After gaining notoriety on Instagram and TikTok for its high-quality/low-price business model, direct-to-consumer fashion brand Quince now has its sights set on conquering beauty.
The company is looking to add new beauty products and brands every three or four weeks to The Beauty Atelier by Quince, the third-party marketplace it launched in June. Makeup, haircare and body care brands are set to debut on the site by the end of the year. The Beauty Atelier by Quince features luxury and prestige beauty brands like Augustinus Bader, 111 Skin, Irene Forte, True Botanicals, Le Prunier and wellness tools brand Therabody. It operates on a drop-ship model with brands fulfilling orders made on the site.
“The Quince customer really loves newness, it drives a lot of excitement,” says Daphne de Chatellus, head of emerging categories at Quince. “I think, for us, we want to make sure that we are launching and expanding in the right way. Yes, it’s curated, yes, it’s about thoughtful expansion, but we also want to be a destination where customers can come to Quince Beauty and find the categories they need.”
Quince has made waves online since it launched in 2020 for offering luxury-style products for affordable prices by shipping products directly to customers from factories. It’s also become synonymous with dupes in nearly every category it offers across fashion, accessories, jewelry, home goods and kids. For example, the brand’s $149.90 Italian Leather Handwoven Satchel and $199.90 Double-Faced Merino Wool Scarf Coat have been compared to Bottega Veneta’s $5,700 Andiamo bag and Toteme’s $1,130 Chain Stitch Wool Blend Scarf Jacket, respectively.
So far, Quince has applied its straight-from-the-factory model to a few beauty categories. It launched branded supplements and fragrances earlier this year. However, it’s taking a different approach with skincare by offering a 35% store credit on any beauty purchase made on the site. “It’s a pretty disruptive loyalty program,” says de Chatellus.
Quince’s disruptive tactics appear to be working. According to the publication Puck News, it generates around $700 million a year in revenue. It recently closed a $290 million-plus Series D funding round that valued the company at $4.5 billion. The round was led by Iconiq, a Silicon Valley-based investment firm that counts technology moguls Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey as clients. Quince’s latest raise tops off the $120 million Series C round it snagged earlier this year from Notable Capital and Wellington Management.
Beauty Independent spoke with de Chatellus about Quince’s value-driven approach to beauty, its curation style and how it plans to avoid the fate of fashion e-tailers, like Farfetch and Net-a-Porter, that have shut down beauty verticals.
Why did Quince jump into beauty this year?
I think if we take a little bit of a step back and think about who Quince is and who Quince wants to be as we look ahead to the next three to 20 years, ultimately, we want to be the consumer destination for thoughtfully curated high-quality essentials at the best value on the market. And as we think about what “essential” means, it expands so much further than just the categories that Quince started in. So, our flagship cashmere sweater, our towels and bed linens, they’re really our origin. But the catalog has expanded so much since Quince’s inception, but there are still so many essential categories.
Beauty has been in the works for a few years now, and as we looked ahead, we thought, what is the right way for us to play? What is the value that we can offer to customers? Ultimately, it is such an essential category and across all of the pillars of Quince—curation, quality and value—we really felt that we had room to go bring a new innovative and also value-driven approach to the customer.
If the approach is value-driven, why start with luxury beauty then?
When we launched a few months ago, we launched with three brands predominantly in skincare, Augustinus Bader, 111 Skin and Irene Forte, all within the luxury tier of skincare. We launched two additional brands, True Botanicals and Le Prunier late last month that start to play into more of the prestige price point. As we think about where Quince is going this year and beyond, we will be expanding always with the lens of curation, but also across price point and category. As we think about the offering we want to provide, we want to meet various customers where they are and what their needs are.
Who is the Quince beauty customer today?
Quince has reached a pretty large scale. We have customers, unsurprisingly, across a range of demographics. At the end of the day, our customer really seeks that price value equation to be in line. They’re willing to spend for quality, but they also want to make sure that what they’re getting meets the price that they’re paying.
We’ve seen really strong success with our initial launch. Part of the Quince value proposition in beauty is giving value back in the form of store credit. And so, we have customers who are historically loyal shoppers of those brands and now they’re excited to have them at Quince. There’s also customers who perhaps have always dreamt of trying these brands, and now we’re helping reduce the barrier of entry for them. Obviously, it’s still early in beauty, but we’re seeing customers come in on both sides.
What is Quince’s curation style?
