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| CHEMISTRY SET: Mandy Ginsberg’s Chemistry.com has found success in the already-crowded online- dating arena. photography by Lisa Means | |
| THE SEASON FOR LOVE | |
| With Valentine’s Day this month, should Chemistry.com expect a spike in membership thanks to lonely singles looking for love? No, says Ginsberg. The biggest surge Chemistry.com and Match.com experience, she says, happens between Dec. 26 and Feb. 14. “So many people go through the holidays, they come home alone, and their mother’s kvetching that they haven’t had someone nice to bring home,” Ginsberg says. When it comes to motivation, Cupid’s got nothing on Mom. |
It was 2006, and match.com was top dog in the online-dating world. In fact, the Dallas-based dating site’s 15 million-person worldwide member base had already garnered a Guinness World Record. So why did parent company InterActive Corp. want to cannibalize its own market share by launching spin-off site Chemistry.com?
“We developed Chemistry … based on consumer feedback,” says Mandy Ginsberg, vice president and general manager of the site. Some customers, it seemed, wanted more than the bare-bones basics that Match offers: a forum for members to casually cruise other users’ profile pages and pictures. With the rise in popularity of social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, which replicate the profile-searching services of Match, customers were beginning to expect paid dating sites to work harder for their money.
Competitor site eHarmony has cashed in on this fact for seven years. The Pasadena, Calif.-based site, which boasts 1.6 million members in the U.S., offers a thorough personality questionnaire and compatibility-matching service for members, much like the ones Chemistry.com now provides. But in an aggressive debut ad campaign (featuring examples of online daters who were “Rejected by eHarmony”), Chemistry points a finger at the rival site for allegedly being too rigid in its standards of acceptable member candidates. So, instead of creating a direct copy of eHarmony, Ginsberg found an opportunity to mend a few broken hearts.
“The idea behind our ‘Come As You Are’ mantra is that we’re not going to judge the kind of relationship you should have,” Ginsberg says. She refers to eHarmony’s strictly heterosexual dating services, along with what she calls a “marriage bent.” Chemistry’s welcoming message has certainly had an impact, as it’s already racked up 3.7 million registrants in just two years.
Ginsberg knows as well as anyone that love is big business. But in this industry, she knows, too, that a little compassion toward customers goes a long way. “When you’re online dating, there’s so much emotion in the purchase,” she says. “It’s really important for us to understand what [our customers] are going through.”
