- Birchbox pioneered the monthly beauty subscription box and was once valued at nearly $500 million.
- But after some financial setbacks, Birchbox was acquired 10 years after launch for just $45 million.
- Now, vendors say Birchbox owes them money, and customers say they haven’t gotten a box in months.
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In 2014, Birchbox was considered a pioneer of the subscription box industry, boasting hundreds of thousands of subscribers and a $485 million valuation.
But late in 2021, the brand was acquired for $45 million, a fraction of its former valuation, following layoffs and a dwindling customer base.
Now, Birchbox seems to have all but disappeared, leaving frustrated vendors and customers in its wake who say the company owes them money. Neither Birchbox nor its parent company, FemTec Health, immediately responded to Insider’s request for comment.
Here’s how a once-hot startup got its start, defined a category, then seemingly “vanished.”
Birchbox was founded by two Harvard Business School grads
Cindy Ord/Getty Images
Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna came up with the idea for Birchbox back in 2009 while they were students at Harvard Business School.
The company was modeled off of what Netflix was doing at the time for movies: sending customers DVDs in the mail for a flat monthly fee. But instead of movies, Birchbox customers would receive designer beauty products, many of them in miniature size, from the likes of Nars and Kiehl’s for $10 per month.
“We were inspired by other companies doing similar things — Netflix and Zappos,” Beauchamp told Insider in 2011. “Our goal was to change the way that consumers shop online.”
Beauchamp and Barna secured $1.4 million in seed funding prior to launch, and by 2011, had raised another $10.5 million in Series A funding from the likes of Accel Partners and First Round Capital. By then, 45,000 customers had signed on for monthly beauty boxes and the company had begun expanding to other categories, like men’s grooming.
Birchbox opened its first retail store in 2014 in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, where shoppers could test out products and build their own Birchbox. The company also raised another round of funding, this time $60 million, which pushed the startup’s valuation to $485 million. By the time it raised its Series B, Birchbox counted 800,000 subscribers and had acqui
