That’s a lot of lipstick and high heels.

Zalora focuses on 10 countries in Asia: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The year-old startup says it has already achieved “annualized double-digit million USD revenues.”

“Our company is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia and has bright prospects,” said managing director Michele Ferrario. “It is an honor for us that investors of such great repute have invested into an e-commerce company as young as Zalora”

It is indeed an honor when a year-old startup with two or three million dollars in annualized revenue scores a $100 million investment. And it’s an unusual honor as well. But there’s method behind the madness.

The investment was secured by the German holding company that owns Zalora, Rocket Internet, which claims to be “the largest, fastest and most successful international online venture builder.” Founded by the infamous Samwer brothers — who Jason Calacanis has called “despicable thieves” —  its modus operandi has been to take successful models from American startups and apply them globally.

Genius, perhaps, if not very original. And very, very successful.

Rocket Internet sold Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for $126 million in 2010 and eBay clone Alando to eBay for $50 million, among many other lucrative deals. That history is undoubtedly part of what led the investment group, led by Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, and the Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group, to participate in this $100 million round.

Source: Rocket Internet

Rocket Internet’s impressive portfolio of companies

A big chunk, 25 percent, of Zalora’s revenue comes from mobile commerce, and the company says its app is the top lifestyle app in all the countries it serves, and the top app overall for Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.

In other words, Rocket Ventures saw an opportunity to take a big slice of an emerging market, and is moving rapidly — and with massive investment — to own the space.

The capital will be used, Zalora said, to scale up operations and grow the number of local and international brands it carries.

The company has just delivered its millionth order.

photo credit: AehoHikaruki via photopin cc

A startup called Madison Color aims to reinvent the home hair care experience, starting with color. The company raised a $4 million funding round today led by True Ventures, a firm that sees a massive market opportunity for high-quality, home-delivered hair products.

Madison won’t publicly launch until the fall, but the founders say they plan to develop an online service for customers select, buy and apply hair products. Madison Color will begin by offering ammonia-free products, which can be ordered online or via a mobile app, and delivered straight to your doorstep. Think of it as a Warby Parker for hair products.

Cofounder Amy Errett [left] secured a smaller investment from her former firm, Maveron LLC, where she had worked as a Bay Area-based venture partner. Errett is a big name in startup circles; she sits on the board for companies like SAY Media and General Assembly, and previously worked as the chief executive officer for Olivia.com, a lifestyle and travel brand for lesbians.

In a statement, Errett said she’s excited by the opportunity to bring new technology to a “market with high existing consumer demand that hasn’t changed in decades.”

Investors are making a bet on the Madison Color founding team, which also includes Home Value Protection cofounder Eric Hutchinson, Zynga cofounder Andrew Trader, and former Threadsy CRO Sabrina Riddle. As part of the terms of the funding, True Ventures’ Jon Callaghan will join the company’s board.

Top image via Shutterstock

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Julep is a fast-growing cosmetics brand that sells nail polishes, bath and skin products, and makeup. It does all its business online. In addition to regular sales, Julep also offers a subscription service along the lines of Birchbox, where “Mavens” receive a box filled with a curated selection of Julep goodies.

In the past year and a half, Julep has launched 52 new beauty products and 186 nail colors. The startup attributes this remarkably fast rate of production to a lean e-commerce business model, which does not involve physical stores and relies on social media channels for marketing. Julep factors fan feedback into its product decisions and envisions beauty as a “two-way conversation” between the brand and the women engaging with it. The low overhead costs mean more resources can be devoted to iterating quickly and rolling out new products every month.

Julep is part of a larger trend of vertically-integrated e-commerce companies like Nasty Gal, Warby Parker, Indochino, Beachmint, Shoedazzle, and Everlane (to name a few) that cut out the supply chain and get their products directly to consumers at significantly lower prices.

Julep was founded by former Starbucks executive Jane Park. Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andressen Horowitz, said in a statement that Park and her team “have leveraged the Internet to build Julep into a compelling brand at a pace previously unheard of in beauty.”

In 2012, Julep launched nationwide on QVC and Sephora. This second round of financing will fuel development into new categories of cosmetics. Maveron Venture Partners, which led Julep’s first round, also contributed to this financing.

“As direct TV proved to be a launching pad for enduring beauty brands decades ago, we believe new social media channels will be the catalyst for launching the next great multi-channel beauty companies,” said Maveron board member Jason Stoffer in a statement. “Julep is a pioneer in using Facebook, Pinterest, and the social web to deeply engage its community of beauty lovers around color and fashion-forward beauty products.”

Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter, Precedent Investments, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, Western Technology Investments, and Version One Ventures also participated in this funding round. Julep is based in Seattle, Wash.

