Listen to the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!
Today, Katia Beauchamp is the co-Founder & CEO of Birchbox—but growing up in El Paso, entrepreneurship wasn’t even part of her vocabulary. In fact, it wasn’t until attending business school that Katia even heard the word for the first time. She still knew right away it was her for her. Luckily, Katia had already developed the qualities necessary to launch a company: some very real bravery and a healthy appetite for risk.
Birchbox is a subscription service that sends its subscribers a box of carefully curated beauty supplies every month. It’s hugely popular today, but had humble beginnings: it all started with Katia and her co-founder, a friend from business school, cold emailing beauty CEOs to ask for five minutes of their time. Katia was no stranger to cold emails—she once not only correctly guessed Steve Jobs’ email address but convinced him to offer Harvard Business School students the same discounts that IBM was offering (she didn’t manage to swing a free computer, though). The cold emails were very effective and soon Katia and her co-founder were beta testing their idea with 200 subscribers, offering 5 beauty samples in a cute box. By September 2010, Birchbox launched full scale, and was so successful that within 6 months they already had copycats vying for market share.
Birchbox is a subscription service that sends its subscribers a box of carefully curated beauty supplies every month. It’s hugely popular today, but had humble beginnings: it all started with Katia and her co-founder, a friend from business school, cold emailing beauty CEOs to ask for five minutes of their time. Katia was no stranger to cold emails—she once not only correctly guessed Steve Jobs’ email address but convinced him to offer Harvard Business School students the same discounts that IBM was offering (she didn’t manage to swing a free computer, though). The cold emails were very effective and soon Katia and her co-founder were beta testing their idea with 200 subscribers, offering 5 beauty samples in a cute box. By September 2010, Birchbox launched full scale, and was so successful that within 6 months they already had copycats vying for market share.
Today, Birchbox has over 1 million subscribers in six markets and lots of plans for growth—recently, they opened a retail store in Soho, NYC! Listen to this week’s #VFApodcast to find out how Birchbox created the mold for subscription box services as the “appetizer” for full sized products.