Direct-to-consumer subscription-based beauty company Scentbird is adding wellness to its offerings in an effort to expand its portfolio and keep up with consumer trends.
In May, the company added 17 full-size wellness-focused products to its assortment, including powder supplements from Golde, and CBD cream and ingestibles from Highline Wellness. Founded in 2014 as a fragrance subscription service, Scentbird has slowly been expanding its offerings: In March, it began offering skin care, and last year, it moved into private-label body and skin care and launched a makeup pilot program. The company, which has over 300,000 subscribers and has raised more than $18 million in venture capital funding, declined to state its annual revenue.
“We realized we wanted to stay on-trend, and wellness is a category that is driving a lot of interest and curiosity from the consumer,” said Richard Vera, vp of brand relations for Scentbird. “These are brands that have a very millennial profile and a unique value proposition.”
The wellness offering works the same way as Scentbird’s fragrance and skin-care subscription. Customers can select one product from any of the company’s offered categories — fragrances, skin care or wellness — to receive every month. The subscriptions start at $14.95. When the brand launched skin care earlier this year, it was projected to account for 40% of revenue within 12 to 18 months. However, with the addition of wellness, the company is now in a learning phase, especially considering the newness of the category within the beauty industry. Subscription offerings for ingestible products have been shown to boost other brands’ bottom lines.
“We think it will be a meaningful percentage of the business, although it’s a bit too early to project,” said Mariya Nurislamova, co-founder and CEO of Scentbird.
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Wellness plays well into Scentbird’s trend-driven approach. Across the larger fragrance and skin-care industries, the primary trends have been building for years: Sales of designer and celebrity fragrance have long been in decline, and clean beauty has been gaining in popularity since 2014. But wellness is on a faster track, with new subcategories — from CBD to mental performance to sexual — constantly emerging.
“One great thing about our platform is the ability to stay on trend and scale quickly. We aren’t tied to physical retail and can make fast decisions about brands and items we bring in,” said Vera.
The brand launched three CBD products by Highline Wellness on May 8, and all units of all products sold out within 48 hours, said Nurislamova, although the brand declined to say how many units there were. Also newly available on the platform are two sexual wellness brands, The Perfect V and Lady Suite. Vera said Scentbird plans to offer 22 wellness products by August and at least 60 by the end of the year.
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Since launch, Scentbird has activated several hundred paid and unpaid influencers within its 3,000-person network to promote the wellness category via Instagram posts and YouTube reviews. The brand said it determines influencer expectations on a case-by-case basis. The influencers will continue to post about the wellness category throughout the year. Scentbird is also repurposing snippets of YouTube wellness product review videos to place on other platforms, including Instagram and Facebook.
“We are starting to add and bring in a different audience because the product offering is shifting, so we are broadening our base,” said Nurislamova.
