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- [00:27]
Lily Twelve Tree
Hello and welcome back to the Bare Face Podcast, a beauty business podcast hosted by me. My name is Lily twelve Tree. I am a beauty analyst and data science student. Long time no see. Really. I'm so sorry it's been so long. It's been a month since we last spoke and that was certainly not my intention. Yet here we are. I report to you fresh off the plane from coming back from Japan, which is topical, because today's episode is going to be a deep dive into the Japanese beauty beauty market, or J Beauty. I, as we'll get into, knew very little about this market compared to other East Asian countries, specifically Korea. And it wasn't until I started to question why that is that I kind of unveiled a lot of things that I don't think are common knowledge. So a long term goal of mine is to take you to all of the places where beauty stories live and breathe. So today's episode is a bit of like a market research trip I took to Japan. I was there on holiday for two weeks, but I was able to coordinate the days so I, I could spend another five days solo and just sink my teeth into the world of beauty in this country. I've been on research trips before when I was working in house, but I've tried to structure this episode as if I am on your marketing team at your beauty brand. And imagine that you've sent me to Japan to get a snapshot of everything happening there. So I've broken that part of this episode down into three key areas. There's consumer trends and behaviors. How do Japanese consumers shop? What are the observable differences and similarities. Then area two, which is innovation and product development. What product types, categories, ingredients, methods are popular in Japan? What was the attraction of those products? And are there comparable products here in the West? And then finally is the retail landscape. What's different about in store experiences, visual merchandising, retailers, brick and mortar stores, brand saturation, and all that type of thing. But before we analyze the Japanese market, we're first going to look at J Beauty in the west, because I am very much aware Westerner and you guys, at least according to my listener demographics, are also, and I just want to first define the differences of K Beauty and J Beauty and understand why J Beauty is not as big in the west yet. At the same time, there's been this worldwide embrace of Japan and Japanese culture in the last few years. And visiting the country in particular has become, for lack of a better word, trendy. Things like anime and streetwear, home decor, all these other areas of Japan are really infiltrating Western culture, but when you compare it to Korea and beauty, that same translation just hasn't happened. And that alone is a pretty cool story. But it will also really help explain why beauty professionals should care about studying the Japanese market. What can we learn from J Beauty that we can't from K Beauty? What is right in front of us that we're missing? That will then inform the observational beauty market research element of this episode, which will come in second and again will be in those three key areas consumer trends, product development, and then retail. And much like the two episodes I did on British beauty, no amount of research will ever make me Japanese. Obviously, the difference here is even more significant. I'm trying to replicate what I imagine a fashion buyer would do on a fashion buying trip, spending time on the ground intentionally looking around and asking questions to absorb as much as I can about what both the cool kids are doing and then what the everyday people are doing. What are the majority doing? This is me relaying that back to you. On top of a heap of research and a little bit of data analysis. These episodes are something I really want to fine tune because although they are huge amounts of work, they are very much labors of love and I enjoy them deeply. But also after the response to the episodes I did on the British beauty market, there seems to be a clear interest gap here because you guys loved it. So if you're enjoying this episode, please be sure to follow the podcast wherever you're listening because it really, really helps other people discover them and in turn promoting the production of more of them. But anyway, without further ado, let's get into it so Part 1 J Beauty in the West When I first walked into Matsumoto Kiyoshi, a popular Japanese drugstore, I quite arrogantly thought I was going to know a lot of the beauty brands, or at least quite a few of the beau brands, especially skincare brands. But I was pretty shocked that not only how few brands I recognized, but the fact that the brands I recognized were actually Korean, to the point that I was honestly pretty embarrassed by this. I consider myself pretty well versed when it comes to beauty, but from my research and reading about this episode, it would appear that I'm very much not alone. The Japan Reporter, a Japanese YouTube channel dedicated to analyzing social issues and trends in Japan, described the cultural difference between South Korea and Japan to be comparable to Canada and the U.S. and that translated to me as the difference being really significant to anyone who has spent any amount of time in either country, but quite hard to discern the difference for those that hadn't actually spent time there or wasn't close personally to the culture. But this then made me question why was I so familiar with K Beauty and not J Beauty? Why had K Beauty become so popular in the west, specifically the US and now Australia? But the same hadn't happened for J Beauty because when I did a podcast episode on the Korean Beauty Boom or the K Beauty Boom, How Korea Skincare Took over the World, I found that a huge contributing factor to that was that South Korea has incredibly limited natural resources, which has led the growth of the economy to come entirely from an export orientated economic model, making Korea an industrialized manufacturing company where they have to create and sell things more innovative than anywhere else in the world to ensure that the country keeps earning money. But that's the case for Japan too, right? Automobiles, electronics, technology, industrial machinery, they're all major contributors to the booming economy. So with that same logic, it didn't make sense to me why J Beauty hadn't taken off in the west the same way K Beauty had. But the answer actually has a lot to do with geopolitics and economics. In my research for this episode, I stumbled across my new favorite data resource. It's called the Observatory of Economic Complexity and it's built by a company called Data Wheel. I'll link all of the details over on Substack, but essentially what it is is it's a website that has linked all of these hard to read, hard to find global trade data sets to a free and easy to use website that you can both query and visualize import and export amounts by country, by industry. So for example, you could select beauty products, as I did, as the trade category you want to look at and see how much each country has imported and exported in any given year. Which you cannot tell me is not the coolest thing