Prestige beauty brands like Clinique, Sunday Riley, and By Terry, have traditionally lived in high-end retail environments such as Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, and Sephora. Now, these brands are combining convenience, accessibility, and premium beauty in mainstream retail to reach today’s beauty consumer who is shopping cross channels more than ever before. This is especially beneficial for Gen Z consumers, who are navigating seamlessly online and offline for their beauty products.
This hybrid distribution that many beauty marketers are embracing to a greater extent comes at a time when brick-and-mortar store sales are flourishing, up collectively 14% last year for beauty retail sales generated through department stores, mass merchandisers like Target, professional outlets like salons and dermatologist offices, and specialty stores like Sephora and Ulta, according to our recently published Beauty Retailing USA database. This momentum is continuing in 2022 as foot traffic analyzed from SafeGraph was up 25% in Q1 versus a year ago for select retailers, like Bluemercury and LUSH.
Retailers that are making a push for premium beauty in stores, but also in their online shops, of course include Target, which now has more than 120 stores with Ulta shops, and Kohl’s, which has nearly 400 Sephora at Kohl’s experiences. Beyond these core two that have been making headlines over the last year, there is Walmart with its new BeautySpaceNK initiative in partnership with upmarket British retailer Space NK; even Best Buy is slowly tapping into beauty, recently adding skin care tech products from brands like Foreo and Vanity Planet to almost 300 stores.
Kline’s new Beauty Destinations: Intelligence Center will gather, process, and understand large volumes of data relating to the U.S. beauty retailing industry on an ongoing basis. This robust digital platform will help frequently measure the sales performance of 30+ beauty retailers, track store openings and closures, see visitor and foot traffic trends, benchmark against competing retailers, and stay up-to-date on the latest channel and retailer developments. For an inside look at this new digital platform, please schedule a demo with our team.
