Odore, a London-based beauty startup that works with global brands including L’Oréal, Guerlain, and Clive Christian recently bagged $830K (nearly £595K).
Eyes to expand their technology offering
The investment round was led by SFC Capital along with participation from RLC Ventures. Odore aims to revolutionise how cosmetics and beauty businesses market their products to consumers. With the fund, the team eyes to expand their technology offering to cover a wider range of beauty marketing needs, thereby enabling clients to launch measurable and tailored digital marketing campaigns that can be run and measured through a centralised dashboard.
This is important at a time when more than half of the spend of $68 billion in the global Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry’s digital marketing last year failed to see a positive return on investment (ROI).
Armaan Mehta, Co-Founder at Odore, commented “Since launching in 2018, we’re developed fantastic relationships with beauty brands across the world, helping them re-write the rules of product sampling and bring it into the digital age. We’re now expanding the support we can provide to these businesses; enabling them to run hyper-personalised marketing campaigns that boost ROI and convert more customers, all from one dashboard.
Karan Gupta, fellow Co-Founder, added: “The beauty market is experiencing huge growth, but
customers are increasingly discerning about how and where they buy products. Our technology enables brands to respond to this with tailored, value-add marketing. We’re delighted to be welcoming this esteemed group of investors into the Odore business, allowing us to grow our product and expand our client base.”
Rohallah Ghasemi, Investment Executive at SFC Capital, commented: “Armaan and Karan have already reset the agenda for beauty sampling and we’re excited to see them apply this success to a wider scope of marketing technologies. From Guerlain to L’Oréal, the calibre of brands Odore is already working with is testament to their product, their deep understanding of the CPG industry and its challenges, as well as the talents of the founding team. We’re looking forward to working closely with them as they scale.”
Disrupts the world of beauty samples
Launched by university friends Armaan Mehta and Karan Gupta in 2018, Odore intends to disrupt the world of beauty samples. The company wants to transform the clunky, old-fashioned way in which beauty brands offer sample products into a digitised, personalised, and measurable part of their marketing strategies.
After a stint on the L’Oréal Beauty Tech Accelerator in 2018, Odore’s pioneering sampling technology quickly attracted attention from global beauty brands. The Odore technology will enable physical marketing including samples and testers to be integrated alongside social media, email, and paid advertising campaigns along with augmented reality integrations. In the past 12 months, the business witnessed a whopping 401% increase in revenue.
The marketing team at luxury perfumers Clive Christian, who use the Odore technology, added: “We’ve been extremely impressed by the Odore software and the impact it’s had on our marketing. Through it, we’ve been able to implement far more tailored strategies and have stronger oversight over customer behaviour across a range of different markets. This included digital sampling campaigns which resulted in an 85% opt-in rate from prospective customers – a huge uplift on our normal projections.”