Excitement in the beauty industry is driven by independent beauty brands. Cosmoprof North America, the world’s largest B2B beauty exhibition, is a platform for brand discovery, and many indie brands have gotten their start at the show. I recently met with Daniela Ciocan, Cosmoprof’s Marketing Director for North America, to learn more about how beauty brands are discovered at the show.
How Are Brands Discovered at Cosmoprof North America?
The challenge for indie beauty brands today is finding a retail opportunity and attracting key retailers, as the beauty space is becoming increasingly crowded. When Ciocan joined Cosmoprof in 2006, the show had less than half the number of exhibitors and only one-third as many attendees as it does today (40,000). It was not known as a driver of trends at the time and, in order to grow, it needed to attract key retailers.
Understanding this environment, Ciocan set out to create what she called “Discover Zones,” or special, curated sections on the show floor that feature up-and-coming innovative products from carefully selected brands. Over the past 12 years, Ciocan has helped create more than 10 new areas within Cosmoprof North America that each highlight a unique trend and help shine a light on new brands and opportunities. The graphic below shows a timeline of the creation of the 10 key Discover Zones at Cosmoprof and describes what is unique about each one.
Drunk Elephant is a natural beauty brand that got its start at Cosmoprof in 2014 and was acquired for $25 million in May 2017. Founder Tiffany Masterson said that her brand was featured in the Discover Beauty section of Cosmoprof in 2014, and that she had scheduled meetings with several different retailers over the course of the trade show that year. Masterson said that although Sephora was not on her list of retailers, Sephora representatives stopped by her booth four times in three days. “It was the first time I was able to showcase my new packaging and finalized formulations, as I had spent the year prior tweaking the line,” she said. “It is very impactful to be able to show how your products look on the shelf and express your brand personality. Sephora ended up launching me six months later, in January 2015. The rest is history!” she said.
The table below highlights other major indie brands that got their start at Cosmoprof in one of the show’s curated Discover Zones.
Discover Zone Success Factors
Each of the specially curated Discover Zones at Cosmoprof has been built with three features that help brands get the attention of retailers at the show:
- Each zone is organized around an emerging industry theme. Ciocan created the Tones of Beauty zone in 2015 after observing that multicultural beauty products were garnering more attention in the market. In 2016, she created the Discover Green zone in response to the emerging organic beauty trend.
- Physical curation and placement on the exhibit floor are critical. The Discover Zones are easy to identify and associate with the corresponding retail concept. Ciocan and her teams carefully select the beauty brands that are featured in each of the areas, which were designed to be exclusive and are physically located in strategic spots on the exhibit floor. The Vanities is an area devoted to emerging brands, and all products in the zone are prominently displayed along a high-traffic aisle on the exhibit floor, for maximum exposure. The Discover Green area is also highly visible, with all of the curated green brands situated on Astroturf in an “outdoor environment.”
- National retailers are invited to participate in one-on-one “speed dating” sessions with selected brands. These special introductions help brands bring their message and product directly to retailers.
Executives from major retailers such as Amazon, Bloomingdale’s, Dillard’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Space NK, Target and Ulta attend Cosmoprof North America to discover new products to bring to their customers, and the show has received awards for its creativity in terms of marketing and key programs. Ciocan has won Trade Show Executive’s Marketing Genius award twice and she was recently awarded Female Executive of the Year and Maverick of the Year awards by Women World Awards. For many indie beauty brands, being featured in one of Cosmoprof North America’s curated Discover Zones has helped retailers, and customers, discover them.
