← The Barefaced Podcast
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- [00:27]
A
Hello and welcome back to the Bareface Podcast, a beauty business podcast hosted by me. My name is Lily twelve Tree. I'm a beauty analyst and data science student. And this week is Paris Fashion Week. So in this episode we're going to be doing a deep dive into luxury fashion brands and their beauty brands. Why do they exist, how do they work, who owns them, what's changing and how do they market to stay relevant? But firstly, I hope we've all had a great week. I don't really listen to podcasts, so the pace of growth of this thing is actually blown my mind and the response has been so overwhelmingly positive. So thank you to everyone who has reached out with kind words and suggestions for this show. It means more than you know. Other than that. I spent the last week wrapped up in learning everything about affiliates from Amazon to LTK and TikTok shop. I didn't realize that affiliates have been so democratized. And it's actually mid tier creators that are really driving these platforms. And what all of this means is that influencer and creative metrics and the way that we actually measure how well something performs has really shifted. And the way that back in the day, high view counts with low followers would be seen as a vanity metric or reflected negatively on a creator's ability to foster community that has completely been reinvented. And brands also seem to be struggling with navigating that. So if you're interested in understanding that dynamic, that's up on Substack. But this week's episode, as I mentioned, it's Paris Fashion Week. It's the start of the fashion weeks. And so we're going to be looking at luxury fashion houses and their beauty brands. There are the big four, Chanel Beauty, Dior Beauty, Gucci Beauty and YSL Beauty. But in the last 12 months alone, Balmain have launched a fragrance. Celine launched Celine Beauty. Prada at the end of 2023 launched Prada Beauty muumu is set to launch a makeup line. This year, Balenciaga is launching fragrance. And the infamous Marc Jacobs beauty is meant to be having a comeback. When and why did all of these luxury fashion houses start launching beauty brands? What is their purpose? I wanted to understand this because to me, some of these beauty brands even feel bigger than the fashion houses themselves. Like Tom Ford or Marc Jacobs at peak, Marc Jacobs Beauty or even sometimes ysl. And again, I'm biased. I'm not a fashion girly, I'm a beauty girly. But the way that luxury brands are able to infiltrate culture through beauty by its more Accessible means rather than luxury fashion is interesting and I wanted to know how much the beauty arm of these businesses is taking off. Is there growth there? What's the difference in margins of beauty to something like leather goods? Because even if it's comparable, obviously the cost of a leather good is way higher. But then if you're selling more of the beauty, how does all of this work? I had so many questions and how do luxury fashion brands even sell beauty? How do Runway shows play into it? How are they incorporating all of this into their marketing for 2025 to compete? Modern beauty landscape, which we've very well established in previous episodes, is so, so saturated. How are these big brands able to compete? This whole episode idea actually came from something quite niche and that's the Loewe candles. If you haven't seen these candles, they were launched in 2020 and it's the Garden Series by Loewe. So there's 11 cents that are all inspired by a vegetable garden. There's the really famous tomato, there's the cucumber, and something about a Lux not having a fragrance. But a candle and then making them all food centered was just too on the nose in terms of conversations happening in the Zeitgeist that it just stopped me in my tracks and made me wonder, hmm, what's happening here? So as always, I'm going to break this episode down into three major parts. Firstly, how do luxury beauty brands actually work? Secondly, we'll look at their retailing. What's changing? What has been historically the way that these luxury fashion houses have sold beauty. And then thirdly, we'll scrape the top of the surface of their marketing. But without further ado, let's get into it. So how do luxury fashion houses, beauty lines actually work? Let's first understand just a little bit of the psychology of luxury. This is nothing groundbreaking, but it helps to set a foundation. So beauty is prime for luxury as much as fashion because at the end of the day they're non essential goods. Consumers don't need fashion, they don't need beauty to live and therefore they're bought by consumers with disposable income. And what this means is that when you're buying a beauty or fashion product purely because it makes you feel something, whether what it makes you feel is about yourself and it invokes feelings of confidence or empowerment or maybe makes you feel desirable or hot for someone else, that's