How to stay on top of every beauty trend and lead the market

Every year has its passwords, you know? Trends that are going to open the secret doors of the beauty market to let you in and thrive. Trends come and go, but if you can spot them from afar, like a big nice wave coming in, and manage to get ready to surf it before anyone else does, you’re going to go a lot further than your competition. But how do you do that?

Have you tried witchcraft and voodoo dolls yet? Sometimes they work, but I feel this time you might need something a little stronger.

The beauty market is flooded by brands popping up every day, which makes competition VERY REAL. As a result, the cycle of beauty trends is speeding up, forcing beauty brands to anticipate emerging trends in order to stay competitive and seize opportunities at the right time.

Why it’s important to forecast beauty trends

First of all: why? Because beauty trends forecasting allows you to predict customers behaviors and improve your demand planning. If you know what people are going to want, before they even know, you’ll be ready and fully stocked to give them what they want when the trends hit the market. Get it?

Also, imagine this awful scenario: if your beauty trends forecasting is sloppy and inaccurate, you risk investing in unsuccessful projects, resulting in unsold inventory: beauty products that are going to be stocked untouched in your facility for God knows how long.

So much money and so much work just sitting there. Such a waste.

A bad planning leads to a bad investment. It’s that simple and yet so complicated at the same time. The only way out of overstocking is to foresee emerging trends and anticipate demand at an early stage.

How you can anticipate beauty trends

There are a few strategies that can help you successfully foresee upcoming beauty trends:

1. Be mindful of your surroundings. Always. Doesn’t matter how small, every detail (if taken up the right way) can turn into a major beauty trend. Watch runways, events and celebrities and ask yourself: out of all this razzle-dazzle what is the one thing that can be transferred into a daily routine, accessible to all? That will be your lucky winner.
2. Monitor influencers to get inspiration and use social media to detect emerging trends. Analyze pictures, videos and hashtags to see what it is that people are looking for. You can also consider using tools such as Google Analytics and Google Trends to see what specific words people are interested in and how many people are searching for those words monthly.
3. Target the right buyer persona. This is extremely important: if you don’t know exactly who you’re talking to, how can you possibly know what they want? Building a detailed buyer persona will help you make more focused, specific business choices.
4. Trends have a lifecycle: nothing new is ever really original. It’s there, somewhere in the past, ready to come back with a new twist. So, keep track of beauty trends lifecycles, their behavior and growth, and you’ll be able to predict if and when they’ll make a big comeback.

These are a few good tips that you can implement in your strategy, but there is one that you always need to carry in your pocket: be curious, get informed, be present. You can’t let anything slip your attention. You have to keep an eye on society and reality at all times.

And if you have an intuition and you feel it’s good, trust your instincts! They’re right more often than not.

But if you feel like you’re behind on all of this, and can’t catch up, don’t worry: we’re here to help! We’re experts of the cosmetic industry and have been spotting beauty trends for a very long time. We can catch you up on how it’s done.