Helping Beauty Brands Grow

The beauty industry looks healthy in 2023

  • $100 bn
    Global industry valuation in 2023
  • $450 bn
    predicted health and beauty sales for 2027
  • 40%
    of Gen Z use TikTok for product searches

The beauty industry has seen consistently impressive growth in recent years and is currently valued at $100 billion worldwide.

Its stellar performance can be explained in part by the continued rise of eCommerce and the ubiquity of social media, combined with the simple truth that we’re all allowed to get out and socialise following two years of Covid caution. Even the current, lengthy cost of living crisis has not prevented beauty brands from growing. Household purse strings may be tightening, but people are still willing to pay a premium for products that make them feel happy and healthy – provided, of course, that their service and delivery expectations are met once they’ve placed their order.

Savvy beauty brands are always looking for ways to improve efficiency and boost customer satisfaction as new trends and behaviours emerge. So let’s take a look at what’s happening on the ground, and consider the implications for your brand’s fulfilment strategy.

It’s important to remember that the cruelty-free ethos extends to people working in fulfilment too. Many warehouse roles are incredibly physically demanding, repetitive and involve employees walking long distances to locate products, all while being timed and monitored, which can lead to intense stress and strain. This is why brands need to choose fulfilment partners that treat their people well, for example by taking health and safety seriously, operating flexible hours and encouraging regular breaks.

1 According to consumer and market insights portal Statista.

2 According to internal data from Google.

3 According to sustainability marketing tech firm Provenance’s Skin Deep Beauty Report.

4 According to a survey tby consumer analysis firm The Benchmarking Company.

Entering the age of social commerce

All major social media players are pivoting towards in-app purchasing, effectively transforming their platforms into massive global online stores. Alongside this, influencers and celebrity brand ambassadors are generating huge sales volumes on behalf of beauty brands-or adding to the competition by launching brands and products of their own.

The market is particularly competitive when it comes to younger audiences. 40% of Gen Z turn to TikTok first for their product searches before using a more mainstream online search engine3. However, succeeding in social commerce means plugging in your existing fulfilment operations to each platform you wish to sell through-something which is difficult to tackle in-house due to the time and cost involved. Get your strategy right, for example, by partnering with a provider that already has these integrations in place, and you’ll be able to make the fulfilment experience as seamless as the social checkout.

Entering the age of social commerce

More emphasis on diversity and inclusion

More emphasis on diversity and inclusion

Diversity and inclusivity issues continue to dominate online conversations and influence consumer purchasing decisions, and in beauty, a growing number of brands are developing new strategies in response-from expanding their shade ranges, to offering varied products that cater to a wider range of skin and hair types.

This positive approach to embracing as many people as possible has the power to pay dividends, with inclusive brands exploding in popularity on social media. However, from a logistical perspective this means more SKUs to manage and keep track of, more potential for confusion and delays to creep into the picking and packing process, and of course, the possibility of public backlash if people receive the wrong products.

This is why amazing warehouse management systems are needed if these issues are to be avoided. It’s certainly not about haphazardly piling products up to the rafters in vast warehouses, but more about using smaller, self-contained hubs to easily store and manage multiple SKUs, all belonging to one brand, all in one accessible space.

5 According to internal data from Google.

Achieving fulfilment success:
Eight simple rules for beauty brands

If you’re a beauty brand selling products via multiple channels such as online shops and marketplaces, you’ll soon discover that as your sales increase, the storage, packaging and shipping of your goods can quickly start to feel overwhelming. Here are eight simple rules to help you achieve fulfilment success for your brand

Keep your fulfilment journey simple

Simplicity is key to a fruitful fulfilment journey, even if your brand sells via numerous channels. When a customer places an online order, whether via your website, or a marketplace, or a social media platform, it should automatically feed through to your warehouse team. The chosen items should then be picked, scanned and dispatched on the same day to ensure prompt delivery and a notable customer experience. A reliable system will also update your stock levels so you’ll never sell a product that’s not available, while alerting you when stocks are running low

