Welcome to this first instalment of my 4 part discussion with Janet Milner-Walker (JMW) on the Global Beauty Industry. Janet is a veteran of the luxury and beauty industry, a classmate at business school over a decade ago and the Founder/CEO of Bespoke Advantage, a London-based beauty brand consultancy.
Enjoy the excerpts.
TA: I tried to look at different stats as to the size of the global beauty industry. I see in some instances in 2019 over 530 billion USD. In some instances, I’ve seen nearly 700 billion USD, but it really doesn’t matter I think I was just amazed to see you know that the industry is that huge. So what prompted you as a person, apart from the fact that you’ve got experience in this category, to start a beauty brand consultancy.
JMW : So, Tope as you say, I’ve been in the industry for well over two decades. I started out working in the beauty industry in South Africa, and then moved across to the UK and also lived in the Middle East. My background is in retail branding, product development and marketing. I’ve worked for lots of big companies including Boots, Body Shop, Marks & Spencer, Harvey Nichols to name a few.
So after working in the industry for almost two decades and being very passionate about working with beauty founders and entrepreneurs, and because I’ve worked with brands and developed brands and launched them into the marketplace, I decided having experienced working in large organisations, to take that experience and utilise that to work with brands that I’m passionate about. I’d always wanted to work with brands to make a meaningful difference. Like a lot of us when we work in our careers, whilst we love our jobs, it’s often difficult to make that meaningful difference and impact in a large organisation. So I set up Bespoke Advantage in 2017 and since launching, we’ve worked with a lot of brands based in the UK and also internationally. But all of these are brands that are making a difference in their particular sector, whether that’s wellness, hair care, skin care or cosmetics.
TA: Interesting, I know when we met when we met back in business school, we always have this conversation and you know that was something that definitely stood you out; your passion for the industry, so it’s not a huge surprise that you’ve ended up doing this. But now let’s talk about your industry. For me, it’s really, I like I said, I was shocked just to see the kind of numbers that I’ve been seeing which you can shed more light on. This industry has evolved in the past five to 10 years. What’s driving this evolution? What changes have we seen?
JMW: So we’ve seen a lot of changes certainly, and probably most over the last 10 years. And as an industry, the global beauty industry is 532 billion dollars. In the UK alone, it’s growing at 21.1%. So it’s one of the fastest growing sectors. And it’s been growing at that rate between 2017 and 2021.
What’s changed significantly is, it’s no longer just the beauty industry. So a lot of people think about the beauty industry and they think about cosmetics and fragrance and skincare. The beauty industry is part of a much larger industry – the wellness industry. What’s changed over the last five to 10 years is that beauty, nutrition, Fitness, Health and Wellness have all merged. So it’s no longer just as I say, beauty in isolation. It’s all of these things together that become part of the wellness industry.
What’s also changed significantly and as you and I both know, coming from a marketing background, is that previously, brands held the power. Power is now shifted from the brands to the consumer. And this has been led by technology.
There’s also been a rise in conscious consumerism. So, because the power is shifted from brands, consumers have become aware of all the macro trends in the industry, such as sustainability and clean beauty. The power has come into the hands of the consumer and it’s the consumer that’s driving this rise in conscious consumerism. Consumers are now questioning the brands as to what they’re doing about things like transparency, sustainability, and making use of clean ingredients and making us aware as consumers of what we use.
There is also a major shift in how we buy these products, a shift in retail which has also been led by technology. So the last 10 years, whereas you used to go into department stores or health and beauty retailers, or perhaps salons to buy beauty products, now you go online, and there are so many other opportunities in which to buy a product. So you’ve got buying from a website online or you could buy from third party marketplaces, places like Amazon.
So as a consumer, you become aware of a brand through affiliate marketing, all through social media channels. So retail itself has changed. And that’s also driving the rise in the size of the beauty industry, but also in how these different categories that were previously individual categories or sectors have all merged together.
Yet what hasn’t changed though, which is great, is the way we as consumers look for products. We’re looking for innovation, we’re looking for products that are easy to purchase as well. And we also looking for products that deliver results. So we’ve always looked for those three things, but the way in which we shop and what we’re looking for in terms of credentials from a brand has changed significantly.
TA: Interesting. You mentioned consumer conscious consumerism. First time I’m hearing that. Another buzzword in marketing?
JMW : It is a buzz word and in the beauty industry, but also in the fashion industry and also in food as well.
TA: There are definitely traditional categorization of segments, if you want to call it that, from mass beauty to skincare to premium hair care and so on. As part of the evolution that’s happened over the years in the last five to 10 years, have we seen new categories coming up strongly, that’s also helping to drive the entire growth of this industry?
