It’s Tuesday, and today we are looking at B4A, a Brazilian beauty company that raised $2.5 million, led by 4 Equity Media Ventures.
The Product
B4A is a digital ecosystem in the beauty space that connects consumers, brands, and influencers. Let’s first look at its distinct products and then discuss the ecosystem piece.
glam and Men's Market — e-commerce stores
Starting with glam — an e-commerce store for women’s products with a subscription offering and personalized recommendations.
The subscription part is what’s interesting here. I actually don’t think I’ve seen anything similar. It’s some combination of Amazon Prime and a Costco Membership.
You purchase a club membership, and aside from perks like a monthly kit and community access, you also get different pricing. Members get a 10-60% discount on every product, and, according to glam, these are the best prices in Brazil.
Another fascinating part of glam is glampoints. This is an internal currency that customers can exchange for products. Depending on the action, you get different amounts of glampoints: a friend signs up using your discount code — get 250 points; you complete a survey — get 5 points. Products cost between 400 and 1000 glampoints.
Men's Market is another e-commerce store, but focused on men’s products. The idea is pretty much the same: the store also offers a subscription, also with discounted pricing. Even the website design is the same. However, men get just one subscription option, unlike women, who have four.
The more people subscribe to both glam and Men's Market, the more data B4A collects, which improves both product recommendations and the influencer marketing piece — which we’ll get to.
Glam Beauty, Ella, Men’s and Malmo — direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands
B4A also sells its own products. Glam Beauty is the main product line for women, covering pretty much every category: makeup, perfume, skincare, etc. Although it has its own website, you can’t buy anything there — you have to go through glam.
Ella is essentially a one-product brand offering a 50 FPS sunscreen, which I couldn’t find on glam — and you can’t buy it on Ella’s website either.
As with glam and Men's Market, Men’s is similar to Glam Beauty but for men. Both brands offer affordable, cruelty-free products with natural ingredients for all skin types. Finally, there is Malmo — a men’s accessories brand.
B4A Connect — marketing platform for brands
B4A’s Connect product is built on four services:
Qualified Experimentation: Thanks to its subscription offering, B4A has much more data on customers since the vast majority are repeat buyers. Additionally, B4A regularly surveys customers, gathering even more data points. Brands can then send test products to well-defined audiences for whom a new lip gloss or hand cream would be a perfect match.
360º Marketing: B4A acts basically like a marketing agency. But while a regular agency works across the web, B4A utilizes only assets it controls: bfluence to launch campaigns with influencers, owned social channels for social campaigns, and its websites for creative content and promotions.
Market Intelligence: By analyzing purchase activity and collecting customer surveys, B4A has compiled over 100 million data points on its audience. So if you’re a brand selling lip gloss, you can commission a study from B4A to understand how customers choose brands, emerging trends, and consumer behavior in your category.
Social Commerce: This is the culmination of all the above. The offering combines customer knowledge, influencer partnerships, and e-commerce to provide personalized shopping experiences for customers and targeted audiences for brands.
bfluence — an influencer program
According to B4A, bfluence is:
…the largest program for beauty, fashion & lifestyle influencers and content creators in Latin America.
The platform connects over 10,000 content creators with 500 brands. It is positioned as both a way to make money by participating in campaigns and as a networking opportunity with other influencers. As far as I can tell, B4A isn’t targeting existing influencers but is instead cultivating its own.
They do that by, first, making everything easy (to register, get the product, and receive payment) and by offering educational opportunities: free video classes and face-to-face or online workshops.
Thus, a customer can start as a regular buyer, earn glampoints, join bfluence, and eventually become a brand ambassador.
The Business Model
B4A isn’t just an e-commerce platform, an influencer network, or a marketing agency — it’s all three, seamlessly connected through its data engine. Here’s how each part fuels the next through what B4A calls Data Connect.
B4A collects more types of data on customers, which, through its machine learning algorithms, allows it to better match products to customers. Customers get a delightful experience; brands get a higher sell-through rate.
B4A knows who its customers are and understands who can actually influence their purchase behavior. Thus, it can better match influencers to brands. Influencers make more money; brands increase conversion.
Unlike most online stores, B4A doesn’t just passively use data to improve targeting. It actively engages brands in conducting additional research. Brands better understand their customers, not just for targeting purposes but also for developing better products and identifying unmet needs.
B4A combines glampoints for referrals and an influencer program to transform customers into influencers. Customers get a better deal and can make supplemental income, while B4A enhances its influencer pool for brands.