I think today when customers shop within beauty, the experience is pretty overwhelming. There are a lot of products and shelves are pretty saturated across so many brands. That was something we were hearing from our customers. Part of the Quince value proposition is around curating the best of the best to customers. As we think about what that means in the beauty landscape, we spent a lot of time pretty rigorously testing all of the products that we carry today, and also the ones that we plan to expand into over the next one to several years through things like product reviews, clinical trials, ingredients, awards and efficacy.
There are amazing brands out there, take Augustinus Bader as an example. They’ve spent decades innovating on the ingredients that are the key parts of their formulas. They have amazing awards and clinical backing. That’s kind of what we’re looking for when we’re curating the assortment that we bring onto our site.
Within skincare, we started in some of the core subcategories but there are many others that we will be launching into as well throughout this year and beyond: hair care, makeup, body care. We will be a comprehensive destination for beauty when you think about the breadth of subcategories. But as you think about the actual depth of products within those, that’s where the curation comes in.
Are there any plans to expand branded products outside of supplements and fragrance?
That’s a question that we get a lot. Where Quince starts with any new category is quality and we spend a lot of time internally defining what does quality mean, what are the quality differentiators that matter most and how do we go attain those? From the outside it might look like, okay, some of these are brands, some of these are Quince, what’s the formula?
We are very aware of where Quince is able to deliver the best product in the market under the Quince brand. We’re also honest about where we’re not and I think beauty was an area where we did a lot of work in this space. There is a lot of brand trust, brand loyalty, innovation, proprietary ingredients, you name it, that we really felt that for us to deliver the best quality to our customers, it would mean partnering with the best brands in beauty.
We are really committed to building out the branded marketplace and there’s so much more to do. I think long-term, [branded products] are likely something that we’ll consider to fill in gaps, but today it’s not on the roadmap.
How quickly are you looking to build out this category?
Part of starting small and expanding thoughtfully here is also to get feedback from our customers. What are we hearing from them? How is the marketplace resonating with them? What do they want to see more of? Of course, we have our internal strategy, but the voice of the customer is so important. As we think about the end of the year, our goal is to be in the haircare and makeup categories as well.
What’s customer feedback been like so far?
Overall, customers have been really excited about it from a brand perspective and a category perspective. One of the biggest messages that we’re hearing is that the value-back that we’re giving is such an unlock to customers. That can come in many ways. So basically, with any beauty purchase on Quince, you get up to 35% back—it varies a bit product to product—in-store credit to be used towards a future purchase.
Of course, loyalty programs are commonplace at this point at any beauty retailer. But for us, we are hearing from a lot of customers, wow, I’ve always wanted to try this product and now I can. Or, maybe they buy one product and then they have the store credit that can help them purchase the next one.
Relative to other categories, how big are you hoping beauty will get in terms of revenue?
Today of course it is very small relative to our other categories just by nature of how new it is. Ultimately, beauty and personal care overall is upwards of a $100 billion business in the U.S. As we think ahead to the next couple of years, we want beauty to be a real portion of the overall Quince business. This goes for all of the new categories that we’re launching into. Wellness is another massive market in the U.S.
It’ll take us time to build up. We obviously have quite a lot of momentum in our home and apparel businesses, and those will always be core to Quince. The goal is definitely for these new categories to also bring their share of the business.
What’s seeing traction with beauty customers right now?
Each of these brands stands for something slightly different and probably speak to a slightly different customer. What’s exciting is we’re seeing customers find the products that are best for them within the curated assortment, whether they’ve been long time users of those brands to date, or they’re coming into this for the first time. Bader has definitely performed really well for us and is kind of one of the leading brands within the assortment.
But overall, I think the response so far has been what we would hope where we are curating products across slightly different needs, slightly different price points, and we’re seeing customers come into those based off of their own needs. On the wellness side, it’s still early days in terms of our assortment, but our electrolytes and Superfood Greens are definitely the hero products so far.
Historically, it’s been difficult for pure-play fashion e-commerce companies to gain momentum in beauty and be successful. Look at Farfetch and Net-a-Porter. How will it be different for Quince?
There are a lot of legacy beauty retailers that are very big and have many loyal customers. If you just go do the same thing as them, what perspective are you bringing? What is your point of differentiation? It’s a lot of the same products at the same price. I think for Quince, the curation and the value-back are very disruptive. It’s early for us. We’re going to need to see how this plays out and see how the customer takes to it.
We really spend a lot of time thinking through what Quince is uniquely bringing to the market. Customers have their shopping habits; they’ve bought their products at the same place for years. We need to kind of break that habit. At the end of the day, people want the best product, but if they can pay less for it, why would they go anywhere else?
