Just thinking aloud here, really…
Having got over my initial disappointment at yet another seemingly spurious price hike, Liberty are a small and sometimes quite inept company in the scheme of things - Beauty Drop membership has clearly got too big to handle and we’re not splurging as much as they needed us to to keep it going.
They are clearly better off pleasing just the very wealthy customers, many of whom won’t be in the UK, so we’re probably talking about spends bigger than I can even imagine in some cases. I don’t think I’m an unusual member of this, having gone from not shopping at Liberty at all to spending about £300 plus BD payments in what, two years? That’s nothing, even at scale.
Beauty Drop’s days are clearly numbered even if they get it down to a much more manageable operation but unspent credits should surely be safe, its just a gift voucher, which they’ll still continue to sell and honour unless the store goes under or perhaps is being sold. I think the former is unlikely and the latter, well, maybe…
Yea, they could have handled it a lot better but (unpopular opinion coming up) offering specially designed and packaged free beauty boxes - and they were not just full of sachet samples you could have got by walking into any store - with free shipping and extra free shipping in return for simply buying a £20 voucher that you also got to keep 100% of each month - was always going to be unsustainable once it caught on and the free/cheap products stopped pouring in from the brands.
Come to think of it, as a form of advertising supplying all the various beauty boxes and advent calendars surely cannot be cost effective for brands or store, especially now the novelty has worn off the concept for most customers.