Adore Beauty to launch New Zealand before Summer

After putting international expansion plans on ice for the past few years to focus on growth in its home market of Australia, e-commerce business Adore Beauty is ready to go overseas again, and the first stop is New Zealand. According to Kate Morris, Adore Beauty’s founder and CEO, the Australian business will launch a localised website in New Zealand within the next six months. This will be accompanied by a local marketing campaign to increase awareness of the brand in the market.

“The offering will be more competitive, and we’ll be looking to make ourselves a bit easier to find for New Zealand customers,” Morris told.

Adore Beauty has shipped internationally since it launched in 1999, but in the past, the experience was less than ideal for overseas customers, since prices were in Australian dollars.

In January 2017, the company partnered with Borderfree, a tech solution that enabled customers to see different currencies, payment methods and customs and taxes, depending on their location.

This was always intended as a stop-gap solution to improve the international shopping experience until the business had capacity to think about international expansion again, according to Morris.

“It wasn’t an area of focus; we weren’t spending any marketing dollars outside of our Australian consumers,” Morris said about international sales over the past few years.

That has changed, as Adore Beauty recently completed a significant warehouse transformation project with HighJump, which saw its capacity triple to 4500sqm. This will enable the online beauty retailer to support its growing Australian business, while servicing new customers.

“You’ve got to make sure you keep up your promises to the customers you already have before expanding out and trying to support new ones,” Morris said.

“Part of our brand is the service level [we provide] and our reliability. Unless we can execute on that wherever we go, what’s our offering? We need to be consistent with our brand.”

Morris said the New Zealand launch is just the first part of Adore Beauty’s expansion plans. It marks the “reopening of international generally”, she said.