Upon opening the Supergreat app, I (Julia here) am asked to choose my age, skin tone, skin type, hair color, and hair texture. The next screen asks about my “beauty interests.” Do I want straighter hair? Smaller pores? Once my selections are made, a curated feed suggests videos of creators using products that might be a good fit for me. There’s even a schedule of live programming—a 60s makeup tutorial at noon, a Sephora haul at 7pm—and a carousel of popular brands to follow.

The beauty of it all is how Supergreat thinks it can cut through the noise in livestream shopping.

The startup is betting on a beauty-centric vision to set it apart from other companies (aka Instagram and TikTok) vying for eyeballs and dollars.

• The US livestream shopping market is expected to be worth $25 billion by 2023, according to Coresight Research.

“The community and experience component of livestream is a huge draw,” Supergreat’s head of community and marketing, Enid Hwang, told Retail Brew. “To feel like you have a connection with a brand...getting noticed and feeling like you can have input into a brand or creator’s process right in that moment.”

Beauty standards

Tyler Faux and Dan Blackman, previously of Tumblr and Tictail, started Supergreat in 2018 as a short-form video app for creator-driven beauty-product reviews. The company only expanded into livestream last year, but it already fancies itself as the QVC for Gen Z.

• Over the summer, Supergreat raised $10 million in a Series A.

According to Supergreat, its 200,000 registered users have created at least 250,000 videos featuring 40,000 products. Not only that, 25% of each week is covered by someone streaming on the platform.

Companies like Sephora and Covergirl also use Supergreat to partner with creators, host sales events, and upload product inventory. And not to insignificant returns.

Brand-hosted sales events rack up roughly 600–700 concurrent viewers, according to the beauty app, and the highest-trafficking stream counted 1,000+ s. Supergreat said its highest-grossing sales event generated $60 per minute on air. Plus, the platform sees an average of 2,500+ comments per 30 minutes of a livestream.

• Supergreat gets a percentage of sales done on the app (though it didn’t share specifics on what those numbers are).

Focus pocus: Hwang argued this kind of engagement is “hard to replicate on other platforms because people are joining for different reasons.” On Supergreat, it’s all beauty, all the time.

That gives an app like Supergreat, with its singular focus, a unique opportunity in the livestream shopping space, Coresight founder and CEO Deborah Weinswig told us recently. Unlike a multi-category live-shopping marketplace or even TikTok, Supergreat’s users aren’t passive. They log on with a purpose: to consume beauty content.

But wait, there’s more. Click here to read about how Supergreat is gamifying its livestream-shopping experience to set itself apart.—JG

The National Labor Relations Board said run it back.

After an effort to unionize a Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse failed earlier this year, Amazon workers are getting a redo. The NLRB authorized a new vote after finding that Amazon violated labor law when it possibly interfered with the March election.

Remind me: Morning Brew summed up most of the deets here, but for a quick recap: The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU)—which is behind the Bessemer organizing drive—alleged that Amazon installed a USPS mailbox at the main company entrance that potentially gave the impression that the retail giant had a role in tallying ballots.

RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum welcomed the outcome, noting in a statement that the “decision confirms what we were saying all along—that Amazon’s intimidation and interference prevented workers from having a fair say in whether they wanted a union in their workplace—and as the Regional Director has indicated, that is both unacceptable and illegal. Amazon workers deserve to have a voice at work, which can only come from a union.”

• An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC and other outlets that the company disagrees with the decision, stating in part that, “it’s disappointing that the NLRB has now decided that those votes shouldn’t count.” (Amazon did not return Retail Brew’s request for comment.)

Now what? The date for the new election is TBD. But it’ll be “even higher profile the second time around,” Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, told Retail Brew.

While it’s tough to predict how things will go, he said that “a yes vote at Bessemer would be a massive victory for the US labor movement...and would undoubtedly spur other organizing campaigns at Amazon and across the economy. But the truth is that workers have shown incredible resolve over the last handful of months and shown that they’re not going to be deterred.”

“I don’t think a loss in the second election would slow things down very much at all,” Sachs continued.—KM

iMile, a Dubai–based delivery company, has reportedly landed a surprising new investor: ByteDance.

TikTok’s parent put $10 million into the logistics startup as part of its Series A, sources told Bloomberg.

• The round—which totaled $40 million and doesn’t disclose any investors—valued iMile at $350 million; it’s also one of largest for a woman-led company in the region.

No time to waste: iMile, which was founded in 2017 by CEO Rita Huang (formerly of Alibaba and Huawei) to tackle the Middle East’s “no address problem,” connects Chinese vendors to emerging markets via its last-mile delivery platform.

• The company plans to use the capital to hire more engineers in China, plus boost its tech.

It’s also eyeing expansion.

“The investment will also help us accelerate our growth in many more markets to come...we have a real vision to connect Chinese sellers to the world through exceptional service,” Huang said in a statement, adding that iMile was looking to get into Africa and Latin America.

Zoom out: What might ByteDance get out of its reported investment? It comes back to social commerce. “E-commerce vendors are...increasingly using social media to target shoppers, which may explain the TikTok owner’s investment in a shipping company,” Bloomberg noted.—JS

Today’s top retail reads.

Keep it casual: The pandemic has relaxed plenty of dress codes (...we type while wearing sweatpants). Capitol Hill is no exception. “It is not the same place it once was, where everyone feels like they have to be buttoned-up all the time,” one senior staffer said. (The Atlantic)

Fast and faster: Reef Global is one of the better-funded startups in the ghost-kitchen space, with $1.5+ billion in backing. It’s also emblematic of the growing industry’s growing problems. (The Wall Street Journal)

The everything story: Who is Andy Jassy? And how did a “nice guy” with an ultra-competitive streak (he even hosts “wing-eating contests” he calls Tatonka) who still drives a 1998 Jeep Cherokee Sport end up the CEO of Amazon? (Vanity Fair)

On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Nick Jaber is all about cyber security—even training to become a professional bounty hacker hunter. He’s been in the fraud-prevention space for five years (he counts working with “hundreds” of online businesses) and has recently taken his skills to Sift, a platform that works with companies like Airbnb and DoorDash, as its global alliance manager of e-commerce.

How would you describe your job? My role is to educate partners and e-commerce retailers on the value of having a solution today to protect their inventory during the holidays and all year round.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: My role at Sift is to develop and scale our partnership division, where my main focus is working with other technology partners within the e-commerce industry.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on: Working with Shopify as a partner to help their merchants prevent fraudulent transactions—usually made with stolen payment info.

One trend that you’ve got your eye on: The rise of account takeover fraud is one of the fastest-growing trends in retail and impacts retailers and customers significantly.

Hands down, the best fast-food restaurant chain is...Taco Bell, no explanation needed.

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• Why malls and retailers still believe in Santa
• Curbside pickup is a must-have for customers and companies
• Patagonia makes wine now (and beer and chili and hot sauce and more)