E-Commerce Platform Daily Polished Puts A Different Spin On The Subscription Box Model

Daily Polished, a membership-based retail platform for emerging beauty brands, is going live next week as an alternative to monthly subscription beauty boxes.

From the mind of Sylwia Wiesenberg, founder of Bawdy Beauty, the brand known for its butt mask, Daily Polished gives members the opportunity to snag full-size beauty products at 50% off their retail prices during daily brand drops, but don’t refer to it as a discount platform. “This is for people who don’t want junk and sample sizes,” says Wiesenberg. “They want to know the brand or product before it becomes famous on TikTok. They want the discovery of what’s emerging and what’s new.”

Forty-seven beauty brands have signed up with Daily Polished so far, including Bawdy, Henne Organics, Bloomi, Vella Bioscience, Herbalore, Love Indus, Madame Gabriela, Raeka Beauty, Pink Moon, Cleo + Coco, Shayde Beauty and Wildka. To keep its selection fresh, the platform will focus on prestige beauty brands that don’t occupy the shelves of Sephora or Ulta Beauty stores. Masstige brands will occasionally be featured as well.

The platform has racked up over 1,000 members to date. It offers two membership tiers for customers: “Enthusiast,” which has monthly fee of $8, and “Pioneer,” which has an annual fee of $30. The latter is a limited pre-launch special. The annual membership fee will climb to $60 once the platform launches.

Daily Polished will spotlight a new brand on its site every 24 to 72 hours. No other brand will be available for purchase on the platform during that period. Wiesenberg says, “The purpose of that is to act as a billboard for the brand and give our partners great exposure. Traditional subscription boxes eliminate freedom of choice and the ability to fully experience a brand. To truly understand a brand, you need to connect with the founder.”

To build excitement, each drop will be teased to members the morning it’s set to bow. At noon on the East Coast, the previous brand will exit the platform to make way for the next drop. Most brands will have at least 48 exclusive hours on the platform to sell either their full product lineup or top sellers. During that period, Daily Polished’s blog will have educational content on the brand. The drop will be promoted across the platform’s social media accounts.

Members will be limited to one purchase per product to protect against potential resellers, and brands will handle their own order fulfillment. Due to its half-off sales model, Daily Polished won’t accept customer returns. 

The initial four months of brand drops have already been scheduled. Some brands launching on the site in May will likely return for further drops in August or September, according to Wiesenberg. Brand drops will rotate between makeup, skincare, ingestibles, tools, personal care, wellness and men’s to foster variety. Bawdy will be the first Daily Polished brand drop. Herbalore will be the second. Maloway and Vella Bioscience will follow in the third and fourth spots. 

Daily Polished premieres at a moment when e-commerce concepts are bulking up their assortments with emerging brands. Flip introduced a consignment model last year in an effort to swiftly onboard smaller brands. Skinholy and the Qurate-owned livestreaming app Sune exclusively showcase products from emerging brands. Meanwhile, beauty subscription boxes continue to struggle post-pandemic as their subscriber totals fall. 

Wiesenberg was inspired to start Daily Polished after Bawdy failed to gain awareness through FabFitFun. The lifestyle subscription box had picked up thousands of units of the brand’s CBD Butt Balm and Clay Butt Mask sticks. She says, “They just randomly sent them to people who probably weren’t interested in our brand.”

To Wiesenberg, Daily Polished counters the ineffectiveness of subscription boxes in connecting brands with customers as well as their reliance on wasteful sample or travel-sized products that are costly for small brands to produce. “Sample sizes a huge waste of resources from an environmental standpoint,” she says. “Plus, they can’t be recycled. They also can cost brands upwards of thousands of dollars to produce.”

Daily Polished’s terms are designed to be conducive to emerging brands with limited resources. There’s no fee to sign up with the platform. Instead, Daily Polished takes a commission on each product sold. Wiesenberg describes Daily Polished’s commission as “modest” and says it’s negotiated by brand. 

Brands have 72 hours to ship after an order comes through on the platform, and they can expect to receive payment in less than 30 days. Members pay for shipping. To provide enhanced visibility, brands will receive their customer’s email address for retargeting purposes.

Wiesenberg says, “I’ve been in big retailers from Ulta to Sephora, Revolve and Credo. Every time I asked, ‘Can I get a zip code so I can retarget my audience with Instagram ads or in Google search?,’ I never got an answer.”

The platform is working to connect members to brands post-transaction. Members will receive an email 30 days following their purchase allowing them to click through to a brand’s website and obtain a discount on their next purchase with the brand. Discounts will vary by brand. 

Additionally, brands will be listed and linked under an archive-style “Brands We Love” tab on Daily Polished’s website once their drop is completed. Wiesenberg says, “These will not be affiliate links. We want to help build up good SEO for the brand and get more traffic to their website.”

Wiesenberg is in the process of drilling down exactly who the platform’s ideal customer is. She’s currently targeting women of all age ranges in areas of the United States that have few convenient specialty or big-box retailers. Men are a secondary target group. She says, “No matter what a customer’s age is, they want to feel in control of where their money goes and who they are supporting.”

Wiesenberg declined to comment on how much she invested to get self-funded Daily Polished off the ground. She anticipates having to take on outside investment in the future to scale the business. Right now, she’s concentrating on building the platform’s membership to bring eyeballs to its brands. Wiesenberg says, “It’s all about becoming the biggest electronic billboard we can be.”