you have ever heard. But anyway, I use this resource a lot in today's episode and what I found was that in 2023, the most recent year we have access to, Japan was the fourth biggest beauty exporter in the world. And if we also consider that the US is the biggest beauty market in the world, you'd assume that J Beauty is pretty popular and maybe you just hadn't noticed. Personally, that's where my mind went to at least. So with that line of thinking, how many Japanese beauty brands do you think Ulta stocks in the U.S. for example, for context, they sell 12 Korean beauty brands. Ulta only sells four Japanese brands. And when I made that whole podcast episode, episode four that went into how Korean Skincare took over the world. One thing I did not find when researching for that was something called Han Han Ryong, which translates to the Korean wave ban. I hope I have done an okay job at pronouncing that. I came across a YouTube video by Ottilie Monod titled J Beauty vs K Beauty. A Professional reveals the differences and it is brilliant. I have linked all these resources up on Substack and I recommend you check them out because this video was great. Oddly is a senior art director and beauty marketer based in Korea and she begins by explaining that the reason for her video is because she is sick of hearing this rhetoric that Japanese skincare is more sophisticated and grown up alternative to Korean beauty, which was something that I'd never actually heard. But Ottilie explains that in 2016, South Korea and the United States agreed to build a missile shield system to protect Korea from the threat of North Korean attacks. Because as we all know, South Korea and North Korea are technically still at war. But China wasn't happy about this agreement, claiming that the system posed a threat to their national security, and they started to express their discontent through a number of economic measures like banning K pop concerts in China, banning Korean dramas from their national TV stations, and even limiting the Chinese imports of South Korean cosmetics. Needless to say, this had a huge impact on the Korean beauty industry, which is heavily reliant on China. Japan looked at this drift between China and South Korea as an opportunity to revive their economy, which was still suffering from the consequences of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. The strategy worked and in mid-2019 Japan overtook South Korea and became the top cosmetic exporter to China. Holy shit, right? I'm the first person to reiterate the power of the beauty industry and how it's constantly being reduced to a frivolous industry for insecure women. And not only is that lazy, but simply wrong when when you look at the economic power of both cosmetics, but also the female dollar. But this still blew my mind. The fact that one of the ways that China could get payback at South Korea about a national security threat by limiting beauty imports is a scale that I had never considered. I wanted to both fact check this and also visualize this data. So I exported Chinese beauty import data from the resource I mentioned before, the Observatory of Economic Complexity, and I created a bar chart race animation to watch the battle between France South Korea to become China's biggest beauty import country. And I did that from 2013 to 2023 and the movement is crazy. I've uploaded that animation over to substack. Always posted on socials but but I'll now do my best to describe it to you. So in 2013, France is the clear front runner before 2014 when South Korea surges pass and stays there in first position comfortably until 2016. That's when Japan starts creeping up because of this South Korean ban. And by 2020 it is in number one position. In 2021, South Korea takes back pole position and France re enters the race after being pretty irrelevant since 2017 before closing out with Japan in first position in 2023. And you can't tell me that doesn't read like an F1 race. I think it's really interesting not only to the context of J Beauty versus K Beauty, but thinking about how dominant the growth of Chinese has been in every beauty business conversation for the last five years. And what this visualization doesn't really show is how much the total amount of beauty products China was importing yearly grew in that same 10 year period. But also narrowing it down just to look at those five years. So in 2016 when this Korean wave ban began, the total value of Chinese cosmetic imports was 3.2 billion. And by 2020 that number was 12.3 billion. That is almost a quadrupled figure. It makes sense why everyone was talking about China and obsessed with expanding into China. But that also helps us paint a picture of how big J Beauty is purely through the Chinese market, but also how much J Beauty has grown in that five year period by being number one in China. But back to why K Beauty is now so much more popular in the West. Essentially because South Korea was forced out of the Chinese beauty market. Their attention and efforts had to go somewhere, right? So there became almost this national beauty initiative to double down on the us. Why the us? Well, it's not only the country with the largest amount of South Koreans living outside of South Korea, but it is also the only other market that is really comparable in size when we look at beauty imports in 2016 specifically. So again, China, 2016 3.2 billion in cosmetic imports, the US 4.5. But US beauty has not boomed the way the Chinese had. So by 2020, US beauty imports were still 4.5, falling dead flat and China again had boomed to 12.3. So although Korean beauty has felt like a global winner through a Western lens, globally it was J Beauty that was the real success story because of this growth coming from China. And that was because if we go back to Ottilie's YouTube video. She said that armed with this success, referring to the Japanese takeover of the Chinese beauty industry, Japan decided to use this same strategy to enter the Western market where they could not only take advantage of the fact Western consumers have a very positive image of Japan, Japanese products were already praised for their high quality and traditional elegance, so it was easy to use this image of sophistication to build hype around their beauty products. Plus, K Beauty already introduced the concept of Asian skincare in the west, so Japanese beauty companies could easily insert themselves in the conversation and use the comparison with Korean beauty as a marketing tactic. That's a pretty crazy story if you ask me, but this mention of Japanese products being praised for high quality was something I had kind of blindly accepted as fact and probably never in my life once thought to question it until oddly mentioned it. And then I thought to the Articles of Interest podcast, which is the best thing your ears will ever listen to by Avery Truffleman. She has this very iconic seven part series titled American Ivory and she explains how Japan played perhaps the most important role of any country in the commercialization of clothing. And yet the perception of Japanese quality has still not been tainted. How? How are they able to pull this off? Well, Steve Jobs actually explained it best in 1996. Take a listen.