entirely your prerogative. But these products exist and are sold on their ability to afflict emotions, which is entirely up to self interpretation. This means that benefits of these products in most cases have to be communicated to you. It needs to be detailed to you why one lipstick is better than another, or why matching fragrances to your mood or a time of year, or attaching them to a memory is better than having a singular go to. Because the sale of these products relies on communication so often, the popularity of these products is directly linked to the marketing budgets and abilities of brands that are selling it. This gives luxury brands the upper hand because higher price points means higher profit margins, which means increased marketing budgets to communicate to you why you need something. And for the most part, all of this is obvious, right? Nothing I've explained is groundbreaking or you wouldn't know. Likely. But I do think that we downplay the significance of luxury marketing if we consider that the owner of lvmh, Bernardo Noel, is currently the fifth richest person alive and he's bounced between fifth and first. And this is a man that has earned his millions purely through selling luxury goods. He is so rich purely because the profit margins on these products are so high, but he's been able to communicate to enough people that they need these things that he's the fifth richest person alive. Luxury businesses have a push and pull when it comes to exclusivity and affordability. On one hand, as soon as something becomes more accessible, therefore more affordable, their sales rise, which is obviously what they want. But with increased sales and increased accessibility, they lose the exclusivity and therefore desirability that these high profile players want to be, these brands want to attract. The best example of this is Hermes with the infamous Birkin. By marketing and selling the desirability of these bags so well, which is done by creating like producing less of them. The amount of money that the brand generates goes up as they create less bags. It's actually absurd, but as a business model, painfully genius, but infuriating. And then this is where luxury beauty enters the picture. Because luxury beauty is aligned enough with the image of these fashion houses that everyday people want to engage with the brand, but at a more justifiable price point, while still being far enough away from the brand that the brand themselves can hang on to this artisanal high fashion messaging. Luxury beauty allows for brands to chase sales through accessibility and while maintaining that exclusivity element. But now with that understanding, we need to understand the business of luxury beauty. And to understand the world of luxury brands means that you need to understand licensing. How luxury beauty has worked for majority of its existence has been through licensing agreements. Editing Lily here. So majority of their existence as in majority of luxury fashion house beauty brands, not as in majority of time. Because as I'll go into later, the OG fashion houses that had beauty lines, the Diors, the Chanel, they did not go the licensing route. Running a beauty business is no easy job and it requires hundreds of specialized people if you want to do it well, which luxury brands obviously do. So to be able to launch a beauty brand, what companies like Gucci and Marc Jacobs do is they partner with a conglomerate who is specialized in beauty to hand off the logistics in creating the beauty brand and they instead enter in a profit share agreement. And you can't talk about beauty licensing without looking at Coty. I've made a visual for the brands that Coty owns and have popped it up on stub sack just to give you an idea idea. Because Cody owns the luxury licensing of players like Burberry, Vera Wang, Tiffany and co Gucci, Marc Jacobs, Miu Miu, Balenciaga, Hugo Boss, Marnie and Chloe. And they also own majority stakes in non luxury beauty players like Kylie Cosmetics, Skin by Kim, Calvin Klein, Adidas, Covergirl, Max Factor, Rimmel, Sally Hansen, just to name a few. There are so many. So Coty is a conglomerate, have these specialized people, whether that be in manufacturing, distribution, logistics, marketing, that then work across multiple brands to give these luxury fashion houses the ability to sell quality beauty products without the fashion house themselves having to build out that team which is timely, costly. And on the whole, luxury beauty has been built off of these licensing deals. But what's happened in the last decade in particular is that beauty has taken off so considerably that luxury fashion houses have started changing how they approach their beauty lines as they grow as key categories in their business. Because beauty, as we all know, has just taken off in the last five to ten years. So please note that luxury beauty has always been and likely always will be the smallest of the beauty segments. McKinsey and Co identified that the segment in 2023 