Are Fast Fashion Brands Not Good at Cosmetics?
- Chaileedo Press
- May 2, 2023
- 2 min read
Some industry insiders have said, “Currently, the volume of cross-border cosmetics business is still very small and cannot stop the continued decline in the performance of fast fashion brands in recent years.”
In recent years, with the popularity of the cosmetics market, it has become a trend for fast fashion brands to cross over into cosmetics. Fast fashion brands such as H&M, Zara, Forever21, and Lululemon have all entered the cosmetics field.
From the product side, international fast fashion brands often prefer color cosmetics. In 2009, Forever21 launched its first self-owned color cosmetics brand Love & Beauty, and in 2014, it launched another color cosmetics brand F21 Premium that focuses on affordable high quality.
Another giant in the fast fashion industry, Inditex Group’s main fast fashion brands currently all have color cosmetics product lines. Zara launched its first lipstick series Zara Ultimatte in 2018 and then launched a full line of color cosmetics Zara Beauty. Bershka launched a full line of color cosmetics Beauty by Bershka in 2017. Pull&Bear and Bershka also launched color cosmetics lines Hey Beauty! in the same year.
“The development prospects of the cosmetics market attract the covetousness of countless companies outside the industry. The fast fashion industry has also become a main force in the cross-border army, betting the company’s second growth curve on cosmetics,” an industry insider told CHAILEEDO. “But currently, the volume of cross-border cosmetics business is still very small and cannot stop the continued decline in the performance of fast fashion brands in recent years.”
In the past decade, international fast fashion retail brands such as H&M, ZARA, and GAP have entered the Chinese market one after another, providing consumers with fashionable and trendy clothing at affordable prices. With the rise and upgrade of the Chinese consumer market, they have achieved rapid expansion.
Objectively speaking, fast fashion brands have a natural channel advantage and supply chain advantage in the cosmetics business due to their mature offline store network. In the past, the main way for fast fashion brands to sell cosmetics was often to rely on their own existing brand channels and crowd assets to sell cosmetics.
CHAILEEDO has learned that although there are already notes on platforms such as Xiaohongshu about cross-border cosmetics brands such as H&M Beauty, most of these cross-border brands have not yet opened official online flagship stores in China and have not carried out large-scale marketing and promotion. The purchase channels can only be through overseas purchasing agents and cosmetics counters in offline brand stores.
Correspondingly, Chinese fast fashion brands such as HLA only treat cosmetics as an accessory and have not made sustained investment and operation, which has led to a lack of competitiveness in the cosmetics field.
“For fast fashion brands, the brand’s own design capabilities and supply chain capabilities are its core competitiveness,” an industry insider said . “The lack of marketing capabilities, cosmetics research and development capabilities, and operational capabilities is the fatal shortcoming of fast fashion brands.”
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