Every once in awhile, a really special beauty website comes along. These are the websites that go beyond just delivering the latest product news or trends, and instead dig a little deeper into the world of beauty. EndlessBeauty.com, the first health and beauty website that focuses on a healthier approach to beauty, is one of those special sites. Founded in 2009, the site provides an array of relevant and dynamic content across multiple digital platforms preferred and visited by women: web, video, social media, and mobile device.
A lot of the website’s success can be attributed to the hard work of Julie Springer, EndlessBeauty.com’s President and Co-Founder. But you’d be wrong in assuming that Springer knew all along that this was what she would be doing as a career. Instead, Springer’s Endless Beauty journey has been a very fateful and lucky one, as she shared with Chrissy’s Beauty School in an exclusive interview.
After six years of working in the Middle East doing digital media and public relations for major oil companies, Springer was ready for a change. She needed a time of pace and she wanted to return to the states. So when a grammar school friend told her he’d just bought the domain EndlessBeauty.com and was looking for someone to help him run the site, Springer jumped at this fateful opportunity.
“It was kind of meant to be, honestly. I was ready to come home and try something new,” she said.
After traveling around the world for her previous work, Springer had a pretty firm grasp on what she did and didn’t want when it came to the overall theme for the website: “I didn’t want to do just a traditional beauty site because after having traveled the world and interfacing with a lot of different women out in the world one thing that really resonated with me was the importance of self image and the importance of confidence and the importance of feeling beautiful but achieving it [through health means].”
And as a result, EndlessBeauty.com isn’t your typical beauty website. Yes, there are product reviews and recommendations, but the overall goal is deeply rooted in health and well-being.
“Endless Beauty comes from collective passion and the need for doing something good versus just monetization and generating money, money, money,” Springer said. “We actually really want to [make a difference in some way], whether that’s [by] helping one girl or one young woman at a time achieve sort of that steady state of happiness where they’re confident.”
I chatted with Springer about the site’s journey to success and how she came to be involved with Endless Beauty. Here’s what she had to say!
Chrissy’s Beauty School: You have some pretty strong criteria for product reviews, which right away separates this from many other sites. How does this fit into the greater goals of Endless Beauty?
Julie Springer: When we first launched the site, people were just throwing products at us…. And at first, we really had to sit down and collectively decide how we were going to approach this because we didn’t want to silo it and only review organic or natural products, for example, because that’s what’s driving consumerism out there. You have a percentage of people out there that only use those types of products but we have a greater goal than that.
And so, rather than turning down products, we said, “You know what, let’s just be completely transparent and say ‘Hey listen, we tried this product, perhaps it’s not eco-friendly, perhaps it contains chemicals, but at least we’re going to let you know as a consumer what exactly you’re getting if you want to go purchase this product.’” And so we wanted to reach a broader audience, and hopefully in the process of reaching the broader audience, we’re educating the broader audience.
CBS: That’s great that you give readers the chance to decide for themselves whether or not they want to buy the products in spite of potentially dangerous chemicals.
JS: I really think it’s an education process, to be honest. You have to really even drill down into what the differences [are] between organic and natural [products]; some people just don’t know. And so we really try to be as transparent as we can and we’re very forthright [and] very honest with the product companies about that….We really truly do not want to be biased in the health and beauty community. We want to only provide true, honest content.
I think you have to consciously decide if you’re going to go down that road, [and determine] what the boundaries are there. It would seem that you’d really want to please the product companies. After all, they drive the monetization on the site, and that’s important. But at the same time, I guess the question is: Who are you most loyal to? Are you most loyal to your readers or are you most loyal to the product companies? And we decided a long time ago that we were most loyal to our readers.
CBS: Endless Beauty takes on monthly themes for its content. September was Body Image Month and October a Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Can you tell us what kinds of themes the readers can look forward to in the coming months?
JS: January is, of course, New Years. It’s about starting fresh, it’s about feeling good about embarking on a new year, and perhaps something new in your life. So that’s coming up and we’re pretty excited about that.
We’re going to take a little bit different approach. We’re going to do a lot of content on cleansing and just how to emotionally prepare for a new year and how not to get bogged down in [your New Year’s resolutions] that can weigh you down emotionally. We set such high expectations for ourselves and then when we don’t achieve those goals, that can be somewhat damaging emotionally. So we’ve got some tricks on how to combat that and how to set practical goals and achieve them.
CBS: Anything else you’d like to add? Anything you’d like readers to take away from the website?
JS: We really try to encourage a two-way dialogue with our readers. We have multiple feedback mechanisms on the site [and] there’s always a place to comment, whether that’s on content or video. We have multiple ways in which to reach us through various channels, whether that’s on our social media sites or email, and we just really encourage people to provide us with ideas. We really, really truly listen to our readers and we develop and enhance the site accordingly. So that’s kind of important to us, for [the readers] to understand that it is a two-way dialogue; we’re not just here to push information.