Ecommerce Content, Product & Services Site Youtime.Com Launches In Australia

Introducing youtime.com – a considered curation of content, products and services all designed to help enhance your ‘you time’. Unlike anything else in the Australian market, youtime is set to lead the way in a new-age breed of digital destinations; where editorial leads eCommerce, retail becomes a service, shopping meets experience, and everything is grounded in community.

The platform is designed to showcase the best in global lifestyle brands connecting youtime’s audience with vetted beauty, wellbeing and lifestyle essentials via seamless editorial engagement. Expect sexual pleasure tools from Rosewell, skincare from Grown Alchemist and Medik8, wellness tools from Therabody, BALA and Maat World, the future of sunscreen from Standard Procedure, natural oral care from GEM and Keeko, supplements from WelleCo and The Beauty Chef, haircare from Oribe and Sacha Juan, and fragrances from exclusive Scandinavian fragrance house N.C.P.

Leading tastemakers, creatives and thought leaders will also collaborate to educate, guide and inspire the youtime community to spend time on the things that make them feel good, and connect with themselves, each other, and their surroundings. Organically woven into the editorial direction, youtime’s community can benefit from highly curated edits by trusted experts from a product offering across verticals of explore, nourish, feel, move, live and express. Contributors, known as ‘youtimers’, include beauty expert Gemma Watts, style leader Nadia Fairfax-Wayne, athlete Montana Farrah-Seaton, make up artist Rob Povey, cook Clementine Day, sex therapist Alekandra Trkulja, author Nina Karnikowksi, hairdresser Paloma Garcia, author and cook Charlotte Ree, and more.

To bring their vision to life, the youtime team selected leading Australian eCommerce web design and development agency, Convert Digital, to launch their new online experience using headless commerce on Shopify Plus. The fully custom, headless site is supported by a best-of-breed tech stack with a NextJS front-end coupled with Tailwind CSS hosted on Vercel, plus Gorgias (live chat), Prismic (CMS), Yotpo (reviews), Algolia (search and merchandising) and more.

Andrew Waite, managing director and founder at Convert Digital, said: “We were incredibly proud to work alongside the youtime team to launch this new-breed digital destination into the Australian market. The choice to go headless on Shopify Plus has unlocked total creative control, allowing a flexible, fully-adaptable site that offers a sleek online experience synonymous with the youtime brand vision. This has been a really exciting project for Convert Digital as we lead into the next phase of eCommerce innovation.”

“Youtime’s custom storefront showcases the flexibility, creativity and control that Shopify Plus delivers with speed and scale for headless commerce,” said Heather Beeken, Shopify Plus ANZ partner manager. “The result is total freedom to create an immersive digital brand experience that speaks to the youtime mission.”

Australian born with Swedish heritage, youtime is the brainchild of Steve Terry, an Australian businessman with 25 years building wellbeing legacies in Sweden, and one of the most esteemed and successful figures in the hair and beauty world. With the Swedish ways of life and values learned during his time in Stockholm, Terry is committed to building a space where a community can be forged through a shared purpose.

“Youtime is a manifestation of what the foundation of my entire career has always stood for. It feels like a natural next step and that everything I have done and learned up to now created youtime,” says Terry.

Steve Terry’s early career as an international artistic director at Toni & Guy saw him become one of the world’s most influential celebrity hairdressers. In 2012 he founded Stockholm beauty and wellbeing destination YOU, and theyouway.com. Terry then became co-owner, creative and business development director of Lyko – Scandinavia’s largest beauty eCommerce site with an annual revenue of $A300 million. This success saw Terry become a household name in Sweden; making regular television appearances including his own segment on the Tv4 morning show, as a judge on Swedish TOP MODEL, and head of hair for both X FACTOR and IDOL. In Australia, he is most recently known for his 2017 recruitment as executive general manager of Hairhouse.

The broader youtime team is composed of seasoned veterans in their respective fields including Lani Barmakov as general manager (formerly Nourished Life), Caroline Beard as art dDirector (formerly Aesop and Henne), Andrea Robertson as editor (formerly the Daily Mail’s Femail), Claudia Aughey as content manager (formerly Sukin) and Karri Griffin as ecommerce manager (formerly Incu), to name a few.

“Everything we do is grounded in our values and purpose. We are here to inspire and be inspired,” said Terry. “From our very first day, we have been on a mission. And that’s to create spaces, both digital and physical, and communities that allow us to spend time on what matters. Where you can be unconditionally you and share the journey of the body and the mind.”