occupied just 4% of the industry by retail sales. That said, luxury was also found to be the segment with the largest compound annual growth rate of all segments heading into the next five years at 9%. So when luxury brands first wanted to expand into beauty, licensing was perfect. The brand would take home just straight profit purely for existing in a relatively small market. For them, it would spread the reach of the brand, introduce them to new potential fashion and leather customers, and they wouldn't have to touch any of the logistics deal made in heaven. Because again, for many of these fashion houses, beauty revenue is nothing on what they generate through fashion and leather goods. If we look at 2023, LVMH's beauty sales were, which was nothing compared to their 45 billion in fashion and leather goods. Not to mention how much luxury beauty conglomerates are struggling. If we compare big beauty conglomerate stock performance to the S&P 500, which is the stock performance of the 500 of the largest companies listed on the stock Exchange in the US the S&P 500 grew 22% in the last 12 months. Yet LVMH was back 8.4%, L'Oreal was back 27.6%, Estee Lauder was back 40 and Coty was back 44.1%. Of course, I made this into a pretty graph and it's up on substack. But Coty has had the worst performing year of all. And as we spoke about just before, their business has a significantly large percentage which is driven by these luxury licensing agreements. According to Investing.com, they maintain their gross profit margins at 65%, which is standard for the industry. But it still will never not be wild to see it in print. So now you've got all these conglomerates not selling, so what's the benefit for the brand? If we look at under the hood at one of these brands, LVMH, in October 2024, they published at their growth of the first nine months of the year. The only category that had positive growth other than selective retailing, which is dominated by Sephora, was perfumes and cosmetics. Perfumes and cosmetics was up 5%. Selective retailing was the only one to beat that at 6%. Fashion and leather goods was back 1%, jewelry back 3%, and wine and spirits were back 8%. Brand I've included this table upon substack. So what all this means for fashion houses is their beauty brands, in short, have gone to shit. The conglomerates aren't selling yet. The desire for beauty is growing and they don't even own or operate that part of their own business. And this has caused a heap of movements between luxury brands and their licensees. The most direct way brands are starting to combat this is by taking back control of their beauty businesses and ending their licensing agreements. Brands like Dolce and Gabbana chose not to renew their licensing agreement with Shiseido and instead released an entirely new line in House in 2023. And they said that this was to have more control over product development and distribution. But as we've discussed, building a beauty brand inside a fashion house with strict brand guidelines, huge boards and with layers and layers of approval processes has made this option historically pretty undesirable for most brands. And big players that don't follow this model are Dior, Chanel. Chanel is the real outlier. They're privately owned, but it's also Chanel. They're so established with their beauty line launching in 1924 that they've been able to build out those teams and resources and also just cult like status over time. But then you've also got Dior that launched Dior perfumes in 1947. So now that they've got the support and backing of lvmh, that makes them even more comfortable. But they've been doing this for decades also. But that model is very atypical for brands. So instead you've got more and more that are wanting more out of their licensing deals, but don't want to bring them house either. So Prada and Miu Miu ended their long standing agreement with puke and joined L'Oreal. And since then they've both announced that they'll be expanding from just fragrance and into makeup. Something that L'Oreal knows a lot more about than Puke. But also the licensees know this. They know that the brands want to be expanding to capitalize on this interest in beauty. So Kering, for example, launched a beauty division in 2023 so they could roll out out the beauty lines for their own brands and have been wildly successful like Bottega Veneta with their launch into beauty through perfumes in 2024. It was also mentioned in a business of fashion piece which I've linked in the show notes because it's a fantastic resource. It was hinted that Kering, who own Gucci but have a licensing agreement with Cody, may try and use this new branch of their business to end that licensing agreement and bring Gucci back in house. But then another layer of this is that the licensees don't want to lose those brands either. So another trend that we're seeing is that the conglomerate themselves are buying the fashion houses outright purely in order to maintain control of the beauty