Il Makiage UK Launch: Here’s Everything You Need To Know About The Cult Beauty Brand

The cat eye is out of the beauty bag, makeup lovers—cult cosmetics brand Il Makiage is finally coming to the UK.

Though the brand was founded back in 1972 by makeup artist Ilana Harkavi, it found a second coming as one of The Beauty Businesses To Know in 2018 thanks to new leadership, new R&D and new investment ($29 million from the Growth Fund of L Catterton, particularly)— all of which has sent the prestige brand’s popularity into the stratosphere.

The waitlist is open on IlMakiage.com as of today, and the full site will go live for purchases on Thursday, May 14th, with hundreds of products starting at £19 ($23).

Why is Il Makiage so popular?

When Il Makiage relaunched in the US in 2018, the company prioritized perfecting consumers’ online shopping experience. Rather than following the industry’s ‘discover offline’ and ‘replenish online’ footprints, Il Makiage invested in technology that would help people shop better online, and—as the fastest-growing beauty brand in the US—they’re already reaping the rewards.

In less than two years the company has successfully shifted millions of cosmetics collectors from buying makeup offline to online, thanks, in large part, to its unique PowerMatch algorithm.

The PowerMatch algorithm was created to remove digital beauty’s biggest barrier, utilizing machine learning (and hundreds of thousands of data points) to not only precisely match complexion products like foundation and concealer, but do so without ever needing to see a customer’s face.

The company’s data scientists, R&D and engineering teams worked tirelessly to perfect it and the algorithm now employs 700 different skin tone combinations.

Dubious? Understandable. We’ve all ordered a product off the internet and ended up with a tube of something that doesn’t match expectations (or any part of our skin tone), but PowerMatch’s proof is in the public’s response.

Since its launch, the company’s Woke Up Like This foundation has fast become the US’ most-reviewed beauty product, with over 90,000 reviews, and almost every reviewer awards the PowerMatch-ed product five out of five stars.

But brother-sister entrepreneur duo Oran Holtzman (CEO) and Shiran Holtzman-Erel (Chief Product Officer) didn’t expect anything less.

“Beauty is huge on social media,” says Oran Holtzman, over Zoom. “Especially YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, but consumers still make more than 90 per cent of beauty purchases offline, making beauty one of the most under-penetrated categories in e-commerce.

“We are here to change it, to disrupt this category, and that was our mission from the get go.”

By the end of 2019 ten million people had taken part in Il Makiage’s algorithm-backed questionnaires, so the company decided to invest in furthering its technological capabilities by acquiring NeoWize, a Y Combinator Big Data Science start-up.

“Their founders joined us and both of them are obviously incredibly smart, we are very happy about this acquisition,” says Holtzman. “One is our now is our head of R&D and the other is our Chief Data Scientist. They developed advanced active machine learning algorithms and it helps us to be better for our consumers.”

The algorithms now change all the time, “even yesterday!”, in an effort to get the algorithm’s 94 per cent success rate up to a seemingly impossible 100 per cent.

Of course, Il Makiage’s impending UK launch, which marks its first market expansion, has come with all the trials you might expect during a global pandemic; closed factories, increased inventory demands, and more.

“It was a huge mess, but since we are a start-up we can move much faster to get more inventory and produce more. Given the fact that we are an online brand, manufacturers have been able to offer a lot of help.

“We’re growing dramatically. January was great, February was better, and March was insane, but think about it—most of the stores are closed. This is the time for online brands to gain market share.”

With the highest e-commerce penetration in Europe, and second highest globally, the UK has high potential for direct-to-consumer digital companies. Beauty brands, even more so, as the UK boasts one of the highest per-capita beauty spends in the world, even beating the US.

Sure, that’s reason enough.

“Personally, I love London and was looking for a reason to come more, so that’s the number one reason,” laughs Holtzman.