Mass Beauty and Personal Care in the United Kingdom

PRE-COVID-19 PERFORMANCE

Premium products continue challenging mass categories, but masstige beauty offers pockets of growth in the mass segment

Mass beauty and personal care recorded flat growth in 2019 due to declines in key categories such as fragrances and colour cosmetics. The mass fragrances continue to perform worse than their premium counterparts due to the dominance of celebrity fragrances within mass, which are recording poor performances as they are considered cheap and outdated.

New product developments in private label helps in competition with branded products

Private label continues to compete against branded products, with multiple trend-led and high-quality launches in 2019, which mimic those of existing and often luxury brands. In 2019 and 2020, respectively, both Superdrug and Boots launched ingredients-focussed skin care lines.

Competition from e-commerce encourages modernisation of mass beauty and personal care retailing

At the end of the review period, mass beauty and personal care store-based retailing continued to be under threat from e-commerce, where convenience and affordability reign, as well as being at risk from leading experiential premium retailers that encourage consumers to trade up, such as Space NK. The effects of this threat continued to be most prevalent for Boots, which announced the planned closure of around 200 stores in June 2019.

2020 AND BEYOND

COVID-19 impact

Value sales of mass beauty and personal care are expected to decline by 1% in 2020 at constant 2019 prices in light of the impact of COVID-19. While sales will naturally be impacted by the country’s lockdown in the first half of 2020, with consumers using fewer products, such as colour cosmetics, as they spent most of their time at home, sales will also be impacted by the increase in economic uncertainty.

Affected products within mass beauty and personal care

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will vary considerably across the different product areas in mass beauty and personal care. Products with a non-essential positioning and those generally used in order to maintain an attractive and well-groomed appearance will be hit the hardest, with mass colour cosmetics seeing a strong value decline at constant 2019 prices in 2020 as consumers spend most of their time at home.

Recovery and opportunities

With many companies in the UK furloughing staff during the COVID-19 crisis, others laying off workers as well as the job insecurity for self-employed and zero-hour contract workers, consumer confidence and disposable income are understandably under threat. As a result, consumers were downgrading from premium products, particularly as mass beauty remained more widely accessible in the bricks-and-mortar retailers that were allowed to remain open, such as supermarkets, discounters, drugstores and pharmacies.

Files are delivered directly into your account within a few minutes of purchase.