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Consider outsourcing some or all of your fulfilment operation

The logistics journey for your offering is likely to be complex and hard to keep track of without the right support, particularly if you’re selling multiple beauty products. Outsourcing this time-consuming process to a trusted fulfilment partner will afford you more opportunities to focus on other key aspects of your brand, while being safe in the knowledge that your customers are privy to a seamless, satisfying service. And don’t simply accept a one size fits all approach to fulfilment. Your fulfilment partner needs to understand your specific requirements and create a bespoke plan that will best serve your business going forwards.

For example, at Huboo our Continuous Improvement Team analyses all client processes to optimise the service we provide, working in tandem with operations, finance, supply chains and future projections departments to identify untapped opportunities and make improvements. This enables the team to fully collaborate with you throughout your Huboo partnership to guarantee scalable growth while maximising efficiency.

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Make sure your fulfilment is flexible

A frictionless fulfilment process allows brands to be more agile as new trends – and subsequent commercial opportunities – emerge. You need to be able to react quickly to meet sudden spikes in customer demand and, while this will inevitably pose challenges to inventory planning, this can be overcome if you’re using software that offers real-time insight into omni channel sales and warehouse inventory levels. Assessing current sales data alongside historic data makes it easier to spot seasonal patterns and ensure that you aren’t left with expired or leftover products once a spike has passed.

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This is equally important to bear in mind when preparing for peak season eCommerce events. A fulfilment provider needs to have the tools in place to meticulously forecast orders so that warehouse teams can flex in size to serve different needs, including key calendar dates for beauty, such as Mother’s Day and Christmas. To that end, we partner with retail operating system Brightpearl, whose inventory planning function ensures that you always have the right products to meet demand, particularly during those trickier to forecast peak season events.

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Take storage seriously

Your warehouse should include dedicated storage areas for beauty products so that they leave them in the same condition they arrived in. Not every warehouse will be up to spec – you need to make sure you have clean, temperature regulated ambient spaces and, of course, that you rvaluable products are kept out of direct sunlight.

In addition to this, your fulfilment provider needs to demonstrate that it has batch control and quality assurance measures to ensure products don’t exceed best before dates. This is particularly important in the case of perishable products or those that contain organic ingredients. One example of best-practice is adopting a first-in-first-out method so that older products are picked, packed and shipped as priority, minimising the risk of waste and items reaching expiration dates.

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Ensure your packaging is on point

Unboxing is the first physical interaction that your customers have with your product. So it’s vital that customers experience products and packaging as intended and, crucially, without any damage. Sustainable, seasonal packaging, protective insulation materials and appropriate sized boxes are all helpful when it comes to achieving this. Some fulfilment providers can also meet more intricate specification requests to make sure that beauty products are pristinely presented, such as adding samples to an order or including a branded note, tissue paper or a spray of fragrance.

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Store your products in the best possible location

Brands need to consider the optimal locations for getting products out to customers effectively. Geographic proximity means faster, more cost-effective and more environmentally friendly shipping, so try and choose a fulfilment partner that has a proven presence in the locations that matter most to your business – and that can boast easy access to major transport networks, allowing for cohesive and effective distribution further afield.

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Offer optimum delivery outcomes

A good delivery experience encourages customers to order again, and that doesn’t always mean the same or next day. Customers want high levels of service at a reasonable cost, transparency  throughoutthe fulfilment process – in a nutshell knowing where the item is and when they can expect it – and a guarantee that it will arrive at the time stated when they made the purchase.

In addition to this, customers are becoming more eco-conscious, so it’s important that you’re fulfilling orders in a way that’s as sustainable as possible. Beauty brands can clearly demonstrate their ESG credentials to customers when they have the relevant accreditations in place.

As part of this process, fulfilment providers should have teams dedicated to achieving relevant industry standards. This isn’t merely a box ticking exercise, it ensures that your products are managed, fulfilled and delivered – from eco-friendly warehouses – with integrity.