- [15:32]
Steve Jobs
It's funny, the group of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. You never see them using quality in their marketing. It's only the American companies that do. And yet if you ask people on the street which products have the best reputation for quality, they will tell you the Japanese products. Now why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming Award or who won the Baldrige Award. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services. And so one can spend enormous amounts of money on quality. One can win every quality award there is. And yet if your products don't live up to it, it customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds. And so I think where we have to start is with our products and our services, not with our marketing department.
- [16:31]
Lily Twelve Tree
Quality being sold through product rather than through marketing feels like a radical idea in 2025, particularly with this Western lens. But this association of quality being inherently Japanese has been a factor in this Western fixation on Japanese culture that we've really seen take off in the last decade, particularly on the Internet. You can See, hear and feel the influence of Japanese culture in every nook and cranny. Not to mention the huge cool factor that is associated with anything Japanese from fashion and streetwear to stationery and homewares or matcha or anime or video games. What is it about Japanese culture that draws us in so much? And before I sure I answer that, I want to make note of how I'm trying my best to be articulate here and be intentional with my language and my wording. Because what I don't want to do is reduce Japan and Japanese culture to a trend. Because another element of this is there has definitely been a fetishization of East Asian culture that has played into this Western obsession. I hope not to contribute to that in any way. So back to where this Western fixation on Japanese culture has come from is that Japan is physically isolated. And in tandem with that, they have been very, let's say, protective of their culture for hundreds of years. This has meant that Japanese culture, for better or for worse, hasn't been very globalized and it's preserved a lot of this cultural uniqueness. The Japanese government cut ties with the outside world for over 200 years from 1640 to 1854, in a period known as Sakoku. All relationships and trade between Japan and other countries were severely limited and almost all foreign nationals were banned from entering Japan, while common Japanese people were kept from leaving the country. It's also important to note that Japan was one of the only Asian countries to never be colonized by Europeans. And all of this led to Japan's fascistic phase of extreme nationalism that helped start the worst war in the history of mankind. And all of this is to explain why people describe going to Japan as like it's stepping into another world. And even now that Japan is has a much more open attitude to the world, they still have some of the lowest ranking English skills by the standards of other First World nations. This preservation of culture is one of the reasons that Westerners are so drawn to the country. But if it was about cultural uniqueness alone, this would be a whole number of countries. So what else is it about Japan that Westerners love? Money. Japan has been one of the top four richest countries in the world since the 60s. After the war, the strength of Japanese capitalism was so strong, it led to the development of a very large and powerful middle class that are well known for being insatiable consumers. And this brings me to the reason I tell you all of this. And that is because, put simply, Japan makes and sells a lot of stuff Stuff is something that Westerners are very fond of now that Japan is open to the west, at least at a commercial level. Because if you talk to anyone that is ever fallen in love with Japan but then moved there, often they'll speak to how hospital the Japanese are to tourists, but less welcoming to foreigners that actually move there. So now that Japan is open to the west, at least at a commercial level, this has allowed us to become huge consumers of Japanese stuff. And you really feel this when you're visiting, because in Tokyo in particular, not so much Kyoto, which is probably why people are so fond of visiting Kyoto as well. But in Tokyo, it was a lot about checking out a heap of shops. Whether you're in Harajuku and you're looking at indie brands or you're in Ginza looking at luxury, then you've got smaller suburbs like Shimokitazawa for vintage. A lot of visiting Japan is built around buying stuff, which is genius if you're sitting on the Japanese tourism board. That's why people often joke that when you go to Japan you should pack an empty suitcase or bring an empty suitcase, or will joke that they had to buy another suitcase before they returned home. But anyway, this whistle stop tour of Japanese history hopefully provides a lot more context to set us up more nicely. To then go back at the beauty market research piece and look at consumer trends and behaviors that are present in Japan today and that were observational to me as someone trying to understand how J Beauty has not only sustained a really significant level of growth as the growth of China has started to slow down, but but also understand who the Japanese beauty consumer is and how do they shop. Part 2 Consumer Trends and Behaviors of course, beauty consumers in every country differ greatly and we're generalizing here, but from my observation and reading, there seem to be some pretty distinct trends when it comes to Japanese beauty consumers. And so obviously in the name of research, while I was in Japan, I had to have a Japanese facial. I went to Mochi Beauty in in Manato City and I really enjoyed it. The facial was actually so brilliant because it was 90 minutes where I got to ask my facialist of all my burning J Beauty questions. She was actually a Korean expat in Japan, so she was the perfect person to explain to me a lot of the nuances in the difference between Korean beauty and Japanese beauty. And she explained that Korean beauty is all about innovation. She was saying that Koreans will always be willing to try the latest and the greatest in the name of