Photo Credit: Screenshot

Glossybox made a powerful entrée this morning, announcing that is has shipped its two millionth box and has received $72.4 million (55 million euros) in overall financing.

This European version of Birchbox delivers monthly packages filled with beauty products to its community of subscribers. Upon signing up, women choose their subscription plan and create a beauty profile. They will then receive a curated box of 5 travel-sized products, based on their preferences. A beauty magazine is included in the package along with cosmetics like hand cream, nail polish, perfumes, and so on.

Glossybox appeals to consumers that appreciate the element or surprise and ability to sample beauty products before buying, as well as to brands that want to put their products in the hands of an engaged audience. It was founded in Germany in 2011 and now has a presence in 16 countries.

Along with the fresh, sparkling funding news, Glossybox also announced shipping its 2 millionth box. The service has more than 200,000 customers around the world, and all these demonstrations of traction attracted the attention in investors looking to get in on the action.

German accelerator Rocket Internet, Holtzbrink Ventures, and Investment AB Kinnevik participated in this round, which is a first for Beauty Trend Holding.

Earlier this year, Birchbox acquired its French clone Joliebox in an attempt to penetrate the European market. However, with a presence in Asia and Israel, as well as wider distribution across Europe, Glossybox’s reach is already greater than its American competitor  and this large round of investment will only accelerate its growth. Europe has become a hot space for e-commerce startups this year, such as Zalando, another Rocket Internet company.

For Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, yoga is big business.

Bessemer Venture Partners,  Institutional Venture Partners and Catalyst Ventures today invested $35 million into MindBody, a Salesforce-like technology for businesses like yoga studios and hair salons.

With this sixth-round of capital, the San Luis Obispo-based startup is plotting its international expansion — it already has satellite offices in New York and the UK, with a third opening soon in Australia.

MindBody provides a suite of marketing tools, scheduling, analytics, networking and point of sale services for health, beauty and wellness providers. It has been around since 2001, and has witnessed the explosion of competition, primarily online scheduling systems like Schedulicity, SalonBooker, Appointment Plus, and Groupon Scheduler.

To strike ahead of the competition, the company has diversified its software stack. Now, it faces heat from Salesforce, SugarCRM and other major customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which also target small businesses.

MindBody claims it is the only company that can offer the full gamut of software and specifically caters to the health and wellness space– for this reason, it is experiencing impressive growth with 900 businesses signing up per month.

“Our intent is to enable and link the 2 million beauty and wellness businesses operating worldwide with the hundreds of millions of consumers who can use their services to improve their own lives,” Rick Stollmeyer, the company’s CEO (pictured above), told VentureBeat.

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) participated in all the previous rounds; with this funding, the company has a total of $58 million in the bank.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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New York fashion and beauty media company StyleCaster has acquired Daily Makeover, another New York-based digital property focused on combining beauty and technology.

As we’ve written previously, StyleCaster manages several web destinations, including StyleCaster News, Beauty High, and recently launched luxury site The Vivant. Now StyleCaster will add Daily Makeoever to its stable of sites and licence out its technology to generate more revenue. Daily Makeover’s tech allows people to try out cosmetic makeovers virtually, and it currently powers more than 30 million makeovers per month.

StyleCaster CEO Ari Goldberg said his company’s march to success hasn’t been easy and that he will keep fighting to make his business bigger. He noted that he sees a lot of similiarities in Daily Makeover, which has fought to keep expanding and licencing its makeover technology.

“Both StyleCaster and Daily Makeover are still here,” Goldberg told us via email. “Through ups and downs, booms, and recessions, these two businesses never gave up. Both of these businesses are fighters, and that’s why we will win. When you bring together two teams that have a track record with that kind of dedication, desire, and willpower — amazing things can happen.”

StyleCaster expects the addition of Daily Makeover to its sites will triple its traffic and double its revenue by the end of 2012. The StyleCaster team will expand from 25 to 40 employees, and it also plans to hire new executives and salespeople.

While the exact terms of the StyleCaster-Daily Makeover deal weren’t revealed, StyleCaster did raise $2 million in new funding led by Bo Peabody, partner at Greycroft Partners. Goldberg says the round is still open. Previously, StyleCaster raised $5.75 million in funding.

Beautiful twins photo via Shutterstock

Beauty subscription service Birchbox has acquired its Parisian equivalent, JolieBox. The deal extends the perfume-scented reach of Birchbox’s platform in Europe and expands its repertoire of partnerships.

JolieBox is based in France and with distribution in the U.K, and Spain as well. The company offers a basically identical product and business model to Birchbox, which founder Katia Beauchamp said should make for a harmonious combination. Like rose and jasmine.

