Make up and hair products online retailer Adore Beauty and supermarket giant Woolworths have ended their association, with Adore reacquiring Woolies’ 25 per cent stakeholding to strike out on its own again.

Adore Beauty founder and chief executive Kate Morris said while the two-year tie-up had helped her business, Adore was now better off pursuing its next phase of growth as an independent company.

Morris, who started the company from her garage at the age of 21 in 1999, said Woolworths’ and Adore’s priorities were no longer in sync.

“The partnership has been successful and we were able to use Woolworths’ investment to grow the business by about 125 per cent over the past two years,” she said.

“We were able to invest in people, stock and marketing but in terms of it being a long term relationship, you need to have good strategic alignment and while that was there at the start, it probably wasn’t so much a couple years down the track.

“The best position for the business going forward is to be independent again.”

Adore has expanded its range to more than 12,000 beauty products in the past six months, has a customer base of 50,000 and is pushing 60 per cent growth year on year, Morris said.

She said she is confident the company has the means to continue to grow.

The company has put ambitions of expanding into China on hold and recently left Chinese e-commerce site Tmall after opening a store on the platform about 10 months ago.

Morris said the company had found China was not a market to “dip your toes in” to see if it will work but instead required a bigger commitment than the company was prepared to give at the moment.

However, it has recently partnered with global retail solutions provider Borderfree Retail, a move that will give Adore access to shoppers in more than 200 countries.

Morris said that in Australia people had originally shopped online because it was cheaper but the market has evolved and is now a place for greater choice.

“Online, if you do it right, provides a better experience and people can shop for a broader range of products, and compare products across a range of different brands and categories,” she said.

Read more about Kate Morris and Adore Beauty’s reasons to buy out of Woolies in this week’s magazine.

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