Amazon is like a dog to a bone when it comes to beauty, and Shopbop, the e-commerce giant’s high-end fashion website, is the latest vehicle it’s using to try to make its mark on the category.
Amazon desperately wants to be taken seriously in beauty, and despite people buying just about everything else on the platform, the world’s largest retailer continues to face two main obstacles: consumers are hesitant to buy beauty products ( or clothing) high-end on Amazon. And as a result, high-end brands are wary of selling there, for fear they will be seen as less luxurious. Among her many attempts to break into the prestigious beauty market was an underwhelming partnership with Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs (the brand relaunched as a Sephora exclusive earlier this year).
Now, Amazon is trying again, minus the Amazon name. Shopbop made its beauty debut this week with a variety of mostly prestigious brands, including Dr. Barbara Sturm, Augustinus Bader, Costa Brazil and Vintner’s Daughter, which sell $300 serums and $100 body creams.
To coincide with the launch, Shopbop’s home page, starting Tuesday morning, features a beauty takeover. It’s the picture of youth and diversity: models with (what appears to be) foundationless complexions and eyelids painted bright blue, purple, orange, and pink. She’s showcasing the modern, undone way of wearing makeup now: a very Gen-Z look that’s distinctly different from the dramatic styles popularized by Millennial beauty YouTubers.
It’s obvious that the online retailer is trying to appeal to a young customer, but most of the products it sells are too expensive for people in their teens or twenties.
What is really going on here?
The move likely isn’t solely due to Amazon building a presence in prestige beauty. Now that its competitors have entered the space, Shopbop may not want to be the only online destination for premium clothing and accessories without its own beauty offering.
Shopbop is the third high-end fashion e-retailer to focus on beauty this year. In May, Moda Operandi announced plans to introduce beauty later this fall and in April, Farfetch unveiled an ambitious three-pronged beauty strategy. Farfetch operates a luxury marketplace, selling brick-and-mortar beauty through London department store Browns, which it acquired in 2015, and is incubating brands with New Guards Group’s beauty arm NGG Beauty (the fragrance line of Off -White “Paperwork”, which was released in May, was NGG Beauty’s first project).
Luca Solca, head of luxury goods research at Bernstein, told me that beauty is more interesting to multi-brand fashion markets and retailers like Shopbop and Farfetch because of the traffic it drives to the site.
“Beauty is a category that consumers buy often, [and] if you manage to take advantage of this traffic and promote other categories such as fashion, this could be a good tailwind for GMV [gross merchandise value] growth,” Solca said.
In terms of traffic generation, beauty is a choice for e-retailers over jewellery: a more obvious complement to fashion, but with far fewer opportunities. Jewelry is the “polar opposite” of beauty because it has a “significantly higher average value, but significantly lower purchase frequency,” she explained.
Shopbop’s approach to the category (as well as that of Moda Operandi and even Net-a-Porter) is not dissimilar to what Walmart is doing.
Last year, the big box store brought in more than 100 beauty brands, many of them geared toward Gen-Z. Walmart isn’t trying to become the premier beauty destination: it’s leveraging its position as the largest retailer in the US The strategy goes something like, “Millions of people are here every day to buy something else, so, How do we get them to buy in this other category that has low yields and high restocking rates?”
That’s even the case for Farfetch, which had an extremely glitzy and expensive launch with the acquisition of Violet Gray and the purchase of several very fancy brands, including Chantecaille and Westman Atelier. But ultimately, unless it’s Sephora or Ulta Beauty, makeup or skincare is just another thing you add to your cart.
To some extent, Shopbop is also doing this. The e-retailer does not accept brands without a name; most of the beauty lines she offers already have high brand recognition or some buzz around them, like Dr. Barbara Sturm or Vintner’s Daughter. Whether or not it will actually constitute a significant part of the business is less important.
The point is that if someone spends hundreds or thousands of dollars on clothes or shoes, they may also be forced to buy a $38 Kevyn Aucoin blush, or at best, a $280 Augustinus Bader “The Cream,” since they are already there, of course.
Source: news.google.com