Indie beauty brands, especially fragrance players, continued to outpace beauty conglomerates in 2025, showcasing a market resilience that bucked the economic turmoil of last year.
Indie beauty brands – defined as having under US$300m in annual revenue and independently owned and operated – grew 16.1% in 2025 compared with conglomerates, which increased 7.4%, according to NielsenIQ’s (NIQ) latest beauty report.
Smaller brands have benefited from a rapid shift to e-commerce and social selling, with Amazon and TikTok Shop driving discovery and sales, found the report.
This resulted in indie fragrance brands in particular seeing the biggest increases last year, as indie brands grew 46.3% compared with 2024, while conglomerates only rose by 11.4%.
Indie brands also saw more unique in-store growth, achieving 11.2% growth compared with conglomerates’ 0.1%.
Conglomerates do have more consumer loyalty, however, at 13.2 points as compared to indies’ 8.8, according to NiQ’s metrics.
Although indie brands represent a smaller base, accounting for about 32% of total beauty & personal care dollar sales, they benefit from the beauty industry “being a trend-driven category”, Anna Mayo, VP of the beauty vertical at NIQ, told Cosmetics Business.
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