Retail round-up: Lunar New Year airport pop-ups are a data-capture gift to beauty retailers

Lancome Renovated Absolue Cushion

DFNI associate editor, ALISON FARRINGTON reports on the travel retail beauty opportunity for Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is upon us and travel retailers across Asia have been creating special promotions designed to attract passengers for the biggest Chinese shopping opportunity of the year. Travel retail or duty free shoppers are big business. Often referred to as the ‘Sixth Continent’, in 2018 the global market was worth $79bn.

Beauty remains the biggest and fastest-growing product sector in travel retail, while Asia Pacific is the category’s main growth driver. In 2018 the region saw beauty sales grow 23.5% to a total of $31.5bn. Beauty and fashion accessories are the biggest pull for Chinese travellers eager to snap up seasonal limited editions at the airport. This year’s theme is Year of the Rat (sometimes interpreted as a mouse) and we’ve seen brands adopting characterful themes such as Rocket Rat and even Mickey Mouse. (more…)

Disneyrollergirl 0 Comments Beauty, Brands, Business of fashion, Events, Retail concepts, Shopping Alison Farrington, brands, business of beauty, Chinese New Year, Cle de Peau, events, Kiehl's, Lancome, long read, Nars, retail concepts, Shiseido, shopping, T Galleria, travel retail

2 February, 2016

Buy it now: the best beauty and fashion gifts for Chinese New Year

When is it not gift seaason somewhere in the world? Between Christmas and Valentine’s comes the Lunar New Year, AKA, an opportunity for stores to promote some full price product in festive red and gold. Unsurprisingly, it’s the luxury stores who are pulling out the stops to present enticing, Chinese-friendly gifts, especially with monkey-themed motifs or in editions of lucky number eight.

In truth, I’m not seeing a huge amount of innovation. The beauty brands get my vote for gorgeous jewel-like compacts in lovely packaging – for example this Estee Lauder compact and the Giorgio Armani Illuminating Palette – but for leathergoods brands like Jimmy Choo and Mulberry it’s a case of merchandising all the reds and golds together for a simple (but probably quite effective) pick-n-mix offer.

In China, Burberry is doing what it does best, using social platform WeChat to let users digitally unwrap gifts and create personalised digital Lunar New Year envelopes to send to friends and family. But elsewhere, it’s about slapping a monkey on anything and everything and hoping for the best. Here’s my edit.

SHOP THE POST BELOW…