Beauty Backer LLC has launched as the first crowdfunding site designed exclusively to raise funds for beauty brands and products, with makeup, skin care, hair care, men’s grooming, wellness, fragrances, gender-neutral and beauty technology as its main categories. The site intends to make it easy for beauty investors to finance beauty innovations.
Crowdfunding is essential to a brand’s rise to success, but the lack of funding can falsely display that the market is uninterested in a founder’s brand. On well-known crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter—which boasts a beauty campaign success rate of about 25%—and Indiegogo, beauty products struggle with recognition and fundraising, as about 70% of the sites’ contributors are men, who often have diminished interest in such categories.
“I’ve been an amateur inventor for most of my life,” said Jacqueline Gutierrez, founder and CEO of Beauty Backer. “I was working on an invention which happened to be in the beauty industry. My project didn’t belong on Indiegogo and forcing it into design or fashion categories all but set me up for failure.”