approving their skin, while the Japanese on the other hand, are a lot more skeptical and a lot more cautious. She explained that trends in Japan are almost always to do with products that are marketed as clean and simple. This distinction made so much sense to me as soon as she said it. We're about 30 or 40 minutes into my appointment at this point. And it all clicked into place because when she'd initially walked me through all the products and procedures and methods that she'd be using in my facial, she reiterated things like botanicals and she listed off a lot of the ways the products were clean and everything they were free from. This isn't something that me as a beauty consumer that I care about. If anything, I'm skeptical of skeptics. So clean beauty marketing and messaging would usually actually turn me off of a product. But it made a lot of sense when I started to visit more beauty retailers, specifically high end retailers, and I saw a heap of products in one category that is growing a lot in the West. And it's a trend that I want to do a whole other podcast episode of about but that is wellness. Wellness being sold as a beauty product or an extension of beauty. The retailer that was described to me by my facialist as the Sephora of Japan was Cosme. I went to one of their Cosme Kitchen stores, which was the version of the retailer brand that was inside a bigger department store, and I could not believe the amount of wellness products. It felt like half of their entire offering. I'm actually not sure if that's factually accurate. I tried to web scrape their site, but it was all in Japanese. So unfortunately we'll have to go off observation alone. The checkout counter, for example, was covered in essential oils that were being sold as fragrance oils. They had a whole gondola dedicated to supplements and protein powders and ingestible beauty, like your collagen cordials and also teas and tablets. Then on the other side of the store, they had half a gondola dedicated to sleep products. The other half was bath salts, crystals, pillow sprays. And it was so interesting, I think, as we talk more about how Western countries look to Eastern countries for the first signals of consumer trends and what to expand into really. And there's this idea that the east does the innovation and the west just sells on top of their R and D spend. But this was really interesting because again, when we think about beauty retailers in the US or the UK or Australia, we're starting to see these signs of beauty blurring into wellness as well. Like Mecca, for example, is opening their new flagship in Melbourne, which will have a whole floor, I believe, dedicated to an apothecary, which translates to a wellness section. The new store will also mark the launch of 14 new wellness brands. Then, of course, we've got celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow with Goop and Kourtney Kardashian with Lemmy that are capitalizing on this interest in wellness as well. And on one hand, this trend makes a lot of sense. In the west, we've seen a rise in interest in elevated results through beauty devices like microcurrent devices and red light therapy. But if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense for these more costly devices to have come first. Because product benefits are visual, the consumer can directly see the impact and benefit of the device rather than wellness. For countries that don't have holistic cultural practices as a foundational starting point, there is more of a learning curve when it comes to selling wellness, which really translates to more marketing spend being needed to communicate to someone how that product is beneficial. I think it's the same reason that Lemmy Sleep was the product of Kourtney Kardashian's that really took off, because the benefits are obvious, they're measurable. It's melatonin, it's going to knock you out. But when it's something like, gosh, the vaginal product that she has, how do you measure that? That. But then something else that's worth mentioning is that wellness in its truest form, it's not a physical product. The benefits of being well are not directly measurable. And that's why it makes so much more sense as a beauty category in Japan than it does Australia or the States. Japan is a lot healthier and a lot more well than most countries. If you look at America with obesity rates and life expectancy, which Japan ranks so much higher on all of these, which is interesting because then when we look at the economies of wellness. The Global Wellness Institute did a study on wellness in Japan and found Japan to have the fourth highest wellness spend of the 223 countries that they analyzed. Germany was in third, China in second and the US in first. The US wellness economy was generating more than the next five combined. Also, interestingly, the UK was then just behind Japan in fifth place. Place. But I think this speaks to a much more broader conversation that is left out when we talk about wellness in beauty, and that is simply the definition of what it means to be well. I saw a TikTok the other day by Carly Elizabeth, which I will upload onto and Link onto substack. But essentially it's this montage of healthy meals, going to the gym, making a tea with the overlay text. Capitalism wants us to believe that this is wellness, but what if it was also. And then it flashes to accessible walking cities, public green spaces and third places. Affordable health care, cultural pride, taking care of others. And it goes on to say that wellness is greater than our individual habits. It is found in community and collective care. Which again, to me, all of these, these things, all of these wellness ideas feel so much more Japanese. So when I thought about it, it kind of made a lot of sense. And there was this one brand that really stood out to me called Ume E U M E because they sold up market wearables like ankle and wrist warmers and compression socks. They also had lavender scented hot and cold pillows which are kind of like a Wedi pack, but they smell nice and you can also use them cold, which were incredibly popular in the Japanese pharmacy as well. Here in Australia, you're paying a good 5 to $10 for a single large stick on heat pack. And then in Japan you can choose from like six different brands and buy a pack of 20 for