What Beauty Professionals Need to Know Today

Discover the most recent and relevant industry news and insights for beauty professionals, to help you excel in your job interviews, promotion conversations or simply to perform better in the workplace by increasing your market awareness and emulating market leaders.

BoF Careers distils business intelligence from across the breadth of our content — editorial briefings, newsletters, case studies, podcasts and events, exclusive interviews and conversations — to deliver key takeaways and learnings in your job function.

Explore global job opportunities in beauty on BoF Careers today, from a beauty pop-ups and activations designer at Burberry in London, or as a store planning designer at International Cosmetics & Perfumes Inc. in New York, to a head of luxury beauty brand at Chalhoub Group in Dubai.

Key articles and need-to-know insights for marketing professionals today:

1. Beauty’s Most Viral Brands Are Moving Offline

For digitally-savvy beauty brands like Summer Fridays, a strong online presence got them into major retailers and on the wish lists of top investors. But the industry has changed — and to keep growing, they’re looking offline. While digital marketing costs have come down from their 2022 peak when Apple’s sweeping privacy changes caused headaches for marketers, online advertising is often irregular in its returns. Even when a campaign performs well, it still tends to reach shoppers already within the brand’s ecosystem, and is limited to those who regularly use social media.

Advertising offline, though, is different than doing so online. Crafting a strong out-of-home campaign requires skilled location targeting and diligent research to ensure any images, taglines or text will be easily understood and absorbed by casual passers-by. Companies must also calibrate their expectations accordingly; without the same easy trackability that digital marketing can offer, brands may have to accept more ambiguity in their results.

2. ‘Mormon Wives’ Puts Momfluencers’ Selling Power in the Spotlight

Already a formidable presence on Instagram and TikTok, Utah-based influencers — known for their wavy long hair, matching workout sets and Stanley cups — have taken over reality TV with “Mormon Wives”. The buzz around the new Hulu show — which revolves around a group of Mormon TikTok influencers fighting to rehabilitate their image after a salacious swinging scandal went viral in 2022 — has propelled it to become the top unscripted show of the year on the streaming platform, even topping the Kardashians’ series.

Beauty spending is a big part of life in Utah. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believes the body is sacred, and chasing physical perfection is a major part of culture in the state. According to Ciele Cosmetics co-founder and CEO Nikki DeRoest, a celebrity makeup artist who began her career in Utah before moving to Los Angeles, the popularity of beauty procedures including injectables, lash extensions, hair extensions and plastic surgery is akin to that in the similarly image-obsessed Los Angeles. “That’s why influencers do so well there, because the audience in Utah craves trends,” said DeRoest.

3. Inside the Growing Hair Loss Market

Fifty percent of women will experience hair loss at some point in their life, due to stress, hormonal imbalances, ageing, nutrition, genetics or a combination of all of these mitigating factors. You could argue that catering to such a substantial market — about 30 million women in the US alone, according to the Cleveland Clinic — is just good business.

But with scalp care products as well as hair thinning and loss products representing some of the fastest-growing segments of the $456.8 million US prestige hair product market, with thinning and loss products up 34 percent in 2024 versus last year, according to market research firm Circana, it looks a lot more like a big business. [...] Even in a more conservative investment environment, hair growth start-ups have remained an attractive proposition.

4. Urban Decay’s ‘Naked’ Relaunch Is a Hit. Now Comes the Hard Part.

Urban Decay’s most beloved product is making a comeback. Last month, the brand relaunched its famed Naked palette — a set of 12 playfully named, neutral-to-bold eyeshadow hues — for a limited-edition re-run, sold exclusively in the US at Ulta Beauty and on its own e-commerce website. Urban Decay retired the product, a motif of 2010s beauty that was featured in countless YouTube tutorials and glossy magazine articles, in 2018 — with the no-makeup makeup look on the rise, it began to feel more like a relic than icon.

The relaunch has been a smash success: The brand sold through what it anticipated to be five months worth of stock in just three and a half weeks on its own e-commerce site, while at Ulta Beauty, it became the number one product in its first week of launch, and is expected to sell out by the end of the month. Its launch also had a halo effect for the rest of the brand, with overall basket size on its e-commerce site lifting 25 percent, according to the brand. “We wanted to engage with our community,” said Stéphanie Binette, Urban Decay’s general manager. “[We know that] some of them may have left the brand, and now they’re back.”