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Set clear KPIs and sales targets

KPIs and sales targets are more than just about numbers and metrics. They help you to understand how a fulfilment provider is performing and the impact of this on your business. Putting KPIs in place with a provider with allow your partner to make continuous adjustments to achieve your strategic goals faster.

This is why at Huboo we adhere to a clear service level agreement that has the potential to yield the best possible customer experience. Our SLAs include 99.9% picking accuracy, same day order dispatch and returns processing as standard.

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Our key beauty partners in profile

Our ever expanding pool of strategic partners exists to maximise the growth opportunity for your beauty brand, giving you access to new marketplaces across Europe and globally, plugging you into innovative new technology solutions, and providing best-in-class guidance and counsel to solve emerging strategic and operational concerns as you grow.

The eCommerce market is constantly evolving, but by aligning with a carefully curated selection of ERPs, marketplaces, eCommerce channels, social media platforms and other software applications, we ensure we’re always best-placed to meet your commercial needs.

The world’s most trusted retailers use Mirakl to manage their third-party marketplace and drop ship business. Mirakl’s intuitive, secure and scalable technology powers profitable digital growth across all aspects of commerce – from platform model to personalisation and payments. Thousands of sellers from the Mirakl Connect platform have joined the Mirakl-powered marketplaces of leading beauty retailers, including Superdrug, Douglas, Nocibé and Shop Apotheke.

Controlling costs by Huboo fulfilment-3

We’re a certified fulfilment partner to the popular video-sharing app at the forefront of the burgeoning social commerce revolution. TikTok’s dedicated eCommerce function, TikTok Shop, is capitalising on the generation of shoppers inspired by influencers and vloggers and provides sellers with quick ways to fulfil large volumes of orders placed through the app. There are currently over 16 bn views across TikTok videos tagged #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, demonstrating the mass appeal of TikTok as a commerce channel.

A selection of large household name brands use CORQ’s unique toolkit to harness the power of influencer marketing, social media and content development to boost their sales potential. CORQ successfully achieves this by providing influencer discovery and due diligence, campaign reporting, daily influencer news blasts, the sharpest data-led analysis and essential trend forecasting. CORQ is staffed by an expert team of journalists who are dedicated to interrogating the digital space, determining where it will go next and helping clients use this knowledge to their best advantage.

Nonsensical is an award-winning TikTok agency that drives powerful and impactful results on the platform by creating original and engaging content for brands, as well as building and managing their communities. In the past 12 months, the team have notched up 600 million video views for brands like Go.Compare, The Works and Uber Eats. The team are TikTok Shop and Ads specialists and have worked with many beauty clients to help them grow their communities and ultimately drive sales. They have also worked on multiple influencer campaigns to deliver real impact for their brand partners.

Packhelp makes it easy for anyone to order fully custom-branded packaging. It connects customers with the most suitable production possibilities, offering them a broad range of packaging products from mailing boxes and kraft tape to tissue paper and product boxes. Packhelp covers everything from local deliveries of small quantities to global procurement of large volumes, with Packhelp Studio – an online editor for small businesses, instantly purchasable products and orders from 30 pieces, and Packhelp Plus, that helps mid-market companies scale their packaging needs.

Breaking the mould with Azio Beauty

Azio Beauty is passionate about helping women feel confident in their skin and reveal their natural beauty. Since 2021, the UK based K-Beauty brand has been on a mission to disrupt the overpriced beauty market and make premium anti-ageing skincare products more accessible to women everywhere.

To do this, Azio has reimagined the production process, partnering directly with R&D labs and developing its skincare products from the ground up to bring down the cost without compromising on quality.

Of course, achieving success in the UK premium beauty market also requires exceptional customer experience. So as Azio prepared to launch in the UK in summer 2021, their team began searching for a third-party fulfilment partner capable of delivering to the very highest customer expectations.

