If the past eight months have taught us anything, it is that people are surprisingly adaptable. Many of us profess we are creatures of habit. But when forces beyond our control scupper our usual routines, we quickly adjust to whatever the ‘new normal’ may be.
When lockdown made it harder for consumers to pop to supermarkets, department stores and high street chemists, even the most hardened technophobes found themselves venturing online to buy their beauty goods.
Benjamin Punchard, Global Packaging Insights Director at market research firm Mintel, confirms that, since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, 30% of European beauty consumers have “bought from a website they’d not used before”.
“We’ve got very strong data that shows consumers are shopping [in stores] less often and not wanting to spend long in stores,” he says.
“This is firstly because you’ve got people breathing everywhere, but you’ve also got social pressure as people are queuing up outside.”
He also highlights that consumers with fewer social engagements due to lockdown have had “more time on their hands” to browse online for beauty goods.
Sebastian Quevedo-Busch is Managing Director of Invinci Agency, which helps brands launch, sell and grow on e-tail behemoth Amazon.
He believes that prior to Covid-19, “some consumers were hesitant about e-commerce, but now they’ve tried shopping online they’ve seen that it is convenient, it’s easy and it works”.
Moreover, “because lockdown has been going on for such a long time, it’s allowed people to create a habit out of buying online”.
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