Blippy Partners with Sephora to Create Social Shopping Destination

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Blippy, a leading social shopping company, today announced a partnership with beauty retailer Sephora, to launch an online social shopping community for Sephora customers.  Customers can use the service to talk about the products they're buying, discover trending products, and write product reviews to share with others.

"Blippy's integration with Sephora.com allows our customers to more easily communicate with each other and talk about the products they're buying," said Julie Bornstein, Senior VP of Sephora Direct.  "Blippy provides the ability for our customers to ask each other questions, get tips, and share recommendations."

"Sephora is a trailblazer.  They embraced social networking early on, which led to Sephora's significant presence on sites like Facebook -- where they have over 900,000 fans and growing -- Twitter, and YouTube," said Philip Kaplan, Co-Founder of Blippy.  "Social networking is becoming an increasingly important way for online retailers to delight their customers and be more successful.  We're thrilled to be working with Sephora."

Blippy is a community where people write reviews, share recommendations, and discover new products.  Here's how it works: A Sephora customer visits blippy.com/sephora and signs up.  Each time that customer buys something from Sephora, they will be asked by Blippy whether or not they'd like to share it and write a review.  These reviews appear on Blippy, with many users opting to automatically share their reviews with friends on Facebook and Twitter, using Blippy's syndication features.

Neither Blippy nor Sephora will share purchase information without explicit prior approval from each participating customer.

As of mid-October, 2010, Blippy users have shared 2.6 million purchases totaling more than $65 million in sales, from more than 300,000 stores.

About Blippy

Blippy (www.blippy.com) is a leading social shopping service based in Palo Alto, California.  Blippy launched in 2010 with $13 million in funding from Charles River Ventures, August Capital, Sequoia Capital, and other investors including Ron Conway, Twitter's Evan Williams, Mahalo's Jason Calacanis, and HOTorNOT's James Hong.  Blippy was founded by Ashvin Kumar, Chris Estreich, and Philip Kaplan.  

About Sephora

Sephora is a leading prestige beauty retailer, providing three ways to shop: an expanding base of stores across the United States, the foremost beauty site Sephora.com, and its seasonal catalogues (1-877-SEPHORA). Sephora offers professional sales assistance in an open-sell environment across a broad range of product categories including skincare, color, and fragrance. Sephora is a part of Paris-based LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world's leading luxury products group.

SOURCE Blippy