that same price. That was definitely the first big difference I noticed in consumer trends with this definition of beauty and the definition of wellness and the way that they overlapped with one another. But then in a stark contrast to that, you can't talk about Japan or Japanese culture and not talk about luxury. There is the stereotype of Asian uni students that we have at least here in Australia for rocking up to very casual classes, but in head to toe luxury while everyone else is wearing sweatshirts. But there is a huge cultural analysis piece here about the fact that Western culture is more built around independence and it's all that matters is what you think about yourself when you go to sleep at night, right? It's that type of talk rather than an Asian culture. It's more about interdependence in East Asia. Your identity, to my understanding, is strongly linked to being an older sister or a mom. And all of this plays into the booming luxury industry. The brands you wear matter less about how you enjoy them and more about the perception other people have of you wearing those brands. And that's a painful simplification. But what I want to articulate is how different Japanese consumerism is through the common consumption of luxury. Part three is everything product from innovation and development to trend. And I wanted to set us up with that cultural analysis of this common consumption of luxury because my understanding of both J Beauty and K Beauty has been very admittedly tied to social media. And what I discovered in the episode I did on the rise in popularity of K Beauty was how all of the products were able to be so affordable. And I found in that episode, essentially because they're an industrialized manufacturing country, there are a lot of beauty manufacturers. And because there's a lot of beauty manufacturers, there's a lot of beauty companies. And with a lot of beauty companies means that there's a lot of competition. And as we all know, competition drives down price. I could not believe the amount of luxury beauty there was in Japan. The two brands I could not escape purely because I think I could recognize them. There were an insane amount of brands that I had never heard of and a lot that weren't, weren't directly translatable to English, which was actually one area of this whole episode I found quite difficult. And that was the lack of insight into Japanese culture you can get in English because of course the Japanese analyzing Japanese culture in Japan is all in Japanese. So a lot of my product analysis in particular had to be observation, which made it quite broad, which is a bit lame. But anyway, it's worth noting. So the two brands that I couldn't escape were Le Labo and SK ii. SK II particularly was insane because you walk into a department store and they have a huge display and a counter and you leave and you go a couple streets away and you go into a drugstore. And the same brand, SK II is not only stocked, but they have a whole built in branded area with a seating area and a dedicated sales rep I might add, had on both floors, on both floors of the same drugstore. That was crazy to me. And a lot of these drugstores as well, they are not very flashy. They are very chemist warehouse esque. I wish I could think of a US comparison like they're not well designed, but the SK2, another one that I noticed was Laneige. These established brands that had built out their own section on the walls look so much more premium in a very not premium retail space. And I mean it worked. It meant that I saw these brands everywhere. But this really confused me because I thought a major draw card for Japanese beauty was the affordability. Like personally I was only really interested in visiting drugstores and shopping for cheaper brands. But as we have well established, I am not a Japanese consumer. And all the J Beauty hauls I had watched were from people that lived in Western countries and had visited Japan, which of course makes sense again because it was in English. And something else that I thought was really interesting that was definitely applicable to luxury beauty, but not exclusively was this keen interest in makeup. Again, from my point of view, I've always looked to East Asia for skincare innovation, so I stupidly assumed that this would be the most popular. But no, there were these beautiful brush brands that had dedicated gondolas in department stores that were retailing for AUD 60 bucks a piece. There was one brand that was stunning, and the name I can't even translate into English from script, but the craftsmanship was unlike anything I have ever seen. I feel like a fashion lover when they talk about how a designer uses leather and they describe to you all the differences that no one other than a fashion lover who's obsessed with the art of fashion would ever understand. But these brushes looked like something out of a film. I took heaps of photos of all of this, by the way. So if you want to take a look at anything or experience these retail spaces in some part for yourself, or maybe you work in visual merchandising or product development, I'm just going to drop everything, all the photos I took up into a Google Drive that hopefully that's helpful and I'll link it over on substack for you to check out. But what was also really interesting about the makeup brands there that I had never heard of again, many not in English, was how familiar so many of them felt. One brand, Snidel S n I D L Beauty, was very sleek, very minimal, and it felt very Ilia beauty to me. Or another brand that was sitting right alongside it was 21 to forward slash O n e and that was very much the same vibe. Shiro S h I r o felt very necessary. They were like a home body fragrance brand, or they even had natural glance, which felt quite Summer Fridays. And that really stood out to me because I thought the way that we've seen Japanese culture influence the west, how of course it had swung back and we were influencing them also for the same reason that we don't have access to a lot of Japanese beauty brands, because it's hard to expand into new markets. TGA compliance or FDA compliance in the US is really costly. So a lot of the time it's just easier for brands to replicate stuff that has worked in other markets. Like I wonder if Ilia Beauty was sold in Japan, how