business. In 2022, Estee Lauder had been operating Tom Ford's incredibly successful beauty and fragrance line under their licensing agreement. And instead of losing the brand, they made the decision to spend a whopping US 2.8 billion to purchase the Tom Ford brand in its entirety. Another example is that Pugh bought Dries Van Nuhton, clothed and all. And these are types of examples of exactly why I wanted to look into these businesses. Because for a beauty conglomerate to buy a fashion house. Surely, surely that implies that the beauty portion of these businesses is bigger than the fashion portion of these businesses, which is such an interesting shift in dynamic and also just biggest frustration ever when beauty is spoken about as being the side piece to fashion, when in fact that these deals would suggest otherwise, that fashion almost in some instances is like a really expensive marketing activity for the real money maker, which is beauty. Tom Ford to me is a perfect example, again with the caveat that I'm not a fashion girly, but I consume a lot of fashion pop media which essentially just translates to I find fashion weeks fun, but Tom Ford for Gucci everything and more Tom Ford for Tom Ford has never been anywhere near as buzzy or relevant to me and there's likely a timeliness there because I was a child during his reign of his namesake brand. But also Tom Ford for Gucci was when I was 2 or 3 and I know way more about that. All to say is that Tom Ford Beauty has been inescapable. Those bronzing palettes, the single pot eyeshadows I wanted as a 12 year old that were like $80 each. Of course, the wildly iconic Tom Ford fragrances that have done such a brilliant job at existing in prestig retailers, but at luxury price points yet not feeling out of place at all. One strategic decision that the brand has made that has allowed them to grow like this is their retail distribution. John Dempsey, ex executive group president of Estee Lauder, told WWD that Tom Ford beauty is controlled profitable growth and the distribution is really tight, which is one thing that most of these luxury brands most certainly cannot say. Part 2 retailing one of the big drawbacks of fashion houses not owning their beauty brands outright is that fashion houses and licensees very often have competing ideals. These beauty giants prioritize expansion and mass distribution, which often is at odds with the brand's core luxury positioning. And the most obvious way that we see that resistance is through retail. The biggest difference between luxury fashion and luxury beauty is the number of touch points the average person has with one over the other. And while that's intentional, it's very confusing. Veronique, senior partner and managing director of MAD MAD luxury consulting firm based in Paris, told the business of fashion that with luxury fashion, you're talking about 400 stores around the world. In beauty you're talking about 15,000 or 20,000 points of sale. With luxury beauty having profit margins between 75 to 95%, beauty is sold at much lower price points, forcing the business model to rely on high volume. This is why historically luxury beauty has had to rely on scaling retail. And for so long that made sense. These were the only brands that were bold enough to charge such high price points that they developed an entirely new segment of beauty. And they could justify these price points because you were purchasing into a brand in a world that otherwise would cost you thousands for a small leather good. But that desirability was enough to justify placing the products anywhere, and the brand name alone was enough to sell it. But over the past few years, because we've seen again this rapid rise in prestige beauty that's given luxury beauty a real run for its money. And in many ways, prestige beauty has had the upper hand over luxury because they've been more selective with their retailing. You'll find Le Labo at standalone stores or in specialty beauty retailers like Selfridges in the UK or Mecco in the Australia or Nordstrom in the us but then Chanel. When I walked through the Sydney CBD last week, I could buy Chanel, the fashion brand at their standalone store or in Westfield, David Jones or Maya. But then Chanel Beauty and Chanel Fragrance on the other hand is at David Jones, Meyer Lottie Duty Free and Chemist Warehouse, but then also online on Amazon, the Iconic and Harvey Norman, which doesn't make sense anymore. So one way that luxury brands are trying to regain control is through travel retail. The first time I worked in house at a beauty brand, I was shocked by how it felt like every meeting we walked into that was anything at all to do with sales performance. Travel retail was always spoken about and I barely knew what it was. Travel retail is simply the sales of products or services sold to travelers, which is usually directly referencing airports. Of course I understood the size of the travel industry, but really the sale of these products that aren't at all related