On Wednesday afternoon, Instagram will launch a Shop with Pride Live Shopping Event, underscoring the rise of both inclusive beauty and livestream shopping.
“There is camaraderie through commerce,” said makeup influencer Patrick Starrr, who will host the event spotlighting various LGBTQ-owned small businesses in the “QVC-style” event. Viewers could shop the various brands by “swiping up” via Instagram Live.
Starrr, who identifies as LGBTQ, founded his beauty brand, One/Size, in July of 2020. It centers on “kindness” and a mission of making makeup “one size fits all,” Starrr said.
“In a marketplace where we have struggled in the past year, camaraderie has been the silver lining to celebrating each other. There is room for everyone,” said Starrr.
The camaraderie that Starrr speaks of, through his support of LGBTQ-owned businesses during Pride Month, is not the extent of his expression of pride. He aims to “walk with pride every single day. 365. The whole year,” he said.
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“I myself have found a silver lining throughout the entirety of my career [by] being digitally native. So to share that with other LGBTQ brands is a silver lining, in itself. We felt unseen and unheard in the past decade,” said Starrr.
One of the brands featured in the event will be beauty brand FluideBeauty. The company’s “mission has always been to showcase and celebrate people of all gender expressions and identities,” said Laura Kraber, co-founder of FluideBeauty. “Instagram [made] us feel valued and like a part of the community [by reaching out] to a small brand like us.”
Starrr’s 4.5 Million Instagram followers will be able to shop FluideBeauty among other LGBTQ-owned businesses, including One DNA, Sigil Scent, Ink Meets Paper and Gay Pride Apparel. The event will be viewable via his Instagram Live and the @instagramforbusiness account, which boasts 9.6 Million followers.
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Starrr, who has seen the development of platforms like Instagram and YouTube since starting his channel in 2013, said that “the foot traffic that you can receive through a livestream, versus a brick-and-mortar business, multiplies by the thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, to generate millions of dollars.”
Kraber said that, as life returns to normal, FluideBeauty hopes to host more in-person events, though it’s more receptive than before to doing digital ones. “Thanks to the many months of lockdown, we all have a much greater willingness and excitement about online events,” Kraber said.
Livestream shopping is “new, it’s immersive, it’s something that millions of people are ready to tune into on a daily basis,” said Starrr. “It’ll continue to blow up even bigger.”
