The department store beauty hall is facing a fight for survival: the pandemic has accelerated the shift to buying cosmetics, skincare and other pampering products online, and a growing number of sales are now via a smartphone rather than over the counter.
Manicured sales assistants, testing pots and makeovers are being replaced by powerful influencers and digital beauty halls that can switch up the products on offer at the tweak of an algorithm.
Where once established brands such as L’Oréal, Clarins and Mac dominated the market, they now face heavy competition from a plethora of upstarts, which can quickly rise and fall on waves of social media interest.
Large luxury fashion brands and e-commerce groups have whipped out their credit cards and are throwing big sums at the problem. A succession of buyouts and joint ventures with celebrities, influencers and online sellers is creating a new generation of cosmetics millionaires, and in some cases, billionaires. Many are women, and what they have in common is an understanding of how to secure attention – and sales – in a noisy, fast changing market.
The shift was highlighted this week by the £275m acquisition of Cult Beauty, which handed the co-founders, the former management consultant Jessica DeLuca and onetime model Alexia Inge, a £70m payday. That deal followed swiftly on the heels of the French cosmetic group Sephora’s takeover of another British startup, FeelUnique, in a deal valuing the UK company at £132m.
On Wednesday, Forbes magazine declared the signer Rihanna a billionaire, after placing a $2.8bn (£2bn) value on her Fenty Beauty cosmetics empire.
One of the most successful performers of her generation, thanks to hits such as Umbrella, Rihanna’s sideline business has become her most valuable. She owns 50% of Fenty, which has already achieved sales of $550m since its launch in 2017. Her partner is the French luxury goods group LVMH, the owner of brands including Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs.
Puig, the owner of Paco Rabanne and Nina Ricci, is taking control of the celebrity makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury’s eponymous brand in a deal thought to have valued the UK company at up to £1bn.
Kylie Jenner, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner reality-TV family, became the world’s youngest billionaire in 2019 at 21 thanks to the success of Kylie Cosmetics, the makeup company which was bought out by the global beauty company Coty.
Tony Brown, the managing director of the department store chain Beales, which is reviving itself after a falling into administration last year, said sales in its beauty halls had been declining by about one-fifth each year before the…
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