What is still touted as one of the fastest growth industries anywhere in the business world has been unable to hide from the ravages of the coronavirus according to authoritative sector sources.
Cosmetics Design Europe.com, one of the continent’s leading and highest read news websites in the cosmetics industry providing information on the cosmetics and personal care sectors for more than a decade, is reporting that the still-rampaging pandemic has changed the face of the beauty industry as we know it, with the Makeup sub-sector taking the heaviest hit with personal care faring better.
The website says that a “dig into the financials” reflects mixed blessings for the sector with some of the heavy hitters in the sector weathering the storm better than others. The internet information provider says that what may have, up until now, saved businesses in the sector from complete collapse was the fact that once the COVID-19 crisis kicked in, “beauty businesses across the globe went into ‘response’ mode.” It says that while companies in the sector stuck to their philanthropic guns by supporting charities and organizations worldwide through cash and product donations, restructured manufacturing operations, and protected retail staff, the current focus has now switched to long-term survival, “in a very different post-COVID world.”
Uniquely vulnerable to many of the concerns associated with COVID-19, the economic impact of the pandemic on the sector can hardly be overestimated. Describing the pandemic as having created a “health, social and economic crisis combined,” Cosmetics Design Europe says that within months of the coronavirus “consumer lockdowns, international travel bans, and retail businesses shuttered,” purchase and usage behaviour changed dramatically across the beauty and personal care space with sales falling dramatically across many beauty segments.
While the economic impact has hit the beauty industry in its entirety, the pressure has been most intense in small salon-type operations in poor countries. Here in Guyana, for example, small beauty parlours renting modest spaces in larger malls have been compelled to cease operations in response to national health directives with regard to the closure of businesses. While some of these have since resumed their operations in the wake of relaxed restrictions, many have been sufficiently affected by the loss of income to find it difficult to get back on their feet.
Interviews with proprietors of five beauty parlours in Georgetown suggest that the recent window of opportunity created by the official relaxation of the COVID-19 strictures has allowed for the still jittery operators to make hay while the sun shines. “Customers are coming in for different types of services,” a downtown beauty parlour operator told this newspaper. Coronavirus isn’t stopping women from wanting to look good.”
Battling COVID-19, however, is not ‘a breeze’ for entities in the beauty business. All of the beauty parlours interviewed told this newspaper that the health and sanitation precautions which they are now required to observe require careful oversight as well as additional expenditure.
What the local beauty parlour owners says would appear to be consistent with the view expressed by Cosmetic Design Europe, that while the impact of COVID-19 on the sector has been an across-the-board phenomenon it is the smaller operators that will suffer most.
Asked to state their biggest concern in the circumstances, four of the five business proprietors interviewed say that they were most worried that another wave of COVID-19 lockdowns would trigger a likely more extended lockdown that could push their businesses closer to the edge.
Cosmetics Designs Europe’s look at the global picture facing the industry, meanwhile, bares what it says is “an expanse of economic disruption that will continue to take its toll on beauty.”
