In a significant milestone for the title, Sigourney Cantelo has relaunched Beauticate, bringing a new look and updated technology to the website after 12 years.
With 3.1 million touchpoints a month across the site, podcast, socials and newsletter, Cantelo isn't slowing down anytime soon.
From introducing AI functions and interactive browsing to, most excitingly, the Beauticate Shop, BD spoke with Cantelo about the relaunch, its challenges and how her readers guided the changes.
Image: Beauticate undergoes relaunch
Congratulations on the relaunch! How has the reception been?
Thank you so much. It’s been an incredible response – better than I let myself hope for. When you've been building something for this long, you get so close to it that you lose the ability to see it clearly anymore. So having readers say they love the design and the curation has made it all worthwhile!
Can you take us through the main changes and your favourite features?
The shop is the biggest change by far, curated from the brands and products we actually love, built straight into the site.
Beyond that, we've made everything more interactive. In the travel section you can browse by the kind of trip you want: a girls' trip, a reset & heal, a romantic weekender, rather than just by destination.
The podcast works the same way, browse by mood rather than just by guest.
And our GO-TOs Spa & Salon Directory, which we launched back in 2016, is being rebuilt into a full beauty and wellness directory that’s much more intuitive.
My favourite feature though is Ask Sig, our AI concierge. It's trained on twelve years and over 1,700 articles of my own archive, so it answers in my voice and recommends from things I've actually tested and stand behind, not a generic scrape of the internet.
Ask Sig introduces AI to the platform. How do you feel about AI in media, and how should media work with it rather than against it?
I think the outlets who'll survive this next decade are the ones who stop treating AI as the enemy and start treating it as infrastructure. Search behaviour has already changed. People ask an AI assistant for a recommendation the way they used to ask a friend, and if your archive isn't built to be found and trusted by those systems, you're invisible to a huge chunk of your future audience.
Where I get nervous is when media outlets use AI to replace judgement rather than extend it. Ask Sig only works because it's trained on twelve years of real reporting, real product testing and my actual opinions. It doesn't invent an answer, it draws from a body of work that already earned trust the old-fashioned way. That's the difference. AI should amplify editorial expertise, not manufacture the appearance of it.
Image: Beauticate's new Ask Sig AI search function
Along with the new site, you've also launched the Beauticate Shop. How did the idea come about?
The idea started years before the shop existed. When we published our Top 50 Skincare Products For Every Age and then our Top 30 Makeup Guide, readers loved them, but the feedback was always the same, gorgeous list, wish I could just buy it.
I built a standalone shop site first to test that, and it worked, but I kept feeling it belonged inside Beauticate itself rather than off on its own. Once I made that call, I found a way to bring on the brands I already loved as genuine partners rather than just listings, which meant I could tell their stories properly, the founder and the why behind the brand, not just the product.
I won't pretend the build itself was smooth. My first attempt, I briefed external developers and watched it fall apart when they made it so complicated I couldn’t make any changes myself. I had to scrap it, absorb the loss and start again.
I learned Shopify from the ground up myself rather than handing it to someone else to hold hostage. It was brutal! But the shop we've launched is better for it, because I understand every part of it and I own it completely.
You've launched with 23 out of 25 brands being founded by women. Why was this important to you, and how did you select the brands?
We've always championed local and female-founded brands on Beauticate, we love telling their stories, so this felt like a natural extension of that rather than a new direction.
Selection for the shop itself came down to three things: does the product actually work, does the founder have a real story worth telling, and does it fit an Australian woman's life and budget. If I wouldn't recommend it to a friend, it doesn't get a spot.
We also introduced the Beauticate Collective just before relaunching the site. We're all experiencing a bit of algorithm and influencer fatigue, so I wanted to formalise what Beauticate has always done, expert recommendation over anonymous endorsement, into an actual panel of editors and experts we can call on for articles and product picks across makeup, skincare, hair and style.
Image: The Beauticate Collective - a curated network of editors, experts and tastemakers shaping beauty, wellness, style and modern living.
You've described this as editorial commerce rather than retail. How does the shop run, and does it link back to the platform?
Editorial commerce is the name we've given it because the products are woven through every part of the platform social, podcast and EDM – rather than a shop just sitting there on its own.
It reflects how women actually shop now. We don't necessarily go looking for a store, we want to shop natively from social, or straight from a newsletter, when the feeling strikes us, not only when we're specifically hunting for a product.
Operationally, it's a headless Shopify build, powered by Shopify on the backend but built directly into beauticate.com, so readers never leave the editorial experience to shop. It’s a dropship model in that brands keep control of their own stock, packaging and shipping, we drive the customer and take a commission on the sale.
Image: Beauticate Shop categories
What categories is the shop stocking, and how do you see the platform expanding?
Right now it's beauty, wellness and some lifestyle. From here I'd love to expand into style staples, interior pieces and travel accessories, essentially products across every vertical Beauticate already covers editorially.
It's been busy and it doesn't show any signs of slowing. We're constantly onboarding new brands, readers can suggest a brand and brands can apply to join the shop directly, and I'm working on more content around how brands can advertise with us too.
It's been a busy 2026. Anything else in the pipeline for the rest of the year?
Plenty. We're moving further into events for readers, our monthly Walk & Talk has been really popular and we're building toward live shopping and podcast events next.
On the brand side, we're continuing to bring on new partners across the shop.
Twelve years in, I still believe the biggest opportunity in this industry is trust, not reach alone. Anyone can buy eyeballs. What we've built is an audience that actually acts on what we tell them, and that's the thing worth paying attention to.
You can visit beauticate.com for more.
You can find Beauticate's best editorial contact details via the BD media directory, here.
Image credit: Supplied/Beauticate
