Jay Hack, CEO of MIRA Beauty, says traditional sampling through Ipsy and Sephora gives brands zero data on whether samples convert to sales. MIRA's platform uses checkout data to send personalized samples instead, then tracks conversion rates and customer behavior. The pilot launches November 2nd.
Chapters
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so the first thing to note about sampling is that the industry is kind of in the dark ages where it's incredibly opaque and furthermore very inefficient. And by that I mean opaque, well, it's very difficult to receive analytics back on the samples that you distribute to people so you can understand the impact that those samples have had. You don't know when you hand a sample over to Ipsos or Birchbox or Sephora, did that actually lead to a purchase? And beyond that, you don't receive any CRM data back. You don't know if that person came back to the website and viewed your product page. You don't know anything about that customer's buying behaviors in the first place. So, you know, what other kinds of products are they shopping for? What did they buy when they received your sample? You know, what brands are they most interested in? And, you know, lastly, it's not as though you're able to build a relationship with that consumer after you give them the sample. They just sort of go off and do their own buying behaviors. And when I say inefficient, I mean the people who receive your sample when you give it out to an Ipsy or Sephora or somebody like that, it's kind of a one-size-fits-all type of program today where everybody sees the same 10 samples when they check out at Sephora. And so, you know, chances are your sample might be going to somebody— if you're a skincare company, it might be going to somebody who's purely a makeup buyer. Or if you're distributing your samples through Dermstore, everybody receives the same sample if they buy within a certain 6-hour period. And so the target segment that you're going after are the people who are actually likely to enjoy your products. And be retentive, high LTV users of your brand are not the ones who are receiving the sample. And that means that you're wasting a lot of time and money distributing samples to people who are unlikely to actually bring value to your brand. So we envision a future in which there's a much more efficient and transparent way to go about distributing samples to customers who are actually going to enjoy them. And we call that intelligent gift with purchase. That's where when, when brands provide their samples to us, when somebody comes to check out, we have gathered a bunch of information about what really drives that shopper. And that's what are they interested in, what types of products they like to browse, do they have a preference for certain lifestyles, etc. And so we can say to them, hey, here are the, the top samples that we think you're actually likely to enjoy. And we facilitate the delivery of those samples to the customer. And so this beautiful narrative emerges where everybody gets something that they want when we facilitate this intelligent sample delivery. Customers, obviously, get more stuff for free with their cart, but also it's stuff, samples that specifically speak to their needs and preferences, which is really powerful and is not the case on other platforms. We get, you know, more satisfied, more attentive customers who come to our platform to do product discovery, not only through the, the screen, but also through the physical medium of receiving samples and physical products in the real world. And finally, brands get the, you know, not only the ability to be much more targeted in who the consumers are who receive their samples, because we're able to, you know, be a little bit more intelligent about that, but also we We have no qualms in providing anonymized data back to brands describing the consumer behaviors around their product. And so we'll tell them, hey, of the people who actually ended up receiving your sample, this percent came back and purchased the full-size product, or the people who received your sample ended up coming back to our website and spending a lot more time reading the reviews on your product page. You can actually assess the efficacy of your sampling campaign and understanding this is or is not driving value for your brand, which historically has really not been something these folks have engaged in. So really excited to pilot this program. We actually just spun it up and we'll be going live with it starting November 2nd.
