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Last week, leaders from across the beauty and wellness industries were gathered for an intimate dinner in New York. Held at Brass & The Tusk Bar, inside the city’s Evelyn Hotel, the evening encouraged meaningful conversation and connection, bringing peers together to discuss the industry’s complex growth puzzle.
Hosted by Amazon’s health and beauty general manager at Amazon US Stores, Melis del Rey, The Business of Fashion’s director of content strategy, Alice Gividen, and executive editor of The Business of Beauty, Priya Rao, the evening began with a welcome toast from del Rey, before Gividen and Rao shared key insights from BoF’s The State of Fashion: Beauty report with attendees, providing exclusive context and recommendations around the report’s major themes.
Executives from luxury beauty brands including Chanel, YSL Beauty, Givenchy and Prada Beauty joined leaders from newer disruptive independents including Gisou, Element Eight and Dr. Few. Joining them were leaders from the sector’s major conglomerates, from L’Oréal Group and Amorepacific through to Puig and Estée Lauder Companies.
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In 2025, beauty’s era of effortless growth is giving way to a more complex landscape. Growth is still anticipated — BoF expects the global beauty industry to grow 5 percent annually through 2030 — but a once-clear blueprint for success is now clouded thanks to consumer fragmentation, category pressure and a marked evolution in the customer shopping journey.
“Today, earning trust with customers has many different facets. Beauty is an emotional category, by default, and also a category of discovery — the way in which you emotionally connect with customers is very important,” Amazon’s del Rey told BoF. “But convenience is also imperative. One facet cannot be prioritised over the other — brands need to consider each of these components equally.”
That sense of emotional connection rang true among dinner guests. “The industry has always been about delighting people — but the way that they discover brands, looks and techniques has changed so much,” said Ali Kole, general manager, North America, at Charlotte Tilbury.
“Meeting them where they are in the ways that they learn best and want to engage is a core focus for us.”
Last week, Charlotte Tilbury launched on Amazon’s Premium Beauty US store, adding to the platform’s expanding prestige beauty selection. The brand’s storefront includes shoppable makeup tutorials and a virtual shade-finder tool to support in meeting customer needs.
Jessica Fisher, CEO of skincare brand Dr. Few, added that brands “really have to know their ‘why’ in a more complex growth [market]. It’s why we are clinically tested, with peer-reviewed published studies for our products. Ultimately, the customer is looking for authenticity and credibility in this space,” she told BoF. “If you have the right point of difference — or the right story — you’re in a better position.”
For del Rey, investing in personalisation is key to appealing to customers who seek trust, convenience, and support when discovering products. According to The State of Fashion: Beauty report, brands could potentially increase conversion rates by 40 percent if they began processing data to segment audiences and create consumer personas.
“Personalisation is so critical, but it doesn’t simply mean, ‘You bought this, so now you should only see this brand,’ or ‘You looked at this brand, so we’ll show you more of the same.’ It needs to go deeper,” she added. “Too often, personalisation is surface-level, based on broad consumer insights. For us, it’s about building trust, so customers feel understood. Amazon customers interact with beauty in distinct ways and demonstrate different habits depending on what products they are shopping, so we need to understand more than just their generic insights. We’re experimenting with technology to build unique beauty profiles for our customers so we can better serve their needs and drive customer satisfaction and engagement.”
For Kia Lowe, general manager at Gisou, loyalty is built through community feedback loops — not just to engage customers, but to bring them into the product development process.
“We’re always considering fun ways to test, tease and suggest new products. Sometimes, we ask ‘what should we launch next?’ on social channels, just to see how customers respond,” Lowe told BoF. “We read through every single comment — we’re always trying to surprise and delight, and do things that feel irresistible for customers.”
With customers now engaged in open dialogue with beauty brands, retailers are strategically evolving their offerings to support. At Amazon, strategic investment in beauty has scaled in recent years, but the retailer has been in the beauty business for more than 20 years, launching its first beauty iteration in 2004, focused on mass beauty products.
In 2013, it started its premium beauty business but acceleration in this space has come in the years post-pandemic through significant innovation to improve the shopping journey, and strategic work to build both customer trust and industry credibility. According to research from investment bank TD Cowen, by 2030, Amazon’s US market share in beauty is expected to reach 15 percent, up from 10 percent in 2024
“Investments include new brand store technology, created directly from brand partner feedback and reworked product detail pages to include more visual, immersive features like augmented and virtual reality capabilities” shared del Rey. “We’ve also doubled down on developing customer engagement programmes tailored specifically for beauty, including dedicated beauty programmes for Amazon Live and the Amazon Influencer Programme to support customer and brand engagement,” she added.
That notion of engagement is a timely investment. The effectiveness of performance marketing has dwindled, making it difficult for brand communications to cut through — 80 percent of Gen-Z globally report feeling overwhelmed by their exposure to brands, according to BoF and McKinsey & Co.’s The State of Fashion 2025 report.
Brands need to show up in the channels and spaces that matter most to their customers — from by-appointment cultural events such as live concerts, entertainment and sports to the myriad of social channels where customers scroll, shop and socialise.
“I think it is very fragmented and non-linear, and it’s basically an omni-journey,” said Emily Coppock, US general manager of Sulwahsoo. “It takes work to determine where to double down, where to prioritise, where to focus to find that customer and to meet the customer where they are.”
At Amazon, entertainment programmes are one key channel to be utilised by brands for cut-through. “To me, this is where we’re creating emotional connections in a more implicit, cultural way,” said del Rey.
“We have a vast content library through Amazon MGM Studios, and we’re actively exploring brand collaborations early in the development cycle to integrate products directly into storylines. Using entertainment as a vehicle for brand engagement is a strategy we’re leaning into.”
Thinking like the consumer is a critical component of building a strong entertainment strategy. “I consume a lot of social media that I personally wouldn’t typically consume [...] to really walk in the shoes of my consumer,” added Charlotte Tilbury’s Kole.
For del Rey, one ongoing priority is replicating in-store product testing and try-on — particularly colour cosmetics — online. Across the industry, virtual try-on tools have proven useful, though accurately translating how products appear across diverse skin tones and lighting conditions has historically proven challenging.
Now proven successful in other consumer categories, such as accessories and eyeglasses, this process for beauty products might be enhanced with generative AI — even demonstrating the potential benefits a product could have to their appearance over time. Indeed, McKinsey research predicts that gen AI could add $9 billion to $10 billion to the global economy based on its impact on the beauty industry alone.
“Amazon is doing a lot when it comes to applying AI to simplify the shopping experience. But beauty is about two things: inspiration and discovery, and we’ve been considering [new] applications that will support shopping for colour cosmetics on Amazon, in addition to AI-powered shopping experiences to combine inspiration, curation and convenience. There’s plenty to be excited by.”
Want to dive deeper into an insight from this article? Check out The Brain of Fashion, BoF’s new generative AI tool where you can unlock BoF’s beauty archive with a single question.
This is a sponsored feature paid for by Amazon Beauty as part of a BoF partnership.
