Courtesy of Kristy Westrup, IPSY Chief Merchandising Officer

Consumers are looking to change their beauty routines and we’re here for it.

Newness is the beauty industry’s greatest asset and biggest challenge. With thousands of launches every year, there are countless opportunities to inspire. But the trick is to unlock that discovery—getting the right product in front of the right consumer. IPSY’s merchandising strategy employs art and science to make that love connection for both brands and our members.

Opening the door to discovery is more important than ever at a time when consumers are craving a change in their routines. According to IPSY’s annual Awareness and Conversion Survey, beauty consumers’ interest in discovering new products is up 20% over last year. With so many choices available, it’s no surprise that reliance on product trial to inform purchasing decisions has also surged by double digits. This is a boon to the beauty industry’s newness machine.

IPSY’s merchandising strategy helps supercharge discovery for brands and members. Our process starts more than a year out as our merchandising team works with our analytics and consumer insights teams to evaluate industry trends and forecasts, past product and category performance, and consumer preferences. To start building the ideal assortments, members’ product preferences and specific needs are fed into IPSY’s proprietary AI platform, IPSY Match. IPSY Match synthesizes millions of data points to determine optimal assortments and ensure that the products our members receive are tailored to their routines and concerns.

Armed with this information, IPSY’s brand partnerships team sources the hottest products on the market from our over 500 active brand partners. Merchants evaluate over 8,000 of these sourced products per year against dozens of criteria including packaging, performance, efficacy, and ingredients. That kind of volume cultivates unimpeachable expertise, but the process doesn’t stop there. Every product showcased in IPSY undergoes pre-vetting by our member community, as we send hundreds of member surveys a year to ensure that the products featured align with their preferences and come from the brands and categories that excite them the most.

The real magic happens when the merchants, planners, and personalization teams collaborate on where (and when) we place each product. This curation results in the allocation of more than 12 million products per year to create the 15,000 combinations that leave our warehouses every month. You might assume a merchant’s role ends here, but IPSY’s team considers every aspect of our members’ product experience, from their unboxing to the inspiration and education derived from the hundreds of pieces of content created by IPSY’s brand and social teams every month.

These efforts foster a highly engaged membership. IPSY’s members eagerly try and review their monthly assortments, leaving millions of reviews and creating a virtuous feedback loop that helps inform future assortments and give brands valuable feedback from a very targeted audience. IPSY’s merchants pore through these reviews—or at least we did before we began synthesizing them with AI—using the feedback to learn and refine our offerings. All of this data and expert curation ultimately fuels targeted discovery on an enormous scale, but our members tell us that IPSY not only introduces them to new brands and products but also helps them overcome category and value barriers as they understand the value of products better and discover new categories.

Allocating 12 million products a year to a beauty-obsessed membership is no small feat, but IPSY’s in-house beauty experts have a lot of tricks in our tool kit to evaluate, curate, and allocate these products. With expert merchants, millions of consumer data points, and a proprietary AI platform, IPSY is able to deliver more—and more targeted—product discovery, helping products stand out in a crowded market and reducing waste as brands establish an IRL connection to their most relevant customers.

About Kristy Westrup, Chief Merchandising Officer at IPSY:

Kristy Westrup is a seasoned executive in fashion, beauty and luxury with over 20 years of experience leading merchandising and business development across global markets for E-Commerce, Subscription, Department Store and Travel Retail.

As Chief Merchandising Officer, Kristy leads the Merchants, Planning, Personalization, Brand Partnerships and New Business Development teams for IPSY. Kristy oversees product sourcing and assortment, partner development, B2B strategy/marketing and campaign management across all subscriptions and e-commerce. During her time at IPSY, she was able to support and lead many of the efforts around Beauty Amplified, an internal corporate program to support and elevate underserved communities such as Black and Latinx founded brands, delivering $55M in investment within the last two years.

Previously, as Senior Vice President of Merchandising and Consumer Insights at IPSY and BoxyCharm, Kristy built out e-commerce, consumer insights and merchandising into a strategically unified business unit that drove the largest full-size subscription membership program and the most engaged consumers within the beauty industry.

Prior to joining IPSY in 2019, Kristy was Vice President of Merchandising at Starboard Services, an LVMH Maison in their Selective Retailing Division. At Starboard, she led the global merchandising strategy and revenue generation across Beauty, Fashion Accessories, Fine Jewelry, Swiss Timepieces, Apparel, Spirits & Wine, Food & Candy and Home Decor. Kristy managed a global Merchandising Team with offices in Miami, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Genoa.