JMW: So you’ve got the wellness category as a whole, which I mentioned is $4.2 trillion and then within that you get sub categories. I think what’s changed is really the trends that are driving the industry and relative to all the different sectors. So when we looked at beauty in the past, as you say we had skincare, we had cosmetics, fragrance was very, very segmented and very defined but because it’s blurred now, a lot of what’s changed in terms of sub-categories are these trends that are coming through. So we’ve got trends such as clean beauty, and you’ve got trends related to supplements themselves and supplements are not just supplements related to nutrition anymore. These supplements are things that then impact the way and impact our skincare or haircare so they are across all these different categories. You’ve got things like CBD products, CBD products have new numerous health benefits that are related to things like acne, diabetes weight loss, so it’s not just specific to skincare, but it will serve in impacting these sub-categories.
Cannabis was always known as a recreational drug, but now it’s actually being used for the benefit of our health and wellness. I’m working with a number of different CBD brands. Cannabis is now an ingredient that has also been then formulated in skincare products and other traditional beauty products. So that’s a big trend that’s driving the beauty industry.
We’ve also got things related to sleep, apparently 31% of us are suffering from insomnia. So there are now more brands that are actually bringing our products in the beauty industry related to helping us sleep better. All of these are trends that are coming through in the industry. Those are some of the trends and I know we get to talk about other trends and but this is what has changed and these also in themselves become sub categories in the industry as well.
TA: So we have effectively moved from a $532 billion dollars to industry to a $4.2 trillion industry?
JMW: Exactly and that’s the opportunity.
TA: You touched on something that I think any discussion on manufacturing today should not ignore – your buzzword conscious consumerism. The issue of sustainability. The other day I was looking at research that gives us data globally, about 55% of the respondents were alluding to some key words in that research – “Natural” and “Clean”. Can we spend some time on this issue of clean natural and sustainability?
JMW: Yeah, there are different areas there. So the first thing about sustainability is in the beauty industry. If you think about the beauty, you just need to open up your makeup bags or your toiletry bags or your bathroom cabinets and see the amount of packaging that we have. Because we all use numerous products day in, day out, whether it’s shampoos, conditioners, toothpast, moisturizers and body lotions. All of those things come in different components. And when you’re using cosmetics, from the scars, to lipsticks, to blushes to eyeshadows, a lot of that packaging is plastic. So the global beauty industry uses about 20 billion units of plastic according to ZeroWaste.
A lot of that is single use plastic. There’s significant changes coming through in the industry to look for alternatives and ways to package your product. Instead of using plastic, what else can we use? Obviously we can use glass. There are some plastics that are recyclable. There are brands like Body Shop that has always stood for brand activism as well in the beauty industry, from ingredients to packaging. We’ve also got brands like Lush Cosmetics, who not too long ago, opened something called naked stores.
We’re not saying the people are naked but the products are naked. Instead of packaging their products, you can actually go in and if you wanted to take a product home with you, you just get that in your own container and you take that home with you.
There are also brands like Beauty Kitchen, which are introducing refillable containers. There are other brands with refillable packaging as well, so when you buy a pellet of ashes, sometimes you only use one or two of those ashes and rather than throw them away, and then go and buy another one, you can actually buy the individual components that go into your pellets, so that you are not wasting packaging. So there’s a lot going on in terms of sustainability and packaging alone.
When we look at ingredients, there are lots of interesting trends coming through as well. So it’s how brands are working directly with farms, to use ingredients from farms, to then apply this to almost the farms becoming like a lab and to apply those ingredients into formulations as well. As in the food industry, you’ve got farm to table in the beauty industry, you’ve got farm to lab. And so looking at the actual sustainability of growing ingredients that we then use within our actual formulations. This is all about the natural organic cycle. And that also relates to something called biotechnology, which is a trend, an emerging trend that’s becoming more and more prominent within the beauty industry as well.
In terms of natural and organic, when we looked at ingredients, before you could pick up a product and you could read the ingredients and look at those ingredients and you wouldn’t even know what they are. Now we go online. We do our own research. That’s related to something else coming through in the beauty industry, which is about transparency. We want brands to be far more transparent with us, and this comes back to conscious consumers we were just talking about earlier. We know that you know the impacts of growing certain types of ingredients or actually cutting down trees and plantations, the impact that’s having on the planet and also some of these things are unnecessary in terms of the ingredients in our products.
TA: So we want to know what’s going into products and what is natural. What is it, because there’s always confusion about what is natural, what is organic as well and what the differences are between natural and organic.
JMW: I think it’s quite a vague, actually between natural and organic, but really natural ingredients are ingredients that are grown naturally. And so you’ve got organisations like the Soil Association, which will then certify those ingredients. So they will look at the whole process of growing ingredients, and how those ingredients are being farmed. To end with whether they can actually be certified as natural and organic, so that there is certification as a brand, you need to be able to provide all of those records in terms of the whole process of growing ingredients to be able to make a claim as to whether something is natural or organic. You will actually see when you look at beauty products, whether they’ve got their logo and their certification on them. And so there’s that side of things, the natural, organic and whether it actually is natural and organic. And there’s also something called Cosmos certified as well, which is even more stringent in terms of the process they pass through to certify whether a product is natural and organic. So those two symbols you should look out for on a packaging.
TA: Thank you.
Watch out for the Part 2 of this discussion.
