CozyCot

CozyCot Pte. Ltd.

Type	Privately held company
Founded	2001 (website), 2002 (company)
Headquarters	1 Scotts Road #26-05/07 Shaw Centre, Singapore
Area served	East Asia and Southeast Asia (mainly Singapore)
Key people	Nicole Yee
Products	CozyCot (website, newspaper, mook), various live events
Revenue	$1.16 million (2009)
Number of employees	38
Website	http://www.cozycot.com/

CozyCot is a social networking website for women from East Asia and Southeast Asia (especially Singapore). It was founded by Nicole Yee in 2001, as a hobby website dedicated to Asian women. Subsequently, the concept of sharing product and service information and opinions gathered a steady community, turning it into a venture business. CozyCot users interact in the forum and by reviewing beauty products (the review system produced reviews for over 35,000 products), also in the live events organized by the staff. The importance of its review database is increased by an iPhone scanner software developed by CozyCot, which allows users to pull up product reviews from the website by capturing the barcodes with cameras in their iPhones. In April 2010, CozyCot launched the newspaper and, in June 2011, the mook with the same name.

CozyCot started in November 2001 as an Internet portal based in Singapore, where members could post reviews and share shopping and fashion tips and opinions. As the online community grew, the founder Nicole Yee began organizing live events for members, in order to get together. Several fragrance brands took notice of the growing community and offered to support her in terms of providing event venues. There followed other commercial projects (workshops, product launches, online shopping etc.), which (together with a presence of the website in the top 100,000 Alexa ranking) mooted the decision to turn it into a venture business. In 2002, Nicole Yee founded CozyCot Pte. Ltd., as the managing company of the portal, in 2007 she hired the first employee, then, in 2008, she invested $100,000 in the website. Its revenue exceeded US$1 million in 2009, with a 115% growth.

The community kept expanding, as readership of Singapore women’s magazines continued turning toward online content, developing the portal into Singapore's largest online women community for beauty, fashion and lifestyle, with over 500,000 unique visitors each month. It expanded also geographically, in the rest of East Asia and among Asian women from United States, Australia and New Zealand, CozyCot becoming one of the local websites "putting Singapore on the global map". Since 2006, forums.cozycot.com ranks first every year in the Hitwise Singapore 'Lifestyle - Womens Sites' industry (and from January - June, 2010 also in `Lifestyle - Beauty' industry) based on monthly average market share, at Hitwise Singapore Hitwise Top Ten Awards.