Poshly

Poshly operated as a business-to-business consumer intelligence platform with a sharp focus on the beauty and personal care industries. Founded in 2011 by Doreen Bloch, the company was born from her passion for both technology, having interned at Yahoo!, and beauty. Bloch, a graduate of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, identified the inefficiency in how consumers discovered products and how brands targeted sampling initiatives.

The company's business model was centered on data provision. Poshly built a community of consumers who would answer detailed questionnaires about their beauty habits, preferences, and physical attributes in exchange for chances to win free product samples. This created a rich, proprietary database of consumer insights. The collected data was then anonymized and sold to beauty brands, including major players like L'Oréal, Shiseido, and Unilever, helping them with strategic planning, product development, and marketing. Revenue was generated by selling this data in various packages, from raw data sets to comprehensive reports with key takeaways, with campaign costs for clients ranging from $2,500 to $25,000. The platform also partnered with publications such as Teen Vogue to help them conduct reader surveys.

The core service was a hybrid between a data service and a real-time market research tool. For consumers, Poshly offered a personalized way to discover and win products tailored to their needs. For businesses, it provided granular data on specific consumer segments, enabling them to make more informed decisions and better target their marketing and product development efforts. Poshly also offered a customizable API for publications to integrate its quizzes directly onto their own sites. In December 2021, Poshly was acquired by Suzy, a real-time market research platform, to expand Suzy's capabilities in the beauty sector and integrate Poshly's audience. Following the acquisition, Doreen Bloch joined Suzy as Vice President of Audience Management.

Keywords: consumer intelligence, beauty industry data, personal care insights, market research, consumer data platform, B2B data, product sampling, beauty analytics, Doreen Bloch, consumer surveys, cosmetic industry research, brand insights, product development data, L'Oréal, Shiseido, Unilever, Suzy acquisition, Teen Vogue, consumer trends, targeted marketing