Health & Beauty

On September 15, the National Bureau of Statistics released data on retail sales of consumer goods in August 2021. The retail sales of cosmetics reached 29.4 billion yuan in August, the same as the same period last year.

Previously, retail sales of cosmetics had achieved the lowest increase in 15 months in July. In August, the growth rate of cosmetics retail sales hit a new low.

In the online sales of cosmetics, the Zhongtai Securities Research Report shows that in August, the GMV of skin care and makeup on Ali platform was 19.914 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 5%. Among them, the GMV of skin care dropped by 0.8% year-on-year to 13.996 billion yuan, and that of cosmetics It dropped by 13.63% to 5.917 billion yuan, a significant drop.

It is worth noting that the sales of the cosmetics industry continue to show a trend of polarization-the overall performance of emerging domestic make-up brands is relatively weak, and the high-end local brands and international brands have relatively better performance.

According to data, in August, the turnover of Perfect Diary's flagship store on Tmall reached 178 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 16%; the turnover of the Huaxizi Tmall flagship store reached 260 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 18.32%. Colorkey has relatively outstanding sales performance, and the turnover of Tmall flagship store increased by 43% year-on-year.

Previously, many new domestic cosmetics brands have regarded the explosive product strategy as an important lever for leveraging growth, but the explosive product strategy has become increasingly difficult to work.

In the "2021 Giant Engine Beauty Industry White Paper" jointly released by Huge Engine and Kantar Consumer Index recently, it is becoming more difficult for best-selling products to get out of the circle.

According to Kantar Worldpanel's statistics on the purchase of facial skin care products and makeup in 1-5 cities across the country in 2019 and 2020, in 2020, the number of best-selling cosmetics will drop slightly from 850 in the previous year to 775. The decline was 9%.

In the past two years, cutting-edge domestic cosmetics brands have used the traffic dividends of Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Station B to launch a large number of explosive products. With the loss of platform dividends, marketing costs have continued to rise, and the difficulty of manufacturing explosive products has increased. The growth of cutting-edge brands has become increasingly difficult to "burn out".

In terms of skin care products, local cosmetics brands that have initiated high-end transformation or focused on functional skin care have performed better.

According to data from the Ali platform, in August, Proya's Tmall flagship store had a turnover of 123 million, a year-on-year increase of 48%. Among them, the sales of ruby essence and bi-antisense essence, which have increased significantly in the past year, accounted for 27%; Winona Tmall flagship Store turnover increased by 53% year-on-year to 89.36 million yuan; Yuze Tmall flagship store increased by 167% year-on-year to 38.55 million yuan; Runbaiyan Tmall flagship store increased by 29% year-on-year to 48.34 million yuan; Herborist Tmall The turnover of flagship stores increased by 85% year-on-year to 15.67 million yuan.

Interface Fashion has previously reported that high-end skin care products have shown steady growth since 2020. According to the report "Attitude towards high-end beauty products-China, April 2021" released by the market research and consulting company Mintel, the high-end skin care product market has demonstrated resilience during the epidemic and has maintained steady development.

International beauty brands targeting the high-end market also performed relatively well in August.

According to data from the Ali platform, in August, the turnover of Lancome's flagship store on Tmall rose by 133.58% year-on-year to 830 million yuan; the turnover of L'Oréal's flagship store on Tmall increased by 4.04% year-on-year to 310 million yuan; Saint Laurent and Armani were Ali platform makeup products At present, the transaction volume is 263 million yuan and 194 million yuan respectively. Among them, Saint Laurent's turnover is down 11.66% year-on-year, and Armani's turnover is up 0.47% year-on-year.

In fact, throughout the first half of 2021, international beauty groups such as Estee Lauder, L'Oreal, and Shiseido have also achieved considerable growth.

The Estée Lauder Group's sales for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021 increased by 13% year-on-year, L'Oréal Group's sales in the first half of 2021 increased by 20.7% year-on-year, and Shiseido Group's sales in the first half of 2021 increased by 21.5% year-on-year.

The growth of the e-commerce business of high-end brands is the key to the bright sales of the aforementioned international beauty groups.

With the Estee Lauder Group, its brands Estee Lauder and Hailan Mystery all achieved double-digit online growth in fiscal 2021.

The online battle for high-end international brands is starting when the new and cutting-edge beauty brands have achieved zero-to-one development online and have gradually encountered bottlenecks.

UIFashion previously reported that in the first half of 2021, Estee Lauder became the beauty brand with the largest volume on the Xiaohongshu platform, and the product with the highest reinvestment rate was the small brown bottle essence.

As e-commerce "choose one" has become history, high-end international beauty brands have also begun to actively enter more e-commerce platforms to seek new growth.

From July to August, 7 major brands including Guerlain, Givenchy, Pui Ling, Estee Lauder, Clinique, Yue Muzhiyuan, and Coyan have entered JD.com and launched customized gift boxes for Qixi Festival.