When I posted about the Mrs Gloss £10 beauty box (now sold out, unsurprisingly), I suggested that the price was taking beauty boxes back to their origins of being brand sampling boxes. When they first hit our world, these boxes were seen as a sterling opportunity for brands to get their products out to exactly the audience they needed to reach – beauty loving women/men who actively wanted to try more products. My own boxes with LIB were cut to the bone on profit and we could do it that way because the spirit of the boxes was right – to offer my edit of products to BBB readers at prices they couldn’t ordinarily expect to buy them for. The brands were happy too because they got great feedback and new customers – we’d provide reports back to the brands quoting readers, giving stats and they could see the affirmative action around the activity.
I didn’t think beauty boxes would last as a trend as long as they have. I stopped because I couldn’t get more of the quality brands I really wanted and didn’t want to offer half hearted efforts. I chased so hard for Jo Malone, Laura Mercier and Clarins – I can’t tell you! Boxes with Aveda, Clinique, Givenchy and L’Occitane sold out within hours. I’d resurrect them in a heartbeat for JM!
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But as with everything in beauty world, competition sets in. A Mrs Gloss reader sent me a picture of a beauty box she’d bought in Walmart recently for under $10. FeelUnique and M&S do their own boxes (M&S has their summer box now for £15 if you buy £40 of product from other departments (new sheets, school uniform?) excluding food and its got a £135 value so go, go, go HERE) but we’re yet to see the supermarkets properly jump on board. So, Walmart’s $9.98s are the first that I’ve seen as a real threat to the beauty box industry. That’s a price that quite literally cannot be beaten and why would you head off anywhere to buy a £25 box, postage not included, when there’s a ten pound one all-in that’s just as good?
As an example, the Walmart Love My Curls Box contains 8 products from the likes of Maui and John Frieda, while the Refresh & Extend Box contains seven products from L’Oreal, Got2Be, Batiste and Herbal Essences. Postage all in.
Supermarkets have massive purchase power – they want their stores to be as much a beauty destination as say, SpaceNK, only with cabbages and milk on the side. They need to claw consumers from special beauty visits to Boots and Superdrug and have them shop all in one place – enticing, highly competitive beauty boxes surely have to be coming?
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