Amid Challenges, What’s Next For Beautycon?

The future of Beautycon, whose beauty festivals are billed as meccas of cultural relevance where brands can connect IRL with a new generation of beauty-obsessed, digitally native consumers, is at a crossroads. The company has hired investment bank Ohana & Co. to seek additional investment, WWD has confirmed. Beauty festivals — think professional trade show meets Coachella — have become prevalent in the last five years, largely thanks to Beautycon, founded in 2013, which was one of the first. At a time when Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly shopping online and looking for experiences to fill Instagram feeds, Beautycon’s chief executive officer Moj Mahdara has aimed to apply the fandom experience found at events like Comic Con to beauty brands and influencers. Beautycon in particular has drawn thousands of attendees — 20,000 at its 2018 festival in New York, according to WWD — and in the past two years retailers have launched festivals of their own, including Australia-based Mecca’s Meccaland and Sephora’s Sephoria in 2018, and in June, QVC’s Beauty Bash. But industry executives are grappling with whether beauty festivals, Beautycon’s primary source of revenue, are really the effective marketing vehicles they were initially perceived to be, raising questions over Beautycon’s future direction even

Follow WWD on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

Read More...

from WWDWWD https://ift.tt/2EAW5nZ