Beauty category proves to be one of the strongest for retailers, survey

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but then again, numbers don’t lie.

While some retailers such as Kohl’s and Target report struggling in apparel and home goods, beauty is not only holding its own, but also holding up these companies’ financial outlooks.

• For example, beauty sales at Kohl’s jumped 150% YoY during the company’s first fiscal quarter.
• Beauty sales for Target grew in the mid-teens and was the company’s most profitable category.

A survey of 26,000 beauty shoppers found that 29% of consumers are spending more than $200 per month on beauty, up from 15% a year ago, according to PowerReviews.

• In the online and physical spaces, beauty shoppers are very willing to experiment: 35% say up to half of their digital purchases in the last year were for products they have never tried. That same figure was 40% for in-store shoppers.
• Nearly a third (31%) say new items are more than half of their online purchases in the past 12 months and 29% for brick-and-mortar consumers.

“Because of this evolution, marketing strategies and tactics that were effective in the past may not cut it for today’s beauty shoppers,” Power Reviews’s report reads. “Instead, beauty brands and retailers must adapt their strategies in order to attract, convert, and retain shoppers in a crowded marketplace.”