to the country you're going to or traveling from those random little duty free sections. Is that significant of a retail channel? And in short, yes. Fortune Business Insight reported that with the post pandemic travel boom ongoing, travel retail is set to surpass 117 billion in global sales by 2030, growing at nearly 10% annually from 2022. But this doesn't actually mean all that much to me because the growth of it annually, I don't have a reference point of anything to do with travel retail. And also when people thr out entire industry figures like 117 billion in global sales compared to what? I don't know what that means. All I know is that 10% year on year is going to compound incredibly nicely. So to try and better understand this, I worked backwards from a stat that I found on Statista about the global E comm sales through 2010-2020 during the E Comm boom. Because I live that, I understand that. And I found that the growth year on year was at 22%. So E Com became a thing and in the 10 years that followed it was growing at 22% a year. Travel retail and duty free started in 1947 in Ireland and now is having 10% growth a year. That's half of E Com during the E Comm boom. Like how, how is this happening? And why does this affect luxury beauty more than anyone else? The most obvious reason as to why travel retail is so lucrative is because of the saturation of foot traffic. Sydney international has roughly 1.5 million people that pass through through it a month. Tokyo Haneda 1.9 million JFK New York 5.2 million London Heathrow 8 million. That's more people than brands could ever dream of in major malls or shopping precincts. But this isn't the full picture. Travel retail, there's also a forced dwelling time. Potential shoppers are literally forced to spend time in a space where your products are stocked and offered at a slight discount in duty free. And I've been researching and writing this episode for quite a while, but I held out recording it because I knew I was going to be going through Sydney International in just a few days. And I have before. But honestly, I've never really paid attention. And tell me why I've never noticed how insane international airports are for luxury. I took some videos and some photos and I'll mash them together into a video for Substack so you can get a visual reference of what I'm talking about. Because I think until I saw this in person, I was meshing high end prestige beauty with luxury beauty. Because when I think about luxury beauty, I think of le Labo and Dr. Barbara Sturm. And while they were around, I know I definitely saw Le Labo in the duty free section. They were so far from dominant it's not even funny. What we're really talking about is Chanel, Hermes, Tom Ford, ysl, Gucci, and all these major, major fashion brands that we've spent all of today's episode talking about. So as soon as you go through the security and body scanner thing at the Sydney International Airport, Margot Robbie is in your face with her latest Chanel campaign and you are forced to experience the cleanest, most premium looking department store like experience. You've ever had. I hate eight department stores, but this doesn't feel like a department store. It's. It's laid out like one, but it's far cleaner. It's way less chaotic. There's a lot less people in there, there's a lot more space. And then you finally make it out of beauty and you've got all these same brands but with their standalone mega fashion stores. And that's when it's hit me that the traffic is what makes this place run. But the real reason that travel retail is a haven for luxury brands is because they're all in bed together. The bloody Sunglass Hut had a six foot animatronic face art installation and the Dior beauty section had a boucle couch and seating area. There are then 50 beauty employees that are trained on luxury beauty specifically. So travel retail allows luxury brands to reimagine the mall with only brands that are at the same price point selling the same style of aesthetic and life. They all get to exist purely alongside one another. And if we also consider that travel retail is mostly referring to international travel retail, which is a high cost activity, it means that those high foot traffic numbers that I mentioned before is not only a lot of people, it's a lot of rich people, people that have the means to be traveling internationally, especially recreationally. They have an incredibly high amount of disposable income and luxury spending ability compared to the majority of the population. There have been a lot of doubts over the first few years post Covid about the health of travel and other factors like geopolitical conflict, cost of living, higher interest rates, etc. But Airports Council international data forecasted a 12% gain in traffic in 2024, with an additional 9% in 2025 and an additional 7% in 2026. Connor Gaynor, a travel and leisure analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, spoke in a YouTube video that I found that