that would translate. Like the fact that you could take the visual identity of a brand that was working so well in one country and then shift the comms, shift the pr, shift perhaps the product Descriptions and claims again in Japanese. I couldn't read them them, but shift all of that to speak directly to the Japanese consumer while drawing obvious inspiration from Western design trends. And then this was when I just started looking at packaging even more closely and the free from marketing that was mentioned to me by my facialist. I it was everywhere and I couldn't even read the packaging. But the icons with slashes through them thankfully transcended the language barrier. My facialist also mentioned how interested the Japanese consumer is to vegan products, which is super interesting because this means that until very, very recently these are products that could not be sold in China. And for those that are not familiar, for a beauty product to be sold in China it had to go under mandatory animal testing. Now a lot of those regulations have been lifted, but if we think back to again the years that the Japanese beauty was growing in China, 2019, 2020, so those would have been products that wouldn't have been vegan, that certainly wouldn't have been cruelty free. And I do not think you can be cruelty free and not vegan actually. I suppose there would be a technical space where it's not made with any animal products but could have undergone animal testing. Mintel found that among new beauty and personal care product launches In Japan from 2016 to 2020, the proportion of vegan products products fluctuated between 1 to 3%, which again makes a lot of sense given that Japan was focused on expanding in China. Along with that Mintel research, they wrote an article titled Opportunities for Vegan Beauty in Japan. It was released in 2021 and they stated not only do consumers agree that it is best to avoid cosmetics that have not been safely tested on animals, but even those who are favorable to vegan and cruelty free products still feel uncertain about their safety. Mintel research highlights that cruelty free is not always considered ethical in Japan. As such, it's key to give consumers a sense of security by correctly communicating information on alternative testing methods, not to mention the safety of cruelty free products. This is a communications barrier that we don't have here in Australia at least, because cruelty free I think has a almost entirely if not exclusively positive connotation to it. Rather than the idea that in Japan for a very long time marketing a product as cruelty free meant also having to market the product as having done alternative testing methods because cruelty free had a connotation of not being tested, quote unquote properly. I thought that was interesting that now in such a short period you could now see this uplift in interest in vegan products. The last product area I really want to speak about is what I noticed was in the indie space or not necessarily even indie because indie of course actually means independently owned and operated and beauty brands. Although when we talk about indie beauty on social media at least I think that term gets thrown around a lot for brands that started as indie but maybe, maybe they didn't raise a seed funding round but have now since, but have since sold part of the business making them no longer independent but still seen very much as indie brands brands. So I think I mean more instead of Hindi brands. I mean trendy lifestyle social media led beauty brands, your Birados for example. Because what I saw a lot of signs of was Japanese streetwear and Japanese style which we spoke about before is having this really strong cool factor that seemingly had started to extend into beauty and they were brands that were so cool. I can't think of another word for it other than cool that I had never heard of. And they were legitimate enough to all have retail spaces, to have a store presence. And because of regulations around beauty and it being so much more costly to expand a beauty brand internationally than fashion brands, for example, I'd never thought about what it means for the amount of brands we don't have access to. Like I think although my understanding of J Beauty has come from social media, a lot of that is because. Because these are mass distributed. They're the Japanese versions of Sarah V and Set A Phil who have the money to grow in new markets or even be available, let alone Target and market to and all the cool shit. All the young brands. The same reasons we turn to young indie brands in western markets for newness and innovation and brands that are, that are visual led you turn to the smaller, the underground stuff because of course to be mass is to be mass consumed which is to be trendy which is the antithesis of cool. So all of this to say is that the draw card of Japanese streetwear And again the cool factor extending into beauty is something I really want to explore when we talk about retail part four, the last part retail. So I want to continue talking about those indie trendy, cool brands. Trendy and cool. I feel like antonyms of one another but I hope you understand what I mean. I had never, I've never been a buyer, I've never. I've actually really want to chat to and interview someone who is a beauty buyer because I think it's super interesting the difference between fashion buying and beauty buying. I've worked with fashion buyers and they would go to a market like Japan for example, and not only scout new styles and designs for their in house vertical, but also to find brands to stock stock at the retailer. Retailer would go and get the brand to draw the customer in which is such a 180 of beauty. Where to my understanding at least the brand themselves have to decide to expand into that new market and pitch themselves to the retailer. It's this reversal of power. Like if I was an indie Japanese beauty brand and I wanted to come to the U.S. i would have to go and pitch myself to Sephora rather than if I was a young Japanese fashion brand, I might have a specialty US retailer come to me. And I wonder if that art of curation will ever extend to beauty. Because a retailer's draw card is more about having an extensive offering to make someone want to come into store. It's about Sephora