Dive Brief:
- In a continued effort to advance its beauty offerings, Target introduced 40 new beauty brands in stores and online, according to a company announcement. Half of the brands are exclusive to Target, and most items are $10 or less.
- Twenty of those brands are from Black-owned or founded companies, and almost all products meet the company’s clean standards for ingredient transparency.
- The assortment incorporates graduates from the company’s Target Takeoff accelerator program, which gives up-and-coming beauty brands the chance to learn about mass retail. Companies from the program include Frederick Benjamin, Sassy Hair and Undefined Beauty.
Dive Insight:
Further emphasizing that it is becoming a formidable player in the beauty space, Target has introduced additional products to its lineup — specifically with an emphasis on Black-owned brands and clean beauty.
“[W]ith the addition of nearly 40 new beauty brands, we are raising the bar on our premier beauty experience, with a strong focus on our commitment to Black-owned or -founded brands and Target Clean offerings,” Cassandra Jones, Target’s vice president and general manager of beauty and cosmetics, said in a statement.
The announcement is part of the retailer’s initiative to spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025. Target introduced the project goal last April, and said it was a way to use the company’s “size, scale and resources to create economic opportunity for Black-owned businesses that extends outside of Target.” The company has increased its Black-owned and founded beauty assortment by 65% since 2020.
In the fall of 2020, Target announced that it was opening Ulta Beauty shop-in-shops at over 100 stores (with hundreds more to come) in a partnership that would feature established and emerging brands, and would be placed alongside the retailer’s existing beauty assortment. By the summer of 2021, 58 of those locations were open, with Ulta executives stating they were excited with the customer response to the partnership.
“We feel really confident how we’ve come out of the gate operationally, working really well, and most importantly, as I mentioned, consumers are thrilled by this,” Ulta CEO Dave Kimbell said on an analyst call at the time. “They’re really excited about the idea of bringing together two great retailers in a unique experience that nobody else is doing. This is totally new to beauty.”
Around the same time Target and Ulta partnered up, so did Sephora and Kohl’s. The two retailers announced a deal for at least 850 Sephora shop-in-shop locations in Kohl’s stores by 2023.
The collaboration between two sets of mass retailers is setting the stage for a rivalry to appeal to beauty shoppers and gain market share.