had 100 views but was actually incredibly brilliant at articulating where growth opportunities are in travel retail and why it's so relevant. Because I couldn't find anyone to explain to me much about travel retail at all. And definitely nothing specifically about beauty and travel retail. But in that YouTube video, Bloomberg Intelligence had created a graph that I'll pop up on Substack and it showed four of the huge travel brands, Avolta Lagarde Travel, SSP and WH Smith Travel. How much of the revenue of each of these brands is generated by region? And over 75% of the revenue of all four brands was being generated purely fully by Europe and North America. And that might be obvious to some, but it wasn't to me. And it took me a second to clue in that obviously the reasons that so many of these brands would have focused on Europe in the first place is not only because it's the birthplace of a lot of luxury, but think about the ease of traveling internationally in Europe. Think about the density of duty free retailers in Europe. It's wild. Conroy explained that transatlantic travel is the most mature pure travel regions in the world, and that means they will not be driving the growth. The growth will actually come from developing hotspots in Asia, particularly India, and also the rapid growth of the Middle east, particularly as a travel hub. All of this is to say is that travel retail in many respects is luxury beauty's opportunity to be selective. It's luxury brands opportunity to regain control over their crazy widespread distribution from the early 2000s thousands and to market themselves as lux again by being positioned alongside only other brands that can invest in travel retail because it's bloody costly. What I believe is happening here is the way you would go to Sephora, Space, nk, Selfridges or Mecca for a very specific type of product and those stores have a reputation for a certain experience. Is what I believe to be likely what luxury brands are aiming to recreate with travel retail. For you to directly link the purchase of a luxury perfume or a luxury foundation with the experience of traveling. But what this model poses a challenge for is marketing. Because by the time a customer is going through travel retail, that's when you want them to transact. Because for most, traveling internationally is not a super regular occurrence. So instead luxury beauty brands will need to lay the groundwork beforehand. And luxury marketing is a whole other topic.
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So Part three Marketing before we dive into luxury marketing strategies, let's get a bit of a sense check on whether or not it's actually working. If you listen to the episode on celebrity beauty brands and you would know that I love Reddit, particularly for getting a snapshot of how the general public feels towards something. And that's because people on Reddit are brutal as fuck. There is barely any censorship on the platform and it's all in all a really great place I've found to get beauty sentiment data. So by using Reddit's API and a sentiment analysis tool, I was able to analyze a thousand comments that reference the luxury fashion house and then the luxury beauty brand. We can then compare them to get a starting point of how consumers feel about these brands. And I did look at mentions across all of Reddit rather than a specific subreddit. But that said, to my knowledge at least, there is a more vibrant and lively beauty community on Reddit than there is a fashion community. But again, maybe that's confirmation bias, but.
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I thought it was worth a mention.
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So the results didn't just swing in one direction, it was very brand dependent, which surprised me. Chanel Beauty had 9% more comments with a positive sentiment than Chanel Fashion. Gucci Beauty had 5% more comments with a positive sentiment over Gucci Fashion, but then Dior Fashion had 1% more comments with a positive sentiment over Dior Beauty and YSL was the same with YSL Fashion having 1% more comments with a positive sentiment than YSL Beauty. I've built these numbers out into donut charts which is up on substack for a more visual representation which makes all of this make a bit more sense.
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Because it can be hard to visualize.
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Firstly, but then also to compare across brands to figure out which is swinging.
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Which way because then also if you.
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Look at comments with a neutral sentiment, they were way more dominant in Chanel Fashion for example, and that then reduced the amount of comments with a negative sentiment.
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So it's up over there if you.
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Want to have a look.
