Hope you all had a great weekend. I sure did.
It’s almost time for me to go see Jenna Perry and get some big, blonde highlights for the summer 😎
Some news:
McKinsey made a big, sexy state of beauty report for Business of Fashion. The beauty industry is in the midst of a new era of expansion, with global retail sales expected to record a compound annual growth rate of 6% between 2022 and 2027. I really liked this one quote from Topicals’ founder Olamide Olowe, “People need to understand that VC is rocket fuel. If you’re not building a rocket, if you don’t want to build a business that’s going to be doing north of $50 million to $100 million in sales in the next five to seven years and you don’t want to dedicate your life to that, there are — and we should be creating more — other ways to fund businesses.”
Here were some key takeaways for me:
Consumers are interested in adding products to their regular home beauty routines: the way people shop for beauty and skincare has become akin to grocery shopping. We’ve become accustomed to dropping cash on seeing if we like a new lip treatment, or Instagram skincare brand, or viral tool. While influencers and celebrities, as well as family and friends, continue to be a significant source of inspiration for beauty, shoppers also report being highly influenced by recommendations from doctors and dermatologists, according to the global consumer survey.
As I mentioned last week, most boomers don’t actually KNOW what Gen-Z wants, which puts brands into major risk of being cringe: As Gen-Z grows
up, brands must adapt, finding new ways to speak their language. This may
require retiring traditional ways of doing business — from marketing to product development — and rethinking assumptions about this diverse, digitally savvy and demanding generation that prioritizes value and efficacy when choosing their beauty brands and products. If I was running a business targeting Gen-Z right now, I would try to hire an 18 year old, not a 35 year old, to tell the company what Gen-Z wants. What I thought was surprising was that Gen-Z is not as digitally fixated as some believe. While 50% of Gen-Z respondents said they are most likely to learn about new products from social media personalities, particularly on TikTok, 41 percent also cited brick-and-mortar stores as an important channel — roughly the same percentage as older survey respondents.
Speaking of beauty, I like this hat with backwards copy for mirror selfies from Glossier.