having the monopoly of the amount of beauty brands in one market that would make you want to go there over somewhere else. It's like minimizing the amount of places that you want to go rather than going to a boutique because they have a reputation for finding the cool stuff, the newness underground brands the way you would a fashion for retailer like in Sydney. I can think of above the Clouds for example. And obviously the huge hurdle here is that the regulations around beauty and a retailer not wanting to have to brunt the cost of bringing that brand into the new country because that's hugely costly. But you also couldn't burden the smaller brands with, with that either. So I don't really understand how this would work. But it just got me thinking about the art of curation. And while there's a little bit of that like this libertine perfumery in Paddington and Sydney, which is this idea and it makes sense because it's fragrance only and again ease of import. But this idea of curation is because what was really interesting about walking around Harajuku, a suburb, one suburb in particular was the, the the world of indie brands that they had created among themselves. And now I'm doing what I was just critical of, which is using indie in place of, I think I mean lifestyle brand because it was standalone stores for brands like Le Labo, Maison, Margiela, Birado and those were three brands that actually no, I've been in a La Labo store before, but I'd never seen standalone stores for these beauty brands. And granted they're pretty big. Like there was Jo Malone as well. But another brand that I did check out and was really cool was Retour, which my boyfriend very Cleverly figured out is just water backwards. But I was obsessed with the store design where they had everything in these fridges. They weren't on, but took a lot of photos so I put them all up on that Google Drive. But it was kind of a bummer because then I walked around the corner in Harajuku into Byredo and saw the exact same photo thing and clearly someone had copied someone there. Unsure of who came first. But then you're walking around these streets and there's a pop up for a shoe brand that has a line around the street over here. And then Army Paris has a pop up, Lacoste has a Marcher cart, Ralph Lauren has a pop up coffee cart. And it really felt like these brands had all gotten in a room together and come up with this concept of building a suburb to create a collection of stunning and intentional retail experiences. But what was so cool is that the cool kids weren't priced out of it either. There was a small art gallery space on one corner that had a pop cartoon style exhibition. And then you had this really cool trendy Japanese streetwear brand scattered around. And then on the main strip you had the big luxury players, but next to a MoMA, a museum of modern art. And all of this is to say is I had two major takeaways was that like firstly, this felt like such an antidote to department stores which is also really, really common in Japan. Then secondly was this curation element. There's always a pay to play element when it comes to retail and particularly the streets of Harajuku, which I can only imagine the rental prices because the foot traffic is so high. But through this endless access and endless discovery we have of new beauty brands which has happened because we've had this massively reduced barrier to entry to start a brand because of social media and E commerce. But this saturation of products fueled by the dismantling of magazines, the disappearance of editors and tastemakers to help us filter through all of this product again, because particularly now there is just so many new brands, there's so many new products that it can make beauty quite uninviting. You're so spoiled for choice that you, you can't be bothered to make the choice. I think I see that in my purchasing patterns. I'm way more brand and product loyal now than I was five years ago because I like knowing that my money is going to be spent. Because I think I've been burnt before, frankly on young new brands that they haven't got the product right yet, which is totally within their Right. But I would rather buy something I know I will like. And also decision paralysis. And nothing I'm saying here is revolutionary. The beauty industry's return to retail has been really well documented and publicized. But I think by walking around Harajuku, I just really understood why for the first time. And to me, the theme that was most obvious was curation. Even the way I just wanted to exist and spend times in these shops rather than taking aesthetic photos of them, which I think says as much about me as it does the store. Although I did take photos of everything for research purposes. And the difference is significant to me who, as someone who was a sucker for a pretty Instagram story. The fact that I just, I didn't care to frame the experience, to capture the experience the way that you would at kind of like a road or summer Fridays pop up where the stores are incredible fit outs, but they're designed to be be Instagrammable over everything. Didn't feel like that. They were gorgeous, absolutely, but in a way that was approachable and inviting rather than a sort of exhibition experience. And I just thought to myself that this is what all those people are talking about when they talk about the return to retail. And one brand that does this extremely well in Japan in particular is Le Labo in Kyoto. They have a store built around a cafe with a Japanese garden. And from the street it looks like any other shop front in Kyoto, which for context is very nonchalant. You walk around the streets of Kyoto and you hardly know which places are fully booked and which places are dead empty. But Le Labo have several stores in Japan and several in Tokyo. And I visited two, and it introduced me to the most genius, yet infuriating sales concept I have ever encountered in my life. And that is City Exclusive scents. I don't know how I'd never heard of this, because as it would turn out, it is somewhat common. Because I then visited Jo Malone and they had just launched the exact same thing. So picture this. A fragrance brand you like and trust is releasing a limited edition scent. Scent. You see it online and you think about getting it, but how good could