Beautylish builds boutique stores on its social site

Now people can do more than just talk about makeup on Beautylish, they can buy amazing products too

After building out a fashion and beauty-centric social community of more than one million monthly users, Beautylish is announcing that it will expand its Web platform to include an e-commerce arm to help bring the products to those who love them.

Beautylish, founded two years ago, is ready to merge with word of editorial content, social interaction and now social commerce with a new feature called Boutiques. Boutiques will allow registered members on Beautylish to purchase products and limited exclusives from some of the most biggest brands in the community such as Sugarpill Cosmetics and collections from celebrity makeup artists like Billy B (known for his work with Lady Gaga).

“Over the past two years, Beautylish has been successful at generating significant purchasing intent from our community of more than one million unique monthly U.S. visitors in the 18-34 year-old demographic in additional to a large social following of 500,000 Twitter followers and 300,000 Facebook fans” said Nils Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Beautylish. “We’re launching e-commerce as a way to satisfy that purchasing demand and provide our community with a great end-to-end user experience.”

Beautylish will regularly be introducing a new brand to the Boutiques on the site -- this first of, launching Wednesday, is Sugarpill Cosmetics. Sugerpill is one of the top 10 most popular brands on the site and will offer eyelashes, makeup palettes and a limited edition eyeshadow. 

Each boutique will have a limited exclusive item that will be available while supplies last in addition to an assortment of products that will be stocked on a regular basis. The company has hopes that by combining the editorial, tutorial and community content with these commerce items, it can help members recreate their favorite looks with fun and ease.

The startup has raised funding from Silicon Valley’s premier angel investors including SV Angel, Naval Ravikant, the Co-founder of Epinions.com, Innovation Endeavors, Max Levchin, the co-founder of PayPal, Steve Chen, the Co-founder of YouTube, Jeremy Stoppelman the CEO of Yelp, James Hong, the Co-founder of HOT or NOT and Mariam Naficy, the founder and CEO of Minted. 

Beauty and fashion extensions have become very popular in the Internet tech sphere. In past few months Fab has partnered with Glamour magazine to bring beauty products to its design-centric customers.

Fab has taken well to the idea of curating and selling hand-picked items for people with a design-focused aesthetic and people are responding in droves. Now with more than three million users Fab is crafting new verticals for its clients including kids products, pet items and fashion offering.

The new pop-up shop, offered high-quality make-up, skincare products, lip care, candles and more. Brands featured include Nest Fragrances, Philip B. Botanical Products, Oscar Blandi, Pangea, and Demeter.

These curated offerings are quite a few steps removed from how Fab started out -- as group buying gay-centric deal site -- and in the last few weeks the stats have spoken for themselves with more than 100,000 products sold each month (thats nearly three items every minute.)

Also companies like Birchboz, where people get monthly packages filled with samples of products that they can buy, has gained a lot of traction -- even inspiring other companies to create sample boxes for food, baby products and home-made crafts.

As people turn to the Internet for more tutorials, advice and reviews of beauty products, we will likely see more melding of commerce and information. I'm just interested to see how many of the more than one million monthly users translates into buyers.