The platform has been established with the intention of enabling buyers to identify and connect with innovative brands from all over the world, according to the company founder and CEO, Sarah Chung.
Chung points out that Marketplace will enable beauty buyers to identify and connect with innovative brands to provide differentiation in the retail environment, compete in alternative channels and ultimately to drive sales.
Connecting beauty brands and retailers
“Our goal is to be the most efficient and enjoyable sales platform for retailers and brands to connect and transact,” said Chung.
“The current process for beauty buying has not kept up with the pace of consumer awareness and demand for new products. Consumers are driving demand for brands not readily available in their favorite stores.”
The platform ultimately aims to make the job of finding alternative and niche brands easier, and ultimately simplifying the process of due diligence, ordering, payment and replenishment.
Marketplace works by giving a brand a profile with products, marketing materials, sales channels, pricing, ingredients and relevant certifications.
This then enables retailers to create profiles for those brands, to target them within specific categories and at specific consumers.
Closely following the experience of shopping on an e-commerce site, the platform has search capabilities that include price, trend, region and product type.
Focus on Korean products
Marketplace will initially have a focus specifically on Korean products, which are certain enjoying a huge surge in popularity in the West, following extensive media coverage about how detailed and innovative Korean beauty regimes area.
As a consequence, Landing International says that US consumers are already purchasing five times the amount of Korean beauty products they were ten years ago, and that figure is predicted to only grow all the more in the future.
Chung has put together a team with extensive experience in launching global beauty products to new markets, and that experience has extended to working with key US retailers such as Sephora, Bloomingdale’s and Target.