Name Ciara O’Hagan
Company - The Beauty Buddy
Role - Brand Manager
The Beauty Buddy is a female led, beauty tech, start up. Our app ‘Beauty Buddy’ lets you search for or scan the barcode of a beauty or cosmetic product to see all the relevant information including reviews and ratings. You can also leave your own reviews, add products to your virtual makeup bag and follow friends to have a peek inside their makeup bag.
Once you leave 10 reviews you can join our Sampling Squad. We send you free products for you to use and review. You also get to meet the brand via a live video event.
My main role as brand manager is to connect with Brands, find the right contacts and connect with them to build a relationship, onboard them and then manage that account. Once they sign up for our monthly sampling subscription, I ensure their product data is added to our database and kick off the sampling campaign. This involves co-ordinating the packaging of the samples, creation of marketing content for our social platforms including blogs, discount codes and videos, all relevant to the brand and ultimately running the live virtual events. After each campaign I generated a report for the Brand which showcases the effectiveness of the campaign.
The Beauty Buddy currently has a seed funding round open for €1million. According to research by All Raise, only 15% of venture capital funding is allocated to female founders. While this makes fundraising tougher for our female led company, we believe we will close this round by the summer.
We are taking part in the Accelerator Academy in the UK. This is a 12 week programme to help revenue generating startups validate every segment of their business and become investor-ready. We will pitch to a room full of investors at the end of the 12 weeks. The co-founders invited me to attend this programme with them. This is one of the key benefits of working with a start-up, while you have a role you have the freedom to get involved with so many other elements of the business. I find it has been a fantastic way for me to learn and working so closely with everyone on the team in an open and transparent culture is refreshing and gives me a real sense of purpose.