The melding of skincare marketing and wellness marketing
A few Trajectory team members just attended IndieBeautyExpo in New York this past week. This is always a massive and high-energy beauty trade show filled with passionate and optimistic entrepreneurs and new skin care brands that are among the fastest growing “must-haves”. One overarching trend witnessed at the show, which we’ll address at the end of this post, is the melding of skincare marketing and wellness marketing.
Some Show Observations
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- Michelle York, Trajectory Account Director who is well versed in the skin care category notes that it is an amazing time to be an indie beauty brand. The community, the support, and the opportunity are all compounded by the fact that millennials (and thereby larger, established brands) are looking for what they bring to the table.
- What do these new skin care brands bring to the table? Clean/natural/innovative ingredients, a sense of community; skincare packaging design that looks great in your IG Shelfie (taking pics of your medicine cabinet loaded with the latest beauty/skincare trends and posting to Instagram).
- CBD, CBD, CBD, HEMP, CBD — Brands featuring these ingredients were extremely prevalent and all had different go-to-market approaches. From touting medicinal benefits (patches infused with hemp, cannabis, and other natural ingredients to help you with everything from relaxation/stress to hangovers) to those strictly marketed as high powered beauty ingredients. This space is huge and according to Michelle and Dan Jovanovic (Trajectory Client Engagement Director, Health & Wellness brands) – everyone we talked to was really excited about the possibilities as cannabis legalization makes its way across the country.
- Being someone who thrives on connecting with people and hearing their stories, Dan noted that everyone had a story, and everyone had a cause. He also notes that I saw the heart, creativity and passion of these CEO’s and I saw business minds hungry to keep pushing to make their dreams come true. A few brands that stuck with Dan were VictoriaLand Beauty (whose owner had a story to tell about her son who has an illness and she uses him as her motivation); Undefined Beauty which just launched at this show; Sapelo from Savanah Georgia, whose owner Cindy Edwards was thrilled to speak with us and demonstrate the benefits of her brand; and dr. macrene | 37 actives (as Michelle got pampered, as you can see here).
But Dan also got in on the action, as you can see from this facial:
The Melding of Skin Care and Wellness Marketing
We’re living in a wellness culture. So it’s no coincidence that this influence has found its way into the skin care category. And many indie brands are growing their profiles by telling brand stories through the lens of wellness.
In fact, beauty and aging account for almost one-third of the estimated $3.7+ trillion global wellness market (which is roughly three times the value of the conventional pharmaceutical industry).
Skincare brands that ultimately win will be those whose efforts go more than skin deep, through wellness marketing that helps the greatest number of people to live balanced lives in body, mind and spirit. Though according to Global Cosmetic Industry’s The State of Beauty, 2018, “wellness is also a movement against “too much,” prizing simplicity above complexity (already integrated into the propositions of many indie brands).
Are you launching or needing to reenergize your skin care business? Reach out to Dan at Trajectory.