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Fashion and makeup focused StyleHaul is not waiting around. The YouTube MCN sold a majority stake earlier this month to European entertainment giant the RTL Group for $107 million. But instead of seeing that moment as an exit, a moment to pause, the company and its founder are accelerating their growth plans.
StyleHaul excels at getting people to watch other people show off their ‘haul’ — their clothing and makeup. That it took $107 million to buy a majority stake in the company confounds most. But to CEO Stephanie Horbaczewski the YouTube MCN makes perfect sense, so try to keep up.
“When I started the network people were like ‘you are going to be the QVC, the Home Shopping Network of the Internet.’ Not exactly,” said Horbaczewski.
In contrast to QVC pitchmen and pitchwomen, StyleHaul creators, “they are talking about stuff they like.”
Advertisers know sincerity sells. Since its founding in 2011, StyleHaul has done well selling sincerity via brand placement, not only on YouTube, but also on Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook.
“I think one of the reasons that StyleHaul excels is I didn’t come into this with the same experience as the other CEOs. I didn’t come from media and I don’t come from entertainment. I come from marketing,” said Horbaczewski. “We figured out pretty quickly and ahead of some of our counterparts, how to scale branded content and how to scale conversation and moved onto other platforms.”
That approach appears to be highly effective. Horbaczewski cites a branded content video StyleHaul did recently with makeup maker Maybelline. The video featured one of Maybelline’s face palettes picked out by one of StyleHaul’s creators. At the end of the video viewers were presented with an opportunity to buy the featured products.
“They were able to sell out of those palettes in two weeks online,” said Horbaczewski. That is the kind of performance brands remember, and want to scale internationally.
“We go where the brands go. It started with the UK/Canada. I started StyleHaul and knew pretty early that Brazil and South America were big and it’s growing pretty quickly for us. And the next place we are looking to invest is APAC (Asia-Pacific).”
To help with those international expansion plans RTL will be investing $20 million into StyleHaul. StyleHaul will also be opening offices in Brazil and Singapore, and will be relying on RTL’s international infrastructure. As they venture abroad StyleHaul is being met with enthusiastic partners.
“One brand was like ‘we really want to invest in this heavily every quarter, but we need somebody on the ground.’ And we were like ‘we are in.,’ said Horbaczewski. “There’s nothing like launching into a new international landscape with a partner.”
Brands in particular do enormous amounts of retail online in China. The Chinese e-commerce market is set to grow to $541 billion by 2015, something that could mean big opportunity for StyleHaul.
“The brands are looking to invest in content over there. It’s being wildly consumed,” said Horbaczewski. “We can see from Alibaba how much e-commerce is being consumed. It’s a really interesting place to be right now.”
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