- [30:09]
A
The donut charts also really highlight that the perception of these brands on the whole is is quite comparable. All the fashion houses and beauty brands have a majority positive sentiment with Chanel being the only fashion brand to have less than 50% of the comments expressing a positive sentiment. So my knee jerk reaction to why this would be is that Dior and YSL Beauty are far more active than Chanel and Gucci Beauty in the trendy beauty space. Therefore in Reddit commentary and Dior with their lip oils and blushes and YSL with their Touche Clarke and of course the horribly received blush lawns earlier last year perhaps opens these two brands up to more criticism rather than Chanel and Gucci Beauty. We won't give too much time to my hypotheses because it's not entirely relevant. My final ad is that of all the fashion houses and their beauty brands, Gucci Fashion had the most comments with a negative sentiment at 18% which I just thought was quite interesting. But I put a story up on Instagram and asked the Bareface followers when they are actually excited by luxury and the commentary was very uniform. Normally that when they're creative and when they're innovative and if there's one marketing tool that luxury brands have invested into for years and their status as a fashion house affords them over all other brands is of course, the fashion weeks. Vogue actually has a brilliant video on YouTube titled A History of the Fashion Show Front Row, 1950s to now, which is incredible at showing how the business of runways have changed. Like, who are the people that are in front row years ago, and it was essentially fashion buyers and then it became media and then it became influencers and how that change over time has influenced the business element of these shows. But I would love to do a version of this for beauty, but I highly recommend having a watch of the Vogue one, because Vogue, honestly, they do these deep dives that are actually quite slept on, which is hilarious to consider Vogue being slept on. And they did this to themselves by Vogue, making their entire social media presence about celebrities. But anyway, I digress. It's a good video. Of course, beauty is an accessory to the clothes and fashion week. But fashion houses are still able to use these moments to inspire the same level of excitement through less commercial products and less commercial visuals and create these pieces purely for the sake of excitement. And really what that translates to on social media is reach. Yet none of them for beauty really ever do that. The one brand that did do this and took full advantage of the Runway was Pat McGrath with her massively viral glass skin she created for John Galliano's four winter Maison Margiela show in 2020 and a year later. So just last week, Pat McGrath Labs released a version of the product that people can now shop for and use at home to recreate this look. Will it go on to become a bestseller?
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Probably not.
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A
But was this one of the most culturally relevant beauty moments and now products of the last year? Absolutely. What will likely happen for these luxury fashion houses that want to grow beauty as a part of their business? They're going to have to find a way to cut through the saturation of beauty through design and creativity. That, at its core, is what makes these brands different, different from prestige brands. And I think this is exactly why we'll see younger fashion houses with their beauty lines become more relevant than the Diors and the Chanel's. Because how do you create products that are innovative, different and new through a beauty line that is so established? I truly have no idea. But when we look at younger brands launching lines, we see not only obvious concepts, but trends. Bottega Veneta perfumes that I mentioned before, that was the fashion house's first non fashion launch and was done through creating a truly beautiful bottle that you don't even care what it smells like. You just want to present that in your home, this blending of using beauty is like the utility element to sell really a piece of design or homewares is the direction that I think we'll see a lot of these brands going in. Or consider Jacques Mousse and the way that they have become so relevant as a brand entirely through quirky and different advertising. Creativity is the currency that these brands have have over prestige brands. And if they don't flex that muscle, they're never going to be able to catch up or compete with prestige brands that are now cult like themselves. Look at loewe and their $150 candles. They are stunning and again you want to have them as a decorative piece as much as you want to smell them. Another thing that Loewe have done, which is very much become a trend in its own right, is that incorporation of food. As I mentioned before, Loewe launched a candle collection in 2020 known as the Vegetable Garden with 11 plant inspired scenes. Sense and I made a TikTok video on why food is being used by so many brands, fashion and beauty alike to sell more expensive products. And long story short is that if you've heard of the