANY: My Beauty Matches

ELEVATOR PITCH

My Beauty Matches is an innovative solution which makes one of the biggest industries in the world—the beauty industry—more accessible to its target consumer.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

A one-stop personalized product-matching site, My Beauty Matches simplifies the beauty shopping process, completely removing the frustrating sales spiel, allowing each and every time-poor woman to find exactly what they’re looking for at the best price. With a ‘shop floor’ of over 300,000 products from boutique, high-end, and high-street retailers, the site’s super-smart technology uses a quick quiz to curate a completely bespoke collection of beauty products in just a few clicks.

The site is self-funded and has been developed thanks to CEO and founder Nidhima Kohli’s dedicated research, strict financial management, and passionate team, taking time to source cost-effective tools to build the MBM website. It has gained notoriety through excellent PR (Harper’s Bazaar, Telegraph), capitalizing on fans of the brand (industry experts and beauty editors) and using the team’s creativity to build the initial database of 85,000 women with no marketing budget.

With the support of industry experts and top beauty editors, but without a marketing budget, the site has grown from strength to strength in its short life, and currently services a community of 150,000-plus loyal beauty shoppers, saving each individual an average of £300-plus per year. Appointed ‘The Digital Game Changer for the Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry’ by WGSN (the world’s authority for fashion and beauty news), My Beauty Matches is already accessible in 167 countries, and will be easy to expand across other markets.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

A beauty industry first, My Beauty Matches’ super-smart technology processes data to generate personalized recommendations complete with price comparisons—a concept which is unrivaled in the current marketplace. The company ethos—to never advertise—renders the service entirely impartial, ensuring the customer’s needs are put first and the right products (selected from 300,000 across 1,800 brands) are put in the right hands. Time-poor consumers are saved time and money in micro-seconds.

FOUNDER’S STORY

Prior to launching the site, Nidhima spent seven years working in the world’s biggest investment banks, closely supporting the CEOs in creating successful strategies, and was responsible for building the £7 billion budget for Credit Suisse. At the same time, she qualified as an internationally BABTAC-qualified make­up artist from the London School of Beauty & Make-­Up, but was frustrated about the biased sale of beauty products and how too much time and money was being wasted by consumers trying to find the right ones. Nidhima is also now a frequent keynote speaker at top UK conferences.

Alongside founder Nidhima is a small (but perfectly formed!) team, working across partnerships, marketing, PR, editorial, and back-end development. All members of the team left lucrative salaries at some of the largest companies in the UK (Shortlist Media, Marie Claire, House of Fraser, the Guardian, Wahanda and Lastminute.com to name but a few) to help build My Beauty Matches, and pride themselves on creativity, flexibility, and a deep ambition and passion for the success of the site.

HEADQUARTERS: London

FOUNDER: Nidhima Kohli

INVESTORS: Bootstrapped

YEAR FOUNDED: 2014

TWITTER: @MyBeautyMatches

FACEBOOK: facebook.com/MyBeautyMatches

LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/mybeautycompare