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Beautylish
Ecommerce platform for beauty
- 101-200 employees
- B2C
- Retail
- B2B
- Logistics
- Beauty
- San Francisco, CA 94111, US
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Company mission
To reinvent the makeup counter for the internet.
Otta's take
Sam Franklin
CEO of Otta
The vast majority of people will test makeup in-store and purchase it online, but the unique angle that Beautylish has taken presents an opportunity for consumers to discover and purchase products in the same space. Furthermore, the company also stands out by providing flexible and interest-free payment programs, an unusual feature for a cosmetic digital marketplace.
Beautylish runs an online social marketplace that specializes in the reviewing, discussion, and sale of cosmetic products. As opposed to simply selling makeup, the online marketplace provides tips for use, formula discussion, and other information to enhance the user experience, in addition to hosting an active userbase that reviews each and every product.
The cosmetics industry thrives on socializing and sharing the latest makeup tips and products, yet online marketplaces do not reflect this. Instead, online makeup discussion has so far existed primarily on social media platforms and blogs, raising questions as to why there is not an integrated social eCommerce platform for the topic.
Benefits
- Employee Discount
- Health, Dental, Vision Insurance
- 401k w/ Company Match
- Competitive PTO
- Monthly WFH stipend
Company values
- Extreme Ownership
- Remarkable Service
- Cultivated Humility
- Commitment to Action
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Nov 2019
$5m
EARLY VC
Aug 2018
$4.8m
EARLY VC
$25m
Total funding
This company has top investors
Founders
Nils Johnson
(CEO, Chief Merchant & Co-founder)Seed investor in early-stage brands, including Wantful, Everlane, Warby Parker, Orchestra, and Airtime.
Vu Nguyen
(COO & Co-founder)Worked as VP of Engineering at Hot or Not for nearly 4 years. Co-founded Crunchyroll in 2007.
Sameer Iyengar
(Co-founder)Worked as a software engineer at Infosys before becoming a Partner Technology Manager at Google and YouTube.
Articles
Endorsements
All
Tech & tools (1)
Supportive management (1)
Strong leadership (1)
Our in-house systems include consumer-facing web properties, as well as internal tools used by teams across the company: merchandising, marketing, inventory & fulfillment, creative, and finance. The codebase is Python on the backend, React + some pre-React "legacy" JS on the frontend. We like Black and Prettier, because we've found they make code easier to work with. We make heavy use of AWS: EC2/ECS, RDS (Aurora MySQL), DynamoDB, ElastiCache (Redis Cluster), SQS, Lambda & Step Functions. We are a few years in on some great ongoing, engineering-led projects: - the project of migrating some key functions/workloads out of the main Python "monolith" into packaged libraries & services. - the project of abstracting out certain ad-hoc systems into rule driven systems, which can then be more easily maintained, and be better exposed to (internal) end users. - the project of building out and improving our testing/CI/CD pipelines. This all happens alongside the development & maintenance of new customer facing features, as well as work done in support of interesting business initiatives and opportunities.
Other Engineering
Tech & tools
Feb 2022
Beautylish was founded in the fall of 2010, and it still going strong almost twelve years later -- a fact I largely attribute to the pragmatism, intelligence, flexibility, and hard work of the three founders and the team leaders they have selected and developed over the years.
Other Engineering
Strong leadership
Feb 2022
I have found the leadership team here to be very competent, flexible, fair-minded, and supportive. They have taken a long-term, all-stakeholder approach to building a business.
Other Engineering
Supportive management
Feb 2022
