Shoppers at Adore Beauty, the leading pure-play online beauty platform in Australia, are snapping up clinical skincare products from across the price spectrum.
SkinCeuticals, Alpha H, The Ordinary and Viviology, a masstige in-house brand launched last year in partnership with Sydney-based dermal therapist James Vivian, are a few of the e-tailer’s top sellers in the skincare category. Chelsea Healey, head of brand at Adore Beauty, explains brands like Viviology, which is priced from 35 to 75 Australian dollars or about $22 to $48, are responding to a growing demand for accessible skincare products with clinical positioning.
“We’re seeing this step up from The Ordinary,” she says. “So, still not in that luxury price point, but that price point that feels like there’s a lot of effort being put into the products and a lot of scientific backing.”
Adore Beauty is intent on building a robust price-agnostic offering. The e-tailer stocks 12,000-plus beauty products from 270 global brands like Tan Luxe, Weleda, Bondi Sands, Embryolisse, K18, Bioderma, Antipodes, Innisfree, Grown Alchemist, Clarins, Clinique, Lancome and Makeup For Ever. It’s looking to increase its mass and luxury market share as it caters to a customer base that values performance and trends over cost. Healey says, “We can have a $100 lipstick next to a $7 cream.”
In addition to skincare, haircare and fragrance are top-performing categories at Adore Beauty. Customers are gravitating toward professional haircare brands like Kerastase, Redken, Kevin Murphy, Christophe Robin and Olaplex. Emerging brands like Juliette Has A Gun and Who Is Elijah are gaining traction in fragrance alongside luxury mainstays like Estée Lauder, Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, Armani and Aesop.
In its fiscal year 2023, Adore Beauty’s sales dipped 9% to 180.6 million Australian dollars or roughly $114 million. In August, the e-tailer reported fiscal year 2024 sales were getting off to a strong start and were up 5.9%. Makeup is beginning to swing upward at it.
Dewy skin and no makeup-makeup products resonate the most with makeup shoppers at Adore Beauty. Dior, Benefit and MAC Cosmetics are some of its top performers in the category. Healey theorizes that makeup will continue to advance at Adore Beauty as customers lean into the happiness-inducing effects of color products. The e-tailer’s recent State of Beauty 2023 Report underlines the trend of makeup as a balm during unsettled times.
“We’re looking for these moments of joy after a really stressful, dark period of time,” says Healey. “All this research is coming out about the antidote to that being play and how color can really help with that. We deemed it ‘joyscaping’ in the report, and similar to fragrance, it’s these beauty products that give you that feeling of joy.”
Along with joyscaping, the report produced by Adore Beauty in partnership with Melbourne trend forecasting agency Soon Future Studies identifies “peer reviewing” and “flourishing” as trends that will influence shopping behavior and product development. Peer-reviewing ties into consumers’ dependence on credible experts and knowledgable advice to make purchasing decisions, and flourishing speaks to the expanding role of wellness in beauty.
Adore Beauty’s customers are asking for more options in wellness, and the e-tailer is expanding the category encompassing sexual wellness, period care and oral care. “We dedicate a lot of energy to talking to our community base. They’re an early adopter audience and that sort of led us into categories that don’t necessarily fit into the traditional norm of beauty,” says Healey. “We were the first major Australian beauty retailer to launch the sex category.”
Le Wand, Smile Makers, Lelo, Vush, Womanizer and Jonny are some of the brands in Adore Beauty’s sex products lineup. Menopause and sleep care are wellness categories the e-tailer expects to dive deeper into. The Beauty Chef’s Supergenes Sleep Support supplement is among its bestselling wellness products.
When it comes to scouting the next big up-and-coming beauty brand, Healey is on hunt for early category leaders with unique positioning. She singles out the Australian brands Ultra Violette and LBDO as examples. Healey says, “Our role as the retailer is to understand what those category shifts will be and then to sort of act fast on those early adopters that we really feel like have the potential to be the leaders.”
Niche international brands that enter Adore’s assortment typically have a prominent digital presence and social media buzz. South Korean brand CosRx and Japanese skincare brand Hado Labo are resonating with shoppers on the website.
Women between the ages of 25 and 40 constitute Adore Beauty’s largest customer pool. The e-tailer boasts 801,000 active customers, a number that’s risen 11% on a three-year basis. Moving forward, Adore Beauty is out to broaden its audience of gen X shoppers. The e-tailer is turning to owned brands, third-party brands and content to reach the new target audience. Last fiscal year, Adore Beauty more than tripled its private-label stockkeeping units to 38.
Healey says, “The last taboo of beauty is really aging and the brands that are able to reposition aging as a bit of a superpower and stop talking about it as this really daunting, fear-inducing period of life I think will win.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.