Following the announcement at the end of December last year (2023) that it would end all online business on Chinese e-commerce platforms, recently, the LVMH Group's makeup brand Benefit announced that it will officially withdraw from China at the end of June 2024.
Although the brand's official customer service responded that this move was "an adjustment of business scale and development focus", judging from various signs at this stage, this brand that introduced the eyebrow bar service model, which was the enlightener of many Chinese young people's makeup primer and blush products, has gone into irreparable decline.
Looking back at its development path in China, why did an American trend makeup that was backed by the large group LVMH, entered the market in 2007, and "touched the net" early in 2011?
fbeauty Future Traces contacted the official customer service of the Benefit brand, and she said that Benefit will adjust its business scale and development focus in Chinese mainland. At present, it is gradually withdrawing all department store counters in the Chinese market, but consumers can continue to go to Sephora's offline stores in China and Sephora's official online platforms to purchase products.
However, another teller at Benefit's eyebrow bar in the Sephora system said that the internal news is that Benefit's upcoming withdrawal from China is complete, and "some stores will continue to provide services at present, subject to the stores that can be reserved."
Although there is no official announcement of the withdrawal, the update of the brand's official Weibo, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu accounts will all stay on December 29, 2023, and there will be no updates on the three major platforms in 2024. Previously, its official WeChat maintained a weekly update, Weibo and Xiaohongshu and even a daily update.
More than ten years ago, my family (nearby) opened the first Sephora, and I bought dandelions and rouge water, a testimony of youth! ”
From the beginning of its entry into China, to today's withdrawal, it is really a sigh. ”
The first blush in college was their dandelion! ”
In the comment section of Benefit's exit from China, many consumers felt sorry for the brand. As a 48-year-old makeup brand, Benefit has made many highlights in the past.
In 1976, twin sisters Jean Ford and Jane Ford, who were engaged in modeling, used the first pot of gold earned as models to open their first beauty store in San Francisco, USA, called Face Place, which was the predecessor of Benefit.
In 1990, Face Place, already well-known in San Francisco, changed its name to Benefit Cosmetics and began to expand into department stores in the United States. In 1997, Benefit opened its first overseas store in London, UK; By 1999, LVMH acquired a majority stake in the company, and Benefit has since grown into a global household name for makeup.
Benefit's offline stores do not sell products, but also provide eyebrow trimming services for customers. In 2003, the brand opened its first "eyebrow bar" in San Francisco. According to LVMH's official website, Benefit has more than 3,000 eyebrow bars and beauty desks in more than 55 countries and regions around the world, dedicated to providing the same fresh and fun beauty services, and every 2 seconds 1 eyebrow product is sold.
With the continuous praise of eyebrow makeup products and beeswax eyebrow shaping services all over the world, Benefit is known as the "global eyebrow makeup leader". According to public reports, according to the estimation of the total retail sales of world-renowned eyebrow products in 2021, Benefit Benefit once became the world's No. 1 eyebrow makeup brand at that time.
In 2007, Benefit opened its first store in Shanghai and officially entered the Chinese market. According to public reports, the brand set a sales record on the first day of opening.
The following year, Benefit entered Sephora China, and then continued to open boutiques in department stores in Hangzhou, Shenyang, Chengdu, Wuhan, Chongqing and other parts of the country. According to relevant reports, by 2020, Benefit has covered 275 stores in 81 cities across the country, not only in first-tier cities, but also in third- and fourth-tier cities such as Linyi, Jiangmen, and Dazhou.
In addition to the development of **, Benefit's exploration of online channels is also very early. In 2011, Benefit entered Tmall for the first time, but closed the store in less than half a year. It wasn't until 2017 that Benefit entered Tmall again, and in 2021 and 2022, she first settled on JD.com and Douyin e-commerce platforms.
However, at this stage, Benefit's business has been in decline under the impetus of the epidemic. In 2021, Benefit began to withdraw from domestic offline counters on a large scale. At that time, the brand said that with the change of the retail environment and trends, the brand is adjusting its business model in China, and will gradually withdraw department store counters, and will mainly sell them on Sephora and Tmall online in the future.
However, Benefit's online business also officially ended at the beginning of this year. On January 28, the official operation of the three major platforms of Benefit, Tmall, Douyin and JD.com officially ended, and only the official Sephora store online can purchase brand-related products. At this point, Benefit's sales channels in the Chinese market have shrunk to the point that only Sephora retail remains.
From the perspective of the LVMH group behind the brand, the perfume and cosmetics business unit where Benefit is located has been a key business unit of the group in recent years, and the performance of the department is also soaring.
According to LVMH's latest 2023 full-year financial report, the sales of the group's perfume and cosmetics division in 2023 exceeded 8 billion euros (about 623 yuan.) for the first time400 million), up 7% year-on-year, with organic growth of 11%; The operating profit was about 700 million euros (about 54 yuan.)500 million), an increase of 8% year-on-year, a new high in the past five years.
