Wendy Slattery
Wendy Slattery is co-founder of Beauty Buddy, an app that uses barcode scanning to create tailored reviews of beauty products, from skincare to perfume. Here she discusses the power of data in modern retail and why the brand and user relationship is changing to one more tailored than ever.
Sometimes success is less ‘born from’ than ‘propelled out of a cannon of’ adversity. For Wendy Slattery and her sister Tracey who had co-founded and run a successful ecommerce party business for 11 years, that touchpaper was overtrading with a retail unit that pulled all their cash flow in 2016, forcing them into liquidation within just four months.
This seismic shock forced them to reflect on whether they wanted to work together again — and if so, what they wanted to do next. Having been through a tough time together and come out fighting, the former was a given. On the latter, they knew one thing: they didn’t want to deal with stock again, so they settled on the idea of a tech business, which also fulfilled their second touch point — a scalable business with global potential.
Impressed by the app My Fitness Pal, where users scan food packaging barcodes in shops to get an idea of the calories, Wendy and Tracey wondered if the demand for instant information in the digital age was a natural avenue. The pair explored scannable business ideas around books and LP covers before finally settling in the beauty space – prompted by Wendy finding it difficult to get information about a beauty brush she had gone to buy in a store from the salesperson or through Google searches.
Building on their previous entrepreneurial experience was key for them. Having not had mentoring or taken professional or peer advice when setting up their party business, she and Tracey wanted to make sure they took advantage this time round, so they joined an Enterprise Ireland accelerator programme and began throwing their energy into connecting with key people in the industry. This included Jennifer Hessel, who had overseen the opening of Kiehl’s stores in the US, who Wendy talked to on a Zoom call. Hessel invited her for coffee to continue the conversation which she accepted without realising she was in New York — undaunted, however, she jumped on the cheapest flight she could find, and used the opportunity to also network with other retail, tech and business leaders out there.
One thing was clear from their business experience and from the conversations Wendy was having: data and audience were going to be central to any brand value proposition and key to success. Beauty Buddy was born to solve problems at both ends of the process, for the women who use beauty products and for the brands that sell them, cutting through the opaque world of influencer, magazine and personal reviews to provide tailored information to both.
“We went into an accelerator as a consumer app, we came out as a data analytics company, because the more we met with brands and retailers, the more we realised that they did not have access to data directly from consumer feedback,’ she notes. “All the data that brands and retailers have access to is from point-of-sale. But we've proved that data wrong a few times recently now, with brands saying, ‘let’s send this product to this age group’ and, we can say, ‘that's not the age group that’s actually buying or using the product, even though that's who they're marketing to.”
From the consumer side the Beauty Buddy app offers tailored and effective information to the user – “if product is rated 4.8 in reviews the app will say that, but as a consumer it might be a 2.0 based on your profile and just not work that well for you” says Slattery. “Profiles on the app include information such as what country you're living in, your skin issues, skin tone and colour and so on, because no one product is good for everyone.”
Within the app a ‘Beauty Squad’, made up of those who have done 10 reviews or more, can be targeted by brands who can send them specific sample products based on their profile, and get valuable data insight and customer feedback in return. The app also helps start-ups get reviews by putting their brands in sample boxes and most recently, it has launched instore signage in stores including the Irish pharmacy chain McCauley which customers can scan to download Beauty Buddy for independent ratings.
“Retailers believe they lose about 36% of beauty sales because women can't make up their mind in that moment — but at the same time, 78% of them don't want any help,” says Slattery. For her, Beauty Buddy represents a powerful middle-man solution and that is one of the key reasons why they are aiming to go in-store to help businesses with footfall and purchasing.
Getting initial funding, even despite the surge in beauty consumption during and post-Covid, was challenging though, the fit was to find investors in what is still a still-predominantly male investment landscape who understood the potential for a beauty brand like this and appreciated the power of data in business viability. “It shouldn’t matter that it’s data for beauty — it’s about what you do with that data,” says Slattery. “Who benefits? What problems does it solve? The key was to find investors that could get it — and have that ambition to grow with us.”
Energy and belief are half the battle in business and the growing Beauty Buddy team is now at 10 employees, many of whom have been with them since the start (“one of our first employees invested money in the business”). Working with tight budgets initially, they reached out to developers straight out of college (“you can’t teach enthusiasm”) and people in Ireland on visas looking for part time work. “We hired someone who worked for the L’Oréal data team in Mexico for seven years but was working as a cleaner in Ireland because they couldn’t place her skill set and no one would give her a job — she now works for us full-time on a new visa,” she says.
And with app downloads now nearly at 100,000 ambitions are high, their goal — to hit a million users and to crack America once the app has enough growth in the UK market. “We want to be what people think of first when they go to buy a beauty product,” says Wendy, whose aim is for Beauty Buddy to be the ‘Trustpilot of beauty products’. For those looking for products worth their time, the free app download offers value from the outset — for brands looking to raise the impact of their product lines it may, in fact, be priceless.