Birchbox has met with tremendous success for its innovative approach to e-commerce. Cosmetics lovers sign up for a monthly subscription service that costs $10 a month. Once invited into the community, members receive a customized box each month filled with beauty samples from over 200 top brands, like Lancome, Kiehl’s, and Dior. If customers fall in love with a product, ladies (and now men too) can purchase the full-size through the Birchbox store.

This system solves one of the challenges with bringing the cosmetics industry online. Consumers like to sample, apply, sniff, and see a product to decide if it is right for them. Quality cosmetics are costly, and it’s important to try products out before purchasing. Furthermore, an overwhelming array of beauty goodies are out there, as anyone who has ever stepped into Sephora can attest to, and the discovery and sampling experience is half the fun.

Beauchamp and her partner Haylay met at Harvard Business School and brought together their mutual love of cosmetics and business savvy to create a model that is not only convenient but delightful for the user (I speak from experience). Companies love Birchbox because it puts their product literally on the bodies of active consumers and promotes sales.

Their example has inspired a parade of similar companies. You can find “Birchboxes” for everything now, from children’s clothing to adult toys.

The platform also publishes editorial content to complement the products and in April launched Birchbox for Men. It raised $10.5 million in investment last year, led by Accel Partners. Birchbox is based in New York.

Read the press release.

Fashion and beauty-focused media company StyleCaster has launched a new web destination called The Vivant, a site dedicated to young people obsessed with travel, luxury, and “the good life.”

The Vivant becomes the third property in the StyleCaster family after StyleCaster News and Beauty High. StyleCaster News focuses on fashion while Beauty High covers makeup and hair. The Vivant tells all those fashionable StyleCaster readers places to go, tips to get in to the best parties, and ways to live big even if you’re not a millionaire.

“Departures is great if you’re 50,” StyleCaster CEO and cofounder Ari Goldberg told me. “Condé Nast Traveler is great if you have a third house in Italy. What about people who younger and still want to enjoy luxury?”

Goldberg said the target demographic of The Vivant is young urban professionals “between the ages of 24 and 34,” with some folks outside that range. “We want to fulfill the needs of the StyleCaster girl,” Goldberg said.

The Vivant’s site, which went live today, features content including an article about New York Fashion Week party crashing tips, a list of luxury hybrid cars, and a profile of Graydon Carter’s new Beatrice Inn restaurant in New York’s West Village. Ideally, the site will be updated every day with more content like this.

New York City-based StyleCaster was founded in 2009 and redesigned its site recently with heavy influence from Pinterest and Tumblr. The company has raised a total of $5.5 million in funding to date. Its last funding round in November 2011 came from folks including Zynga chief mobile officer David Ko and former MySpace CEO and Zynga exec Owen Van Natta.

Top photo: The Vivant
Homepage photo: Holly Owens/Instagram

Cue big data.

Source: Sephora

ColorIQ from Sephora

Sephora has teamed up with color experts at Pantone to help women (and, hey, maybe some adventurous guys) find the right shade of makeup for just their skin, on the first try.

It’s called ColorIQ, and it uses digital imagining technology to record 27 separate color-corrected images in less than two seconds while using eight different visible light settings and one ultraviolet light setting.

In other words, it’s geek enough for any dude.

According to Sephora, your skin tone is a unique combination of ethnicity, hemoglobin, sun exposure, freckles, skin conditions, and melanin levels.

“Our partner Pantone has spent decades working on the science of color,” Sephora senior vice president Julie Bornstein told me today. ”We’ve mapped 110 shades of skin tone in the U.S.”

Once the ColorIQ device has measured your specific skin tone signature, big data comes into play. Taking the digital images from your face and breaking them down into 100-pixel blocks, Sephora creates a color composite for your skin, and your Pantone SkinTone number.

Then, all the data from women that Sephora has tested worldwide helps determine what foundation will work for you from over 1,000 different combinations, Bornstein says. A representative will simply enter the SkinTone number into Sephora’s iPad app for personalized suggestions.

As Bornstein told VentureBeat: ”This gives us the ability to truly recommend a product based on a woman’s skin for the first time.”

Source: Sephora

The new me, thanks to Sephora. Or not.

Women in one of Sephora’s New York or San Francisco stores will be able to come in and get their skin scanned in the next few weeks. Roll-out to the full 300+ stores in the U.S. will happen at some later time.

“The concept of virtual try-it-on in both the clothing and makeup industries is growing,” Bornstein says. “But this is the first thing that I’ve seen that has a purity to it that’s going to make it very effective.”

Customized fashion using technology and big data to help individual women find the best beauty solutions? Very cool.

But I think I’ll have to pass, personally.

Image credit: Subbotina Anna/ShutterStock

Sephora staffers will also highlight their favorite products on Pinterest pinboards. Following a meteoric rise, Pinterest is now the third most visited social network in the U.S. after Facebook and twitter.