We needed a partner willing to work with a growing, and dynamic brand. We were also looking for a provider with the tech skills and infrastructure to minimise our integration times and scale with our business as we grew. Huboo met all of these criteria and, from day one, has enabled us to give our customers the fast, reliable and hassle-free experience they expect from a premium brand.”

Luna Cassan

Co-founder of Azio’s parent company ORBYT GROUP

Going for growth during testing times

As the cost-of-living crisis continues to affect households across the UK, beauty customers have become more discerning about the brands they purchase – a challenging market backdrop but a great opportunity for an ambitious new brand with a distinct proposition.

120%

achieving UK sales growth in 2022

With an affordable, high-quality product range and a best-of-breed fulfilment provider on board, Azio Beauty proved an immediate hit, achieving UK sales growth of 120% in 2022, as customers who traditionally used expensive high-end brands tried Azio for the first time and loved the experience.

While the brand speaks mainly 45-50+,in the UK, Azio found that its bestselling product, The Intense Firming Face Serum, proved highly appealing to younger women too.

“As women start to see the benefits of our products, other household members inevitably take notice and sneakily try them out for themselves – until they get caught and have to buy their own!” – explains Luna.

Social commerce and multi-channel expansion

Younger people increasingly recognise the benefits of taking on the ageing process as early as possible through an improved skincare regime. Going forward, Azio sees a clear opportunity to speak to this audience directly via social channels, particularly through its BeautyAmbassador influencer programme.

Influencer marketing plays a significant role in our acquisition and retention strategy, and we are building long-term relationships with every Ambassador we engage, as they truly are the voice of our brand. Through Huboo, we know we can always get new products out to Ambassadors ahead of their deadlines, giving them the time they need to in stil their unique personality on all of the Azio content they create.

Luna Cassan

Co-founder of Azio’s parent company ORBYT GROUP

Azio frequently runs giveaways and partnerships through its Ambassadors to engage and grow its community, while the community’s passionate response to new product launches has led to a surge in user-generated content, which is now a crucial pillar in Azio’s marketing strategy.

The next stage for Azio will be leaning into the growing social commerce movement and boosting its presence on TikTok and YouTube, amongst other channels. For example, the brand plans to host weekly live shopping events on TikTok, utilising the platform’s new shopping feature to increase sales and engagement with younger audiences.

Alongside this, Azio is developing a rewards programme for loyal followers and a subscription service so that repeat customers can restock automatically at the best possible price point.It’s part of a bold, multi-channel acquisition strategy that will also see Azio expanding into physical stores over the next 12 months – all of which is underpinned by Huboo’s ability to keep picking, packing, and shipping orders, regard less of the sales channel.

Here’s a little more about what we do and
how we can help your beauty brand to grow…

Where it all started

We emerged six years ago on a mission to revolutionise eCommerce by creating a more efficient, simpler and more transparent approach to fulfilment and logistics.

We’ve taken the traditional warehouse format and transformed it into smaller, more scalable service-led hubs, where each area – and every product placement – is optimised by tech. Since then, we have continually refined our hub model, which massively reduces the distance walked by warehouse teams, driving efficiencies and cost savings, and allowing us to put people – and a personalised approach – at the heart of our fulfilment proposition.

Our 700+ strong team has a wealth of beauty industry expertise, having partnered with a host of brands – from high street names to innovators and category disruptors like Azio Skincare and Pore Favor – to help them successfully scale their businesses.

Today, we offer a higher quality, dynamic and competitively priced service offering with a UK and European fulfilment model that has a global reach. This is carefully tailored to eCommerce beauty brands of all sizes and specialisms and is underpinned by a human-centric approach to customer service, end-to-end technology and a commitment to continuous improvement in everything we do.

United Kingdom
Netherlands
Spain
Germany

How we do it

People

We’re not like other fulfilment companies. Our empowering company culture means that our staff are passionate about delivering our goal – enabling your beauty brand to grow. Within our warehouses, we replicate the processes that occur in traditional fulfilment in more controlled, manageable spaces that our people take pride in. Dedicated hub managers run these spaces and act as an extension to your brand, dealing with your customers directly to ensure requests and questions are swiftly actioned and resolved.

