Hi Everyone. Thank you so much for your interest. We absolutely know that the price point is higher than other beauty boxes, so I think its worth giving you the back story and explaining why.
To begin with, we are not a subscription or beauty box company. Our core business is producing trade and consumer shows focused on independent beauty, wellness and lifestyle brands. Here is what one looks like (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1eC7eJ_1H0). Each IBE showcases anywhere between 100 – 200 brands from around the world. This is what we do for a living.
At each show, we offer members of top-tier press (Allure to Vogue) and top-tier retailers (Anthropologie to Ulta) a VIP gift bag filled with samples and goodies from the show. Consumers can also buy the very same VIP gift bag for $99 – $129 at the door. Our VIP gift bags always sell-out because they are a fantastic deal (retail value of the bag is always >$500) and often contain newly launched brands or products that are hard to find.
Over time, as word of IBE spread, we started getting requests from a indie beauty lovers who, for whatever reason, could not attend our show and who just wanted to buy our VIP gift bags and have us mail it to them (which they would happily pay for). Since we were a small company and growing rapidly with our shows, this was just not practical for us to do (on top of everything else), so we kept politely declining.
That was until earlier this year when we announced our Best in Show winners. Then we got a deluge of calls and emails from longstanding IBE fans asking us to put everything in one collection so that they could just make one purchase instead of 21. Since there is no show associated with this collection, we decided to do this as a service to our customers. We are not a retailer and cannot store inventory or have a fulfillment center, so we had to limit the quantity to 125 (which is about as much as we could fit in our Brooklyn office and homes). Our staff picked, packed and shipped every single box. For example, all those giant stickers on the boxes . . . printed right here and painstakingly applied by hand over one weekend.
When it came to pricing, we were challenged. The value of the collection was easily >$500, but that was clearly too high. And we couldn’t find a comparable “box” out there that had 20+ premium or luxury-oriented beauty items, all at full-size or deluxe-size. We found a ton of options in the $9.99 – $49.99 range, but honestly none were comparable in quality or breadth of selection to our collection. So we ended up pricing the collection at $99 simply because that is what our VIP bags were priced at and our customers accustomed to. The Best in Show sold out in a matter of weeks and, considering it was our first effort, we got a lot of excellent feedback–one being, interestingly enough, that is was a great value for money.
At recent our Dallas show in May, the same thing happened again. Email after email regarding our VIP gift bags. This time we got lucky and found a small distribution house which kindly offered to take on storage and fulfillment at an affordable price. So our team curated a lovely collection of 19 brands from our inaugural Dallas show and we priced it at $125; simply because that is also the new price of our VIP gift bags moving forward. As always we made sure that the retail value of the bag was at least five times the price so that, while “pricey” on the surface, for the shopper who wants a true comprehensive collection and understands value of all these items, she is getting a fantastic deal.
Sorry for the long answer, but we pour our heart and soul into IBE and take our reputation seriously. The community here at MSA has been very kind to us and we didn’t want you to think that we are insensitive to price or just “milking it”. If we were a retailer, we definitely would do more collections at different price points and certainly in larger quantities and really take advantage of this opportunity. But we are not, so we can’t.
So our Collections have a very specific purpose for a very specific audience–and that is why they are priced as they are and why they only appear in such limited quantities. So we totally understand that they are not for everyone. We wish we could do more, but right now we have to be very disciplined on where we allocate our time and resources. Hopefully next year we can offer more variety.
In the meantime, all the great brands in the “Discover Dallas” Collection are listed on our shopping page with direct link to their product so that–if you don’t want to buy the collection–you can just purchase as many or as few of these products directly yourself. It would make us just as happy! And if you find yourself buying seven or more of them, then you may to consider the Collection.
Finally, to the user who wrote “I wouldn’t pay $30 for a box with deodorant in a jar in it”, here are a few thing you need to know. First, the product you refer to, the Milk+Honey Coconut Vanilla Deodorant cream is an awesome innovation. If you don’t want any of the awful synthetic additives that are used in regular sticks (which over time find their way into your bloodstream–especially if you shave your underarm and use a deodorant every day), then you need to open your mind and think beyond a solid stick.
Alissa Bayer, the founder of Milk+Honey, is an incredible entrepreneur. We know her personally, and she is a person who is genuinely committed to bringing healthy organic luxurious products to the market. Milk+Honey is so good at what they do, that they now operate three spas and five salons–you don’t get to that size in less than 10 years, unless you bring real value to your customers. For many of us who don’t want nasty stuff in our beauty products, we are grateful to the likes of Alissa who spend the time and resources, and put their own capital at risk, to develop products that solve a particular problem . . . just in an unconventional way. And that is EXACTLY why we included her innovative deodorant in our “Discover Dallas” Collection. While not for everyone, its definitely a discovery.
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