However, according to the group's financial report, high-end beauty brands such as Christian Dior, Guerlain and Givenchy are the brands that contribute the most to the department's performance.
According to Mojing market intelligence data, in the whole year of 2023, in the Tao series platform (**Tmall) eyebrow pencil, eyebrow powder and eyebrow cream category, Benefit ranked 14th in sales, accounting for less than 2% of the market share; The sales volume of this category on the Douyin platform ranked 56th.
On social media platforms, the number of fans accumulated by Benefit is not very large. The number of its fans on Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu is 7850,000, 340,000, 780,000, with a total of 1.2 million followers on the three platforms. As a comparison, Make Up for Ever, another makeup brand of the LVMH group, has 1.3 million and 67 followers on these three platforms, respectively50,000, 3160,000, a total of 2.3 million followers.
The image of Benefit's counter is very young, the product packaging design is very cute, and there are many star items that once became 'Internet celebrity products' in the Chinese market, but I don't know why they didn't do well, which is actually a pity. A department store veteran lamented. It is understood that last year, the department store system where it is located has also cleared the Benefit brand out of the cosmetics area.
Benefit's brand assets such as categories, pricing, and IP cultural differences are not many. An industry veteran analyzed to "fbeauty Future Traces", "Benefit is too far away from Chinese consumers, and those interesting brand images such as Counter-Strike do not resonate with Chinese consumers." ”
In line with his view, many industry insiders also told "fbeauty Future Traces" that in fact, from the perspective of the entire path of the brand's development in the Chinese market, Benefit has many problems in terms of category strategy, pricing strategy and core language.
The first is the failure of category strategy and product strategy.
In the Chinese market, Benefit has focused on the makeup subcategory from the beginning.
When it first entered the Chinese market, the "Anti-Hole Elite" and "Dandelion Blush" products became smash hits and became the brand's star products in the first phase of the Chinese market. However, after using Counter-Strike and Dandelion Blush to cut into the two track categories of pre-makeup and color base makeup, Benefit actually did not continue to do enough category extension and product upgrades, resulting in it quickly becoming bland from explosive, and then submerged among many latecomers.
Later, Benefit began to take the eyebrow pencil as the core category, launched products such as "Root-Clear" eyebrow pencil and "Anti-Muggle eyebrow pencil", and made a differentiation in the appearance design, priced at about 130 yuan.
Judging from the big data of the 2023 eyebrow pencil, eyebrow powder and eyebrow cream of the Tao Department of Mojing Market Intelligence, the total sales of this category last year was 1.7 billion yuan, and the average price of the product was about 30 yuan. From the perspective of brand sales, domestic brands that focus on cost performance occupy the main market share, with 8 of the top 10 brands being domestic products, and only Shu Uemura among the high-end brands also occupies the head of the market and is on the top 3 of eyebrow makeup products.
As a "black barcode", eyebrow products are particularly special in the entire makeup category.
First of all, in terms of product value, the R&D content of the refill itself is not high, and the difference in consumers' perception of the use of different products comes more from the product form, such as the automatic transfer of packaging or the need to sharpen the pen, whether the refill is a thin round bar or a diamond-shaped bar, and at this stage, many domestic brands will use multiple SKUs to cover these use experiences.
Secondly, in terms of ** positioning, domestic eyebrow makeup products also play the ultimate cost performance, pressing the unit price to about 30 yuan. Obviously, the pricing of Benefit Fee 130 yuan is in a more "embarrassing" middle zone, compared to the upward, the product texture and brand value are not as good as Shu Uemura, and the downward can not compete with domestic brands for cost performance.
From the category point of view, Benefit's online eyebrow pencil, dandelion blush, and Christmas limited edition some special packaged small sets are featured goods, accounting for 1 3 each. The above-mentioned senior industry insiders pointed out that Benefit's new products are very slow, "and a set of products sells all over the world, and those interesting brand images such as Counter-Strike do not resonate with Chinese consumers." ”
In addition, from the perspective of the brand's channel strategy, Benefit failed to seize the bonus period of domestic e-commerce platforms.
Benefit Benefit briefly entered Tmall in 2011 (at that time, Tmall was still "** after withdrawing", and then returned to Tmall in 2017, until 2022 to complete all the layout of Tmall, JD.com, Douyin mainstream e-commerce platforms, during which she did not grasp the interest in e-commerce live streaming to bring goods.
Make-up brands need to keep up with the trends in their regions, and respond to consumer needs. A senior makeup industry insider told "Fbeauty Future Traces".Makeup brands need to have a certain frequency of updates, and brands with slow new product development and long-term packaging will inevitably have a feeling of "outdated".
The classic old brand", "youth memory", "regretful departure" and "tears of the times" ......On the Xiaohongshu platform, labels such as these often appear alongside the Benefit brand, and some younger generations of consumers even say that they "haven't seen much of it". Even with the backing of a luxury group like LVMH and its early entry into the Chinese market, it is still facing a regrettable exit due to "unadaptation" in China, which can not help but be embarrassing.
Written by Xiang Tingting.
Proofread by Li Lin.