Here, the top 10 brands online during the Sephora Spring Savings Event (April 10 through April 20) and Ulta Beauty Let’s Haul Sale (April 10 through April 18).Here, the top 10 brands online during the Sephora Spring Savings Event (April 10 through April 20) and Ulta Beauty Let’s Haul Sale (April 10 through April 18).
Beauty’s spring sale season bore fruit for more than a few players, data shows.
Numbers from Navigo Marketing tracking online sales during Sephora’s Spring Savings Event, and Ulta Beauty’s simultaneous Let’s Haul Sale in April, shows that with the exception of Sol de Janeiro, there was little crossover in terms of respective top-10 brands.
Navigo’s assessment spanned five categories: makeup, skin care, hair, body and fragrance. It found that Sephora’s own private label line was the top brand during its event, comprising 4.5 percent of online sales, followed by Kérastase at 2.8 percent.
At Ulta, Clinique was the top brand with 2.9 percent share of online sales; La Roche-Posay came in second at 2.6 percent share, and Ulta’s private label line took third.
Overall, the Sephora sale drove more organic visibility for its brands (up 55 percent year-over-year), and saw greater brand sponsorship intensity (up 37 percent), than the Ulta sale, indicating that “Sephora is treating its spring event like a tentpole moment,” said Jacob St. John, founder and chief executive officer of Navigo Marketing, noting that from an assortment point of view: “the two retailers are moving in opposite directions: Sephora is narrower and deeper, Ulta is wider and shallower.”
In skin care, Sephora sales were driven by K-beauty and indie brands like Innisfree, Glow Recipe and Dieux. At Ulta, skin care is similarly driven by K-beauty brands like Anua and Medicube, but is more dominated by dermatological products. (In addition to being ulta.com’s number-two brand overall, La Roche-Posay accounted for five of the top 10 skin care products during the sale, which took place from April 10 to April 18).
Other top performers on sephora.com included The Ordinary and Rare Beauty, while at Ulta, E.l.f. Cosmetics and Redken were among the big winners.
Notably, in fragrance, two of Sephora’s top-10 products were multibrand discovery sets, which weren’t a theme among Ulta’s top 10 in the category.
“Brands should be lobbying their reps for sampler inclusion the same way they lobby for endcaps and homepage tiles; it’s the cheapest discovery vehicle in the spring window,” said Meredith Matthes, director of operations at Navigo.
Here, the top 10 brands by share of online sales during the Sephora Savings Event, per Navigo Marketing.
