Online beauty brand Reflect.com expands to Marshall Field’s flagship store
Many brands have launched in stores to move online later, but San Francisco-based beauty manufacturer and direct marketer Reflect True Custom Beauty is doing it the other way around, using its established online presence to build a brand in the offline channel. Having founded its customized beauty products and cosmetics business in 1999 with exclusively online distribution at Reflect.com, Reflect in September will open a 325-square-foot store inside the State Street, Chicago, flagship store of Target Corp.’s Marshall Field’s.
The Field’s store will join a second location, also in the Chicago area, where the company has also gone offline to open a store. An earlier mall-based kiosk format was tested in San Jose, CA, and subsequently scrapped in favor of the store concept as a better venue for the prestige cosmetics brand. Reflect’s management has said it anticipates further offline extensions of the formerly online-only brand, which also has added a catalog since it launched. When the Field’s Reflect store is up and running, the Reflect.com web site will invite online shoppers to visit the store, while store shoppers will be introduced to the web site, says Diane deCordova, vice president of business development at Reflect.
In retail stores–-as they can online–-Reflect customers can order custom products made to their specifications. Depending on the order, the products will be either created and packaged on the spot in the stores, which Reflect calls its retail labs, or manufactured at Reflect’s New York plant, packaged at its Ohio distribution facility, then shipped to the customer.
Reflect’s decision to venture into retail in the online channel rather than in the brick-and-mortar world was calculated to yield the most efficient data capture from consumers as it developed both the custom brand and the specialized manufacturing process it requires, deCordova adds. Reflect has used the data to develop the manufacturing methods needed to produce and consistently replicate customized product in units of one. “By asking questions of consumers online, we capture information about a customer`s beauty needs, and connect that to our manufacturing process so we can directly deliver the product the consumer needs and wants. With an interactive front and small batch manufacturing on the back end, we’re able to do that online,” says deCordova.
Reflect’s goal in going into stores now is to provide an experience in which the consumer can create a customized product, through a consultation, that can be purchased subsequently online or at retail and will be exactly the same product and same formulation. To accomplish that, Reflect has been using the online customer data to build a database and a consistent process to determine what formulations an individual customer receives based on her preferences.
The in-store production process is slightly different than the one used in the manufacturing plant, developed initially to serve the online audience, but “The principles are the same,” Reflect COO Alex Zelikovsky tells Internet Retailer. “We’ve been able to scale the process from production size to the retail level, and we’ve been able to take our leanings from the web and apply them to other channels.”
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