The perfume and makeup subscription service Scentbird intends to launch into the home and personal care markets in the fall.
The New York-based company is already profitable, with 140,000 subscribers buying either its fragrance subscription or its Deck of Scarlet makeup service that launched last fall, co-founder and chief executive Mariya Nurislamova told me.
“Subscriptions are doing better than ever before” says Nurislamova. “It is a business model that is increasingly well-understood… [subscribers] are okay with being charged every month and they do understand how this works now.”
The market for subscription-based businesses has been something of a roller coaster over the last year, Nurislamova notes, and counts herself lucky to have had her company come through the other side unscathed.
“It’s very cyclical,” says Nurislamova. “Dollar Shave Club sold and Chewy sold and everybody was excited. Birchbox lays off 100 people and everyone is scared.”
Throughout the rising and falling fortunes of the market, Scentbird has stayed the course. The company has only tapped about $1 million of the $4 million it raised to date, and Nurislamova doesn’t know if it’ll go back out to market for more capital.
“I think that the name of the game is profitability,” she said.
With that profitability comes a greater flexibility in terms of a company’s financing options, Nurislamova said. With $2 million in monthly recurring revenue, debt isn’t hard to come by.
Especially as the company expands its footprint with new brands. Deck of Scarlet — Scentbird’s makeup line that launched last fall — has been well received by the market, Nurislamova said. And now the next step is to move into home fragrances and a body-care line in the fall.
“It’s clearly the same consumer,” says Nurislamova. “Because we started off as a scent recommender.”
The new line will launch in October, should everything go according to plan. Pricing for the new products will start at $14.95 for a box full of items with a retail value of roughly $20 to $24 dollars, according to Nurislamova.
That’s in line with the company’s makeup pricing, which sells for about $30 for $40 worth of product.