it be? And you can't smell it, you can't test it, so you pass. Now instead, imagine that you're a tourist, you're on a holiday and you're doing some shopping and you see a cute store of that same brand that you like and trust. So of course you walk in and you discover that they stock a scent you've never smelt before. You give it a whiff and it's Divine. You love it. You're like, wow. Well, come to find out, that scent is one and a half times the already extremely high price of your normal fragrance. But you can't buy it at home. You can only buy it in this city that you're visiting. And this is the most brilliant manufactured FOMO I have ever experienced. It was comedically, comedically infuriating. I am in the market for a new scent, but regular Le Labo is out of my price range. And yet here I was on the streets of Tokyo contemplating spending Australian $800 on a fragrance I just smelt, purely because I knew I couldn't have it again. Of course, I went home and did some reading and it turns out le Labo have 17 of these city exclusive scents. My dumb ass now wants to collect them all. Scarcity marketing makes you feel like a hamster on a goddamn wheel. But my gosh, no talking about will ever make me better than good marketing. But anyway, that was a bit of a side tangent, but I thought it was interesting. So back to retail. To anyone heading up retail expansion at a big brand with market research budget to spend, head to Harajuku, because I truly believe that is such an exact example of this wave of what moving offline is actually going to not look, but feel like. Like. So that's my favorite type of retail. And we can go on from my favorite to my least favorite department stores. The only thing I hate more than department stores is malls. And I do not use the word hate lightly. I avoid them at all costs. I will spend more time and more money on running an errand or doing whatever I have to do to avoid having to go to a department store or a mall. But in the name of research, I thought I. That's. That's a lie. That's actually not even true. There is. There is no way that I would have been that committed to the cause. Because the real reason, the real reason I actually went now from memory, is that Tokyo is wildly dense, which means that a lot of stores simply exist inside bigger stores or even train stations. I found. But I was trying to find a Cosme store after my facialist described it to me as just Japanese Sephora. And turns out it was inside a department store. And in the process of trying to find this store, I went through the beauty floor of this department store and I was in awe about how little it felt like a department store. Low ceilings, but not in a claustrophobic way. In a more intimate way. The counters were smaller. There were heaps of people Which I think was a contributing factor to department stores in Australia feeling so dead. I haven't been to Harrods in a decade, but it felt similar to how I remember that feeling, especially in the food section, where it's like this melting pot of bougie products that you just want to try and touch everything. Department stores in Japan are very common and from my reading, very successful. So whether or not that's a signal as a resurrection of department stores, I'm truly unsure, because I just cannot not imagine that future. But I thought it was interesting how many there were. And then back to. My reason for going into the department store was to try and find a cosme, which was again described by the Facialist as Japan's Sephora. But the Cosme flagship is actually the only standalone store Cosme has in Tokyo, which I thought was really interesting, given all of the rest of them were. Were Cosme kitchens that were inside department stores. And the Cosme inside the department store was not bustling anyway, near as much as the beauty floor of the department store. The department store really felt like each counter was separate brands, which I know is the whole point of a department store, but I always feel like I'm walking behind the cashier checkout station when I walk around a department store. Like I'm kind of just in a space I'm not meant to be. And sometimes you are, but most of the time you're not. This didn't. This didn't feel like that. First of all, it was incredibly staffed, perhaps even overstaffed, as Japan is known to do. But that made it easier to navigate. And then the only other retail type, of course, is drugstores, which, to be honest, I'm going to bypass because I don't really have that many notes. And I won't waste your time. And with that, that brings us to the end of today's episode. It was a long one, which I'm always a little bit proud of, because it feels like a measure of the effort and research that went into this, I guess. But hey, I thought it was quite interesting, particularly the bit at the start about Japan in China. I didn't know that. So once I kind of start pulling all the pieces together, like a spy in one of those movies with the photos and the string on the wall and. And you take a step back at the end and suddenly you're like, well, that's crazy. That's kind of how this felt. It felt like a really cool way to finish off the trip. I hope you enjoyed it too. If you did, please be sure to give the podcast a follow even if you didn't enjoy it. Actually, be sure to give the podcast a follow and rate it because it does wonders for discovery. If you're feeling generous, you could share it on Instagram as a story. It's only up for 24 hours anyway, right? Or, or if you want to look really well read and well educated on the beauty industry or the Japanese market in front of your colleagues, then share the episode on LinkedIn. But in all seriousness, thank you for being here and showing up for the show. Like I said, I really want to fine tune these types of episodes. So if you have any feedback, perhaps there are things you would have hoped I would cover but didn't, or another topic you'd like me to explore in a different episode. Be sure to leave a comment or shoot me an email. Otherwise you can find Bare faced everywhere else via the link in the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful week and I will see you back here soon. This episode was recorded on Ghana country. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to elders past and present.