Given that Pinterest’s users are overwhelmingly female and Pinterest has been shown to drive considerably more revenue per click than either Twitter or Facebook, the fact that Sephora has pinned its hopes on Pinterest is perhaps unsurprising.

Sephora’s sleek stores have long functioned as the cathedrals of the beauty product world. The French retailer operates more than 300 stores in the U.S. and Canada (and many more globally) and is something of a trailblazer in integrating technology into its retail experience. Last month VentureBeat reported how the retailer, having noticed the high overlap between its customers and Apple users (70 percent of visits to Sephora’s website are from iPhones) introduced iPads running a custom, in-store Sephora app into 20 stores across the U.S.

The iPad application leverages the iPad’s camera functionality to create a “virtual mirror” that lets users see themselves practicing makeup application as a video of the relevant technique are played below. Shoppers can review their purchase history (to avoid shopping disasters such as buying two of the same lipstick) and product information like ingredient lists. Sephora also invested in iPod touches which can be used for mobile checkout in every store.

Sephora’s website is the world’s biggest beauty store. Mobile shopping grew 300 percent on Sephora in 2011 and the company expects another 100 percent increase this year. iPad traffic was up 400 percent in Q1 2012 compared to Q1 2011.

Fashion and style media company StyleCaster is just a few days away from launching a redesigned site that’s heavily influenced by  social media darling Pinterest and blogging service Tumblr.

StyleCaster’s main website, Stylecaster.com, and its social channels offer news and features related to style, fashion and celebrities, and the company focuses intently on fostering conversations around those topics. Stylecaster.com and sister site Beautyhigh.com attract more than 2.5 million uniques visitors per month, and the company sells ads through other blogs as well. The company also offers proprietary ad platform called Style as a Service that helps offer ad placement advice.

“When I wake up in the morning, I go to ESPN; that’s my homepage for sports,” StyleCaster CEO and co-founder Ari Goldberg told VentureBeat. “There really isn’t anything like that for style. I want StyleCaster to be the homepage for style.”

Now the site will take its next logical step to offer access to curated fashion news stories and products. It’s doing that with a homepage that mimics the design of Pinterest. There will also be a brand-new news page that delivers fresh editorial content daily on beauty, fashion, and pop culture.

Every piece of content on the new StyleCaster site will feature an easy-to-click “Love” button, a feature that already appears on StyleCaster but now will be much more prominent. The Love button will also be available to other publishers and e-commerce services for installing on their own sites in the very near future.

“This is the product we’ve envisioned for the three and a half years we’ve been working on the site,” Goldberg said.

New York-based StyleCaster was founded in 2009 and has raised a total of $5.5 million in funding to date. Its last funding round in November came from the likes of Zynga chief mobile officer David Ko and former MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.

Finally, let’s compare the looks of the current homepage to the upcoming news page, which share the most similarities. Take a glance below at the current homepage, which does its best to blend news, features, and shopping together:

And now take a look at the new StyleCaster news page, which is essentially a well-designed news blog inspired by the look and features of Tumblr:

What do you think of the upcoming redesign?

The new ad platform, dubbed Style as a Service, is a joint venture between StyleCaster and ad space monitoring and brokering service MediaMath and seeks to help fashion, beauty and consumer brands with ad advice and placement. MediaMath gives access to the inventory of publishers like Rodale and the New York Times, while StyleCaster uses its knowledge of branding to act as an advisor for where to place the ads.

“With Style as a Service, brands no longer have to sacrifice scale for highly-integrated, strategic media buys,” David Goldberg, president and co-founder of StyleCaster, told VentureBeat via e-mail. “We can give them both, using MediaMath as the pipeline to inventory across any publishing platform and property layered with proprietary user data for rich targeting.”

StyleCaster has done alpha testing on Style as a Service throughout 2011 with various fashion and beauty brands. One campaign StyleCaster likes to point to that shows off its expertise is the Diet Coke “Stay Extraordinary” campaign. The company also has worked with H&M on branded editorial content for the 2011 holiday season.

At present, StyleCaster.com and its sister site, BeautyHigh.com, attract more than 2 million unique visitors per month. Style as a Service will use user data from the StyleCaster network to find out which publishing properties will be most effective for the brand’s target audience.

“What makes SaaS unique is that we utilize our proprietary data to determine what inventory is most valuable to our brand partners and project which marketing assets spark more consumer engagement, all within an environment that is 100% brand safe,” Goldberg said.

The Style as a Service platform will compete with Condé Nast’s newly launched private ad exchange, which is powered by Google’s Admeld. Goldberg said StyleCaster’s solution is superior because it offers user data to better inform where ads should be placed.

New York-based StyleCaster was founded in 2009 and has raised a total of $5.5 million in funding. Its latest funding round came from the likes of Zynga chief mobile officer David Ko and former MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.