Technology

Our bespoke, tech-driven operational solutions integrate with all major sales channels, giving your beauty brand access to a host of potentially untapped markets, while allowing you to manage your entire inventory from a single platform. It’s more reliable this way, because we’re in control of every element and stage in the fulfilment process. Our strategic approach to fulfilment is perfect for all types of beauty SKU, and our approach can help beauty brands of all sizes, while you can be safe in the knowledge that our certified, zero waste hubs are underpinned by a world-class Warehouse Management System. We provide you with real-time order and inventory data and accurate tracking, alongside customised reports that include buying habits, sales metrics and customer insights which help to fuel your business growth. We also have a fully integrated and automated returns management system in place, saving you processing time and providing clear reporting and full visibility on the status of all returns.

Growth

We’re only successful if you are too. Whether we’re supporting new product lines, addingsales channels or helping you break into new markets, we’re here to help our customersgrow better and faster. From our technology to our warehouses, to our people, we channelour expert in-house knowledge to help your business expand in the right way, at the righttime and in the right places.

How our approach helps emerging beauty brands

We ease the complications that fulfilment brings with it, effortlessly integrating with the beauty world’s most popular sales channels and marketplaces. We do this by harnessing cutting edge technology, in tandem with people who care, to enable a more productive fulfilment network.

As soon as you sign up, we assign you a hub manager and hub team to support your brand, ensure the smooth running of your dedicated hub, and provide great customer service. We also provide larger accounts with Key Account Managers to stay across the complexity of your operations and keep everything running according to plan, even during your busiest periods..

We also let you monitor every stage of the fulfilment process, in real-time, from your Client Dashboard. Our intuitive platform gives you the power to track your goods, manage transactions, monitor sales and listings by each channel, carry out quality control inventory and keep on top of costs. We provide full visibility of where your stock is at every step of its life cycle.

Equally, we recognise that a one size fits all approach doesn’t suit every beauty business when it comes to couriers. We let you integrate with the right international courier partner for your needs and, in return, you’ll receive Huboo Express rates. We have clear pricing, fair terms and don’t charge for setting you up. Nor are there any charges for integrating with your existing sales channels and systems and the same goes for storage.

In a nutshell, we’ve got everything in place to help you reach more beauty customers on a global basis and grow with confidence.

How we extend this approach
to larger beauty businesses

We transform multi-million-pound turnover beauty brands into digital commerce market leaders by deploying customised solutions that are forward-thinking and future-fit. This means that they can adapt to the speed and scale that large businesses demand, in turn driving efficiency and growth, while staying loyal to each brand’s ethos, values and heritage.

We build and manage our own technology because it’s more reliable that way and allows us to remain in total control of your products at all times. Our technology also speeds up ongoing operational processes and brings greater clarity to the status of every order.

We can also tailor it in a way that maximises exposure to your beauty brand, taking full advantage of our extensive partnership network. Our team of 50+ software developers is on hand to support, update and innovate, harnessing their tech know-how to make sure you stay ahead of the curve. This includes developing and creating tailored integrations that drive efficiency and growth, such as automation and targeted reporting.

We let you manage your entire inventory from a single dashboard and observe aggregated data across all your eCommerce channels, territories and customers. Simply put, our insights empower your decision-making, by letting you know which sales channels are delivering, how product lines are performing and everything else you need to keep growing your business.

We don’t franchise our tech model, meaning that whichever warehouse your customers order their beauty products from, the quality will be exceptional and consistent, and you’ll have lower packaging and posting overheads on account of the expert fulfilment methods we in corporate into our supply chain solution.

How we extend this approach
to larger beauty businesses

We transform into digital commerce market leaders

We help you adapt to effective growth

We let you manage your inventory from one place

Discover how we can help you grow