One thing stood out to our team as we walked the show floor at Cosmoprof North America last week—there were so many brands we had never seen before! As a firm that has been tracking the beauty industry for nearly 60 years, we had once prided ourselves on being in the know on every single brand. Those days are long gone, as the sheer number of unknown brands seems to increase exponentially each year, not only on the show floor but also in the digital beauty space, as identified by Amalgam, Kline’s new digital beauty tracker. Clearly entrepreneurship and innovation are alive and well.
Author Archives: Carrie Mellage, Vice President
April’s Top Five Digital Beauty Winners
The results for April have just been released from Amalgam, Kline’s new e-commerce tracking service. Several beauty items landed at the top of the charts for the first time. Here are some that caught our attention:
Aztec Secret Indian Healing Clay has been inching up the charts since it first debuted in Amalgam last June. In April, it joined the top 10 for the first time, ranking #2 in facial skin care and #1 in masques. This 100% natural calcium bentonite clay is said to be the “world’s most powerful facial.” Most recently, we’ve found this item only at Amazon among the sites monitored in Amalgam; in prior months, it was also found among Walmart’s top sellers.Continue reading
Top Performing E-commerce Beauty Items Revealed by Amalgam
Five of the top 10 beauty and personal care products jumped more than 200 spots to become one of the top 10 best-performing items in online sales in February 2018, with Ulta’s Eyeshadow Single jumping more than 2,000 spots, reveals Kline’s new digital tool, Amalgam. This service scores and ranks beauty items and brands based on best-selling product listings and customer ratings and reviews across nearly 20 leading retailer websites to identify which brands and products are winning in the digital space. To look inside the Q1 2018 findings, REGISTER for our webinar taking place on May 1, 2018.Continue reading
Professional Hair Care Gets the Royal Treatment
A new generation of treatment products has propelled the salon hair care industry to hit a five-year high in terms of sales growth in 2015. Treatment products was the only product type to register a double-digit gain for the year, with growth nearly four times the industry average. Driven not only by bond multipliers—a brand new sub-category created singlehandedly by Olaplex that was quickly and fiercely replicated by countless others—but also by many deep nourishing treatments and multi-benefit products, as more emphasis is placed on healthier hair and scalps.
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All Natural Products are Here to Stay
Now topping an estimated $36 billion at the manufacturers’ level and experiencing more than five consecutive years of double-digit growth, the natural beauty and personal care market is as vibrant as ever. Once thought of as a passing trend, the natural and organic movement has solidified itself an industry mainstay that gets stronger each year thanks to growing consumer demand and higher performance products.
Having natural ingredients alone used to be enough to satisfy the core natural user, but now that the trend has moved squarely into the mainstream, it’s more critical than ever that products deliver results. Continue reading
Cosmetic Textiles – Where Beauty Meets Fashion
The fashion and beauty industries have always been closely aligned, with runway trends often dictating the latest crazes in makeup and hairstyles. The two industries have now officially collided with the arrival of cosmetic textiles. The cosmetotextile market’s recent rise is paving the way for a new means in which consumers can consider their garments, providing a new growth avenue for both cosmetic and apparel manufacturers.Continue reading
You’d Better Watch Out, You Might Want to Cry—NYX is Coming to Town
NYX, the now L’Oréal-owned mass cosmetics brand that has taken the beauty market by storm, opened its first retail locations in Arcadia and Torrance, CA, in October. The brand has already opened a third location in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, and plans to open at least two additional locations in California before the end of the year. Major plans are apparently in place to transform the chain into a national retailer in early 2016, as initial signage has popped up in malls around the United States indicating that NYX is “coming soon,” potentially disrupting the beauty retailing landscape in a major way.
NYX had already altered the mass beauty market by covertly acquiring a cult-like following via a modern twist on grassroots marketing: putting free products in the hands of beauty vloggers.Continue reading
The Leadership Scramble in Professional Beauty: Who Will Win?
Acquisition activity has greatly altered the landscape of the global professional beauty industry in the past few years. L’Oréal is now the clear leader and only major player to have a leadership role in all three sectors of professional beauty: hair care, skin care, and nail care. The company has long held the #1 spot in the hair sector. With its acquisitions of SkinCeuticals (2005) and Essie (2010), L’Oréal landed a slot among the top 10 in skin care and nail care, respectively. Adding Decléor and Carita to its portfolio in 2014 propelled L’Oréal to the #1 ranking in skin care. The #1 spot is now firmly taken, but rankings beyond that are very much up for grabs. Continue reading
Changing Tides: Procter & Gamble Returns to its Roots, and the Rise of Coty’s Beauty Empire
Procter & Gamble (P&G) has been the leader in the U.S. beauty and personal care market since the very first edition of Kline’s Cosmetics & Toiletries USA report was published in 1963. That study, which was authored in part by Dr. Charles Kline himself, reported P&G among the leaders in the soap, deodorant, toothpaste, and shampoo categories—a position the company still retains some 50+ years later, now with a new CEO taking the helm.
Once the transaction to shift ownership of 43 brands to Coty, which was announced in July 2015, is complete, P&G will slip to the #2 spot, leaving L’Oréal in the #1 position. Meanwhile, Coty will jump to fifth place, up from ninth, edging Johnson & Johnson out of the top five.Continue reading
Unilever Builds Skin Care Business with a Superfecta of Indies
In 2015, the trend towards acquiring successful up-and-coming, innovative brands continues. Some of the most notable headlines in the beauty industry in recent months are about who is being acquired by whom. More importantly, these acquisitions feature a new generation of competition for the leading companies—indie brands. As noted by Carlotta Jacobson, President of CEW, at a recent CEW Newsmaker Forum, “These brands are the new newsmakers.” Many leading companies, like Unilever, are taking notice.Continue reading