True Beauty Lashes started as a side hustle, but then founder Lisa Stroud got the brand “in trouble” a year and a half after its launch, she told Digital Commerce 360.
What started as an ecommerce-led business expanded into department stores “after only 18 months in market,” she explained. Wholesale has represented a “significant” part of the brand’s growth since early on, Stroud said, not quantifying the growth. And wholesale also has played what she considered a “meaningful role” in expanding visibility and validating the brand. Now, True Beauty Lashes is making an effort to make ecommerce its primary channel again for direct customer engagement and insight.
Stroud said when she first started True Beauty Lashes, she didn’t realize it had a lack of first-party data. That prevented the brand from truly understanding who its customer base was, she said.
“We really lost that visibility going into department stores super early on,” Stroud stated. “And so that’s actually been a pain point for us in the past few years of being able to grow and scale and revisit back into direct-to-consumer marketing because we don’t have as much information about who our customer is from having the retailer in between us.”
True Beauty Lashes has launched LashLovr, a virtual try-on tool, with Perfect Corp. The tool is a way to draw ecommerce traffic and sales. | Image credit: InspireTrueBeauty.com screenshot
True Beauty Lashes develops LashLovr
One way True Beauty Lashes has learned more about its customer base is by launching a virtual try-on tool it calls LashLovr.
True Beauty Lashes worked with artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) technology provider Perfect Corp. on the tool, announcing the partnership on LashLovr in late February. Prior to that, the companies tested the tool in a private beta, Stroud said.
LashLovr helps True Beauty Lashes recommend the retailer’s false eyelash products, matching based on attributes including eye shape and type, facial proportions and style preferences.
She said customers have shown an interest in personalization when shopping, calling it a “major reason” True Beauty Lashes invested in building LashLovr.
“We’ve continued to see growing demand for more personalized and intuitive shopping experiences,” Stroud told Digital Commerce 360. “Customers increasingly want help narrowing choices and understanding why a product is right for them, rather than simply being presented with more options. In beauty especially, where fit and style can be highly individual, education and confidence-building have become increasingly important.”
Stroud said that although True Beauty Lashes is “not quite ready” to talk about what its benchmarks are, it’s proud of its conversion through LashLovr. What she shared, though, is that users are “definitely staying in the experience longer.”
She said customers are buying and the retailer is happy with that. But even if they don’t, she said, it’s an educational experience.
“It’s great for us when we see that the engagement time that’s on our results page is really high,” Stroud said. “We know that people are clicking around to learn more about their eye shape. They’re learning more about why we would recommend certain lashes. They’re trying on the lashes through the virtual try-on experience.”
How True Beauty Lashes developed its virtual try-on tool
At first, Stroud said, LashLovr didn’t have the virtual try-on part of the technology.
Instead, True Beauty Lashes planned on a try-before-you-buy experience. The most-requested feature the retailer got from product testers was to see what the lashes looked like on them before making a purchase, Stroud said.
The first step to implement virtual try-on was to test the facial analysis. True Beauty Lashes wanted to test how accurate it was, she said. Another round of testing was for the most proprietary intellectual property the retailer has, Stroud said: the recommendation logic itself.
She said it developed that logic through working with makeup artists and focus groups, conducting “tons of research.” Now, she considers the logic “a very sophisticated algorithm.”
And while the recommendation logic is True Beauty Lashes’ IP, it uses application programming interfaces (APIs) from Perfect Corp. to operate the LashLovr tool.
“Because LashLovr is still in an early rollout phase, we’ve been intentional about focusing first on product readiness, technical refinement, and long-term scalability rather than rushing to scale traffic,” Stroud said. “We view it as a foundational investment in improving product discovery and customer confidence.”
Benefits of on-site experiences in the age of LLMs
Stroud said LashLovr has seen a boost in web traffic from large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude.
“We’re trying to get as much structured data into our website as possible so that as LashLovr has more conversation about it, we have more of the authority with the LLMs,” she said.
True Beauty Lashes uses Shopify as its ecommerce platform. In March, Shopify announced an integration for its merchants to connect their product catalogs directly to ChatGPT, enabling sales through the platform. Stroud said True Beauty Lashes has mostly seen a boost in traffic, not sales.
Separately, True Beauty Lashes found in an analysis that it was in the top 10 ranking for false eyelash brands when it comes to visibility and authority in the space from an LLM perspective. She said the retailer is happy with that placement because it’s alongside “some really established lash brands that have been around for 30 or 40 years.”
“So we’re good with that and just continuing to do everything that we can as everyone’s learning how to play this game, to have the conversations, all of that,” she said. “Next that’s on our radar is to be picked up by them and to have even more signals.”
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