concept of the lipstick effect, during economic downturn, people buy small things to feel good, which back in the day used to be lipstick, but because of inflation now the cost of lipstick is so much that now you're more likely to buy fancy food, whether that be fancy butter or a nice croissant or go out for a glass of wine. That's become the new lipstick because of the cost of living. So we're seeing brands position themselves alongside those things to be perceived as more attainable luxury. Beauty brands have the ability to be an extension of the fashion house's creativity. From Runway to couture to ready to wear and then continue that on to beauty. Right now with these licensing agreements and this mass availability model that beauty brands aren't an extension of the fashion house. So they just feel like a cash grab. And again when the market is so saturated and you would run rather spend $80 on a face tint from Westman Atelier because it's been communicated to you through Gucci Westman celebrity makeup artists and they have all their comms around the quality of the makeup rather than a Chanel face tint for the same price. But your touch points with Chanel are the Paris Fashion Week show this year that was poorly received or the fact that you can find it in the corner of random pharmacies. So the difference that these brands have the unique selling point the marketing opportunity is through extending that creativity, which they just haven't done yet. And that brings us to the end of this episode. I guess the next big question that I have about luxury beauty that I touched on at the end there is the fashion shows. Fashion shows are the highest of budget marketing activities in the world and I'm desperate to unpack how this spend impacts beauty. Because when you're passing Pat McGrath, for example, and you book head makeup artists for a gig like Maison Margiela, and that that decision has to be strategic for both your personal brand and the cosmetic brand, at what scale is it no longer you just booking a job and something so much bigger and the way that that impacts, you know, models reach a point where it's no longer just about trying to book a job for the cash that it has in your pocket so you can live. Because you grow your reputation so much that those decisions of where you want to position yourself in magazines and with certain brands means more than just the amount that you'll be paid. At what scale is it no longer just booking a job and something much bigger? If we continue the Pat example, did she get to use her own products? Are you able to shoot behind the scene content for your personal brand? And if not, why do it? When did fashion shows become a marketing activity as opposed to being for buyers, as we spoke about? And if there's one thing I learned from last week's episode is to just put out into the world my wildest request. So if anyone knows any head makeup artists at fashion weeks, or better yet, are able to extend a media invite for fall winter, please be sure to get in touch. And on that note, if you work in Beauty or Martech and just want to be in touch, be sure to flick me an email or send a DM or LinkedIn on LinkedIn or something. I used to be pretty good at scanning through people that were finding bareface on TikTok and becoming mutuals with them and being able to grow that relationship. But as the rate of growth excitingly has picked up with Bare Face, a good problem to have, I'm starting to miss a lot of you. So please don't hesitate to reach out. I love hearing from other people in this space and be able to ask questions and foster that relationship and just know more people in the industry that are doing really, really cool shit. So yeah, otherwise, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to follow the Bareface podcast wherever you're listening, because it really does help. And if you want more about today's episode or you want to re reference parts that we spoke about. The whole outline and key figures and statistics and graphs are up on substack. Otherwise you can find me everywhere else via the link in bio and I will see you next time. Next episode I've not decided between two ideas. I'm filming this actually from Japan. I either want to do deep dive into Japanese beauty because it's not spoken about as much as Korean beauty. I did do a deep dive into Korean beauty, but I want to understand the differences. But then I also kind of want to do a piece on the marketing of countries. The way that I got sent a product last week and it was made in Korea and I immediately thought positively about that brand and that product, rather than China, for example, has a lot of stigma around made in China, that being negative. Or then the nationalism element. Like I know when I see something made in Australia, I'm like yay. And I know Americans at the the same when they see something that's made in the U.S. even the the foundations that are built around that made in Australia, for example, I'm pretty sure has like a government entity around it that has marketing budgets to make me feel that certain way. I know the US Is the same, so I kind of want to deep dive into that. But anyway, come back next week and I'll see you then.