Black-owned indie beauty brands are finally having a long-overdue moment in the spotlight.
Over the past few weeks, the online presence of Black-owned indie beauty brands has risen exponentially. In the wake of a fierce and timely reckoning of the beauty industry, these brands have shone through with necessary actions for justice and passionate support for the Black beauty industry, which has too often been categorized as an afterthought.
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The Mira Beauty app serves as a beauty-focused universal search engine and social store. Their platform allows users to search for beauty products, tools and supplies based on their unique features and preferences to find out what truly works for them. Mira Beauty summarizes product and brand information from the entire web, and the app’s portfolio pulls product information from sites like Sephora, Ulta, YouTube, Target, and other large retailers and social media platforms.
Unfortunately, up until this point, many Black-owned brands have had little to no exposure in these stores or on these platforms. Due to this lack of content volume on retail sites and social media, Mira was only able to have a few Black-owned brands visible for their users. This glaring lack of representation speaks to the larger issue of Black representation in the entire beauty industry.
Mira Beauty is launching a new marketplace for all of these Black-owned beauty brands, which allows beauty buyers a much-needed avenue to support these brands. Mira has aggregated all of the Black-owned indie brands in one place, allowing beauty buyers an alternative to scattered searching and disjointed purchases. The Mira team used social listening tools to capture information from lists of Black-owned brands posted on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook over the past few weeks in order to find as many brands to feature as possible. They also sourced many of these brands in partnership with Black beauty creators who they work with, and they plan to run a campaign where their users and the wider community can add more brands and products that have yet to be featured.
By simply using the keyword “Black-owned” in the search bar, the app will guide users to Black-owned brand products. Not only will the search result in a plethora of product options, but the app will categorize them in popular/top sellers and most mentioned indie products, as well as provide discussion queues where users can review and discuss their faves.
With their new initiative, Mira hopes to help Black-owned brands to resurface and grow. Today, the Mira app portfolio will feature over 60 brands, including a slew of new—and extremely deserving—Black-owned brands.
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“Mira is a crowd-sourced model through and through. We’re designed for the people, by the people. There’s much work to do, but we’re taking concrete steps in changing the industry,” says Benjamin Lord, Chief Marketing Officer of Mira Beauty. “And we’re going to tap into our community to help us add more products and brands not featured yet.”
