Glow.com

Online cosmetics-sales players just gained an interesting competitor. Will this new kid on the block change the game?

by Julie Sturgeon

All images courtesy of Glow.com

Consumer spending studies in 2009 show a predictable pattern: The Nielsen Co. has seen a 46% increase in the amount of time Americans are spending on videos, a 20% jump in the time we spend reading blogs and a 17% hike in traffic to ecommerce sites. It’s all about entertaining ourselves at home.

Which means that recent research from The NPD Group showing that online purchases increased in the beauty-product category despite declines in other retail channels is right on the money. According to The NPD Group, the Internet has a higher ratio of women saying they spent more on beauty this year than women who cut back on their spending. What’s more, they’ve started spending more on expensive brands this year.

DermStore (www.DermStore.com) in El Segundo, California, owned by Intelligent Beauty (www.ibinc.com), has geared its engines to step right into this niche. Its online-only cosmetics store, www.Glow.com, officially launched in August. (DermStore, which launched in 1999, is also a health and beauty ecommerce site created by a board-certified dermatologist that Beauty Store Business has profiled. Intelligent Beauty, founded in January 2006, is a beauty-industry company in online marketing and new ecommerce technology.)

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