5. Exclusive: L Catterton Invests in British Fragrance Brand Vyrao

Niche perfume maker Vyrao is readying for its next stage of growth. This month, it announced a significant minority investment from L Catterton, the LVMH-backed private equity firm. L Catterton’s growth investment fund, Elevate Beauty, led the round. Also participating were Manzanita Capital, the family office of the Gap magnate Bill Fisher, and Estée Lauder Companies’ corporate venture capital arm, New Incubation Ventures, who also invested in its seed round in 2022.

Vyrao ticked a few boxes for L Catterton, including price and distribution, said Cori Aleardi, founding partner at Elevate Beauty. A 30ml bottle of one of its seven fragrances costs $120, making the brand premium enough to sit in the booming prestige category, but not prohibitively expensive. Vyrao also has a broad wholesale network including Mecca in Australia, Saks in the US and Liberty in the UK.

Aleardi said it also stood out because of its collectible appeal. Customers tend to shop multiple fragrances from the line, rather than having the business concentrated around a single best-selling scent, she said. “You can’t just rely on one signature scent anymore … [brands] have to create an environment where consumers can wardrobe their scents,” said Aleardi.

6. A Deodorant Brand Bets on The ‘Aesop Effect’

How much would you pay for a deodorant? A new brand, To My Ships, which launches on September 26, is hoping it’s a product shoppers will splash out for. The line, which was founded by Aesop veteran Daniel Bense, sells a £35 ($46) deodorant, which it is positioning as an elevated alternative to drug store options. Bense recruited Céline Barel, a perfumer who previously created fragrances for the likes of Loewe and Jo Malone London, to craft its scent. He’s hoping to capture a piece of the small, but growing, premium personal care market, and use it to establish To My Ships in more categories.

Bense said when deciding what direction the brand would take, he considered other parts of the body before landing on deodorant. He said it was “the natural choice because it’s something you don’t walk out the door without using.” Rather than positioning the deodorants as secondary to their fragrances or hand wash, or as impulse purchases, To My Ships is hoping to enter consumers’ routines through a more narrow opening, and build a bigger brand from there. For now, it’s a lean company, with only two full-time employees, and £1.5 million ($1.96 million) in funding raised from a broad group of angel investors.

7. How Franchising Can Help Beauty Start-Ups Grow

A number of beauty start-ups are expanding their brick-and-mortar offerings through franchising — where businesses licence their names to entrepreneurs that operate their businesses independently — a method that has helped chains like McDonald’s and Burger King become global powerhouses. Nail polish maker MiniLuxe, London-based high-end nail salon Townhouse and airbrush tanning provider Pure Glow are all set to open a slate of new franchise locations in the next year.

Franchising is not a new phenomenon in beauty. Hair salon chain Drybar, fragrance seller L’Occitane en Provence and clean beauty brand Aveda are a few that have operated under the model for years. It’s an option that’s becoming more attractive. Opening brick-and-mortar shops is costly, but can spur growth. Franchising offers a way to do so without fronting the entire bill. “In an environment where the cost of capital is high, and it’s become more difficult for brands to get financing from venture capital or private equity, [franchising] is a cost efficient way to quickly scale because other people are doing the work for you,” said Oleg Isakov, a principal in the consumer practice at management consulting firm Kearney.

8. What Would a Post-TikTok US Mean for Brands? Look to India

Over the past few years, TikTok has become the tool for taking a beauty product from unknown to sold-out success overnight. Its ability to bring viral attention to products like the K18 Molecular Hair Mask or Cosrx Advanced Snail 96 Mucin Power Essence has fundamentally changed the industry, and with that, it has become the most important platform for beauty marketers. With TikTok comprising a significant chunk of beauty brands’ marketing budgets, its exit would require them to dramatically rethink their social strategies.

To get a sense of what this would look like, they can learn from India — where TikTok has already been banned for four years. Without TikTok, Instagram has emerged as the dominant platform for beauty content in India, despite the fact that it is estimated to have fewer users in the country than YouTube — which rolled out its TikTok alternative YouTube Shorts in September 2020 in India. The switch was a relatively seamless one, because in India, TikTok was banned much earlier on in its trajectory, and beauty brands hadn’t “fully embraced it,” said Akash Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of hair-care brand Fable & Mane.

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