With all these interconnections, revenue opportunities are plentiful. The three main revenue streams:
Commerce: B4A makes money from traditional e-commerce sales and subscriptions. Since Amazon and Costco inspired the subscription model, it’s likely the main profit driver.
Influencers: Influencers make money through brand campaigns and commissions. B4A doesn’t take a direct cut but could explore monetization via education or influencer-led brands.
Brands: Though not explicitly stated, B4A likely charges per service for research and marketing. Owning all the platforms means they could introduce results-based monetization models.
The Local Angle
Brazil is a great example of how cultural tendencies and a mass market intertwine:
Surprisingly Large Market: Market estimates diverge massively, with numbers ranging from $23 billion to $33 billion, but all sources point to Brazil being the fourth-largest market for beauty products. Brazilian women spend $303 per year on make-up, compared to $290 in Mexico and $236 in Argentina, and spending is steadily growing. Both are surprising, considering that: a) Brazil is only the tenth-largest economy in the world; b) both Mexico and Argentina have higher per capita incomes.
Brazilians and the Beauty Market: But maybe it’s not that surprising if you look at the following. One survey found that 62.7% of Brazilians consider themselves vain, and 65.7% look at beauty as a necessity. When it comes to specific products, 78% consume products with fragrances, while only 50% in Europe, 30% in the US, and 2% in China. Also, according to a study by ISAPS, Brazil has the second-highest share of plastic surgery procedures and the highest total number of surgical procedures, at 2.2 million — even more than in the US, which has a much larger and more affluent population.
Influencers and Their Influence: Brazil is obsessed with social media. Two basic stats illustrate this perfectly. First, Brazilians spend over 3.5 hours on social media daily, compared to under 2.5 hours worldwide. Second, 12% of Brazilians identify as creators — more than any other country. Combine that with Brazilians being rather emotional, and you get a social media ecosystem with an exceptionally high degree of influence over the population. A Dove survey found that 81% of Brazilians agree that social media adds to the pressure to look a certain way — second-highest in the survey. 72% think influencers drive people to cosmetic procedures — highest in the survey. 75% think there’s a lot of pressure to show your best on social media — again, highest in the survey. Brazil has both a lot of influencers, and those influencers exert real influence over people.
The Roadblocks
Some businesses I look at and think, “Yes, it could be a good business, but man it’s hard.” And sometimes, if the business has crossed the proverbial chasm, you feel like there’s not much that could stop it. Although I obviously don’t know the financials or all the ins and outs of the business, B4A feels more like the latter category. But still, some risks remain:
Product Conflict: It’s great to build an ecosystem where every product enhances the others. But sometimes those products are in conflict. I’ve looked at several categories — like body moisturizers and highlighters — and in both cases, Glam’s own products ranked higher than non-B4A products. This is the same conflict Amazon and other marketplaces have. B4A doesn’t do anything egregious; after all, it only has 2–3 products in the first row. But I do wonder if, when brands look at this, they pause and question how much effort they should put into enhancing their own channels.
Influencers Going D2C: I doubt there’s a future Kylie Cosmetics hiding among B4A’s influencers, but some of them may grow into self-sufficient brands, leave the platform, and work directly with other companies.
Influencers Going to Other Platforms: Both Meta and TikTok have their own creator marketplaces. Although they don’t offer such granular data on beauty customers, they do offer bigger reach. You could argue that B4A and social media have different purposes, but still, the better Meta’s and TikTok’s tools become, the more incentive there is for brands to focus on those platforms.
Changing Customer Preferences: What if social media pressures subside? What if people start spending less on beauty products or buy them less frequently? These are long-term risks for the industry as a whole. In Brazil’s case, it could even flip: if people are now obsessed with beauty due to social media, the narrative might one day shift to the opposite. Hard to see that happening soon, but it’s not impossible. And there’s always the opportunity to pivot from beauty to broader care products.
The Takeaway
B4A feels like a fundamentally sound business. I probably don’t do it justice by writing ~2,000 words about it; it deserves more. There’s so much going on, so many pieces interacting with each other. I want to emphasize the ecosystem aspect one more time.
It’s not just a store, not just an influencer network, not just a marketing agency — it’s all of them at once, compounding value at every step. The more customers join, the smarter the system gets; the more influencers participate, the more brands want in; the more brands invest, the more personalized the experience becomes for customers. That’s what makes B4A’s model more defensible than a traditional e-commerce platform or a standalone influencer marketplace.
And being based in Brazil really adds to its charm.
