beauty

I’m back from the 10^thCosmoprof North America July 22-24 in Las Vegas, and here are 20 things I now know.

1. Officially, the trade show featured 856 exhibiting companies on a sold-out show floor along with more than 25,000 attendees—a 9% increase over 2011.

So you think that you can just add a few more beauty products to your shelves to satisfy the back-to-school surge … maybe sometime in August? Think again.

PriceGrabber’s recent Back-to-School Shopping Forecast survey reveals that 46% of consumers are planning to spend more in the 2012 B-T-S shopping season than in 2011.

In comparison, only 13% of last year’s B-T-S shoppers planned to spend more than the year before.

So you think the biggest consumers of Internet beauty products are from the United States and Europe? Think again. The reality may surprise you.

Kline & Co. recently issued its Beauty Retailing Through Direct Sales in Emerging Markets 2011: Channel Analysis and Opportunities report. The report found that Internet beauty sales in China have grown nearly 200% since 2006 and are estimated to be worth nearly $8 billion at the retail sales level in 2011. This makes China the largest Internet beauty market in the world.

You have to absolutely love what the Professional Beauty Association is doing with its first-ever Distributor Executive Conference in the Seattle area on April 3-4.

If you haven’t heard yet, this is a conference for professional-beauty independent distributors. No loud music, no suppliers, no manufacturers reps, no beauty-service professionals, no selling. It’s designed for indie distributors to talk among themselves in a business environment. What a fabulous idea!