This week saw the launch of a game-changing, community driven shopping platform, Sourcerie.
Sourcerie is on a mission to put the ‘personal’ back into shopping our most personal routines, launching a radically personalised platform for individuals to discover and shop beauty products.
Uniquely powered by a recommendation engine based on hundreds of thousands of user reviews, Sourcerie matches brands and products against over three billion distinct user profiles, to find the best possible products or routines for every individual with over 90% accuracy. The platform considers every individual’s distinct skin type, skin sensitivity, goals, age, skin tone, and conditions such as rosacea, acne, melasma, and dandruff.
As a community-powered marketplace, Sourcerie brings together multiple ecommerce stores across brands and retailers, allowing customers to shop a completely bespoke and curated experience tailored specifically to their own needs, based on feedback from other users like them. Sourcerie harnesses the power of data-driven decision making, creating truly bespoke and inclusive shopping experiences for each customer, relevant to their individual needs.
What is Sourcerie?
Sourcerie was co-founded by Kristin Cardwell and Alex Beyer following their successful careers spanning tech, beauty, and start-ups, and resulted in them successfully pre-seeding £1.8 million before even launching.
An impressive achievement in a climate where women entrepreneurs secure only 1% of all venture capital funding, compared to men. Both eczema sufferers, the pair were frustrated by the lack of failproof skincare advice and overwhelmed with the constant challenge of identifying the right products for them.
“We were frustrated by our own personal struggles, I found getting recommendations for new products from people like me to be the most helpful, and thought, can’t we find a way to scale this? Knowing how important reviews are – with 93% of customers saying reviews are hugely influential in affecting their shopping decisions2- this seemed like the logical place to start.” said Kristin Cardwell.
Cardwell and Beyer’s combined backgrounds in beauty and tech creates a true advantage to disrupt the industry, harnessing the power of data-driven decision making to create a fully bespoke platform. By creating a truly inclusive experience for each customer, that’s relevant to their individual needs, Sourcerie removes the guesswork from shopping products suited to you.
Kristin explains, “The beauty industry has become difficult for consumers to navigate, with niche products and brands launching almost daily. The number of available brands, products, and active ingredients used has grown exponentially over the last few years. Nearly 60% of consumers have had an adverse reaction to a product at some point in time, and over 7 in 10 report they are dissatisfied with their current products. We saw a real need for objective, data-driven personalisation, based on the trusted experiences of others.”
Alex added “Beauty is a massive market, but is falling behind when it comes to tech, and personalising for beauty has so much more nuance that can only really be captured by scaling community input. The data platform and software we’re building with Sourcerie has so many potential uses for the broader industry, and we’re already in discussions with many of our brand and retailer supplier partners about further potential applications that they can use and take advantage of. We’re so excited to be pioneering innovation for the UK beauty tech industry and beyond”.
