Spotting big trends in beauty packaging

Mr. Daniel CHA, Sales Category President, Yonwoo

Just as South Korea entertainment has taken China by storm, its trendy items such as cosmetics are also gaining increasing popularity here. As such, it seems to be a great timing for Yonwoo, a S. Korean supplier of cosmetic packaging, to expand further into China. Happi Asia spoke with Mr. Daniel Cha, Sales Category president, at a recent Yonwoo press conference.

With China’s growing economy, consumption of cosmetics has been rising, so the market is also growing rapidly. From our perspective, this market can be classified as high level, i.e. prestige, and middle class, and mass market. When it comes to packaging requirement, the prestige category is looking for prestige packaging, the middle one for reasonably affordable packaging, and mass market is looking for simple and low cost packaging.

Nowadays, what is happening in South Korea is that consumers are getting smarter and well-educated. They are increasingly aware of the issue of environment protection. As lifestyles have become complicated compared to 30 years ago, people are looking for something to buy for their satisfaction.

What are the biggest trends in beauty and personal care packaging?

One of the big trends we see is consumers are trading down. This means they are getting smarter and looking for reasonably priced products instead of something with higher price. Consumers think more of formulations, rather than brands, and they seek information such as product reputation through internet, instead of purely based on brands. Packaging must meet these same demands.

Of course, the level of rich consumers looking for extreme prestige is still very steady. As a result, the packaging for prestige market has rarely changed; the brands in this sector are always looking for high-end and quality packaging, and innovation and mechanism should be workable for them.

So, trading down trend is mainly among middle class. To tap into this increasingly sophisticated market, we actually further classify into five levels: luxury, prestige, entry prestige, masstige and mass. As long as the market grows and life gets complicated, the industry will become even more segmented. Therefore each segment requires different packaging, which is quite different from 20 years ago.

Luxury is still luxury. Prestige is still prestige. While on the one hand this segment wants the packaging looking prestige, on the other hand it also wants certain level of affordability. For those products sold at the duty free shops, we think they belong to entry prestige.

Along with increased market segmentation, product ranges are also divided. Functional, commonly used products and basic skin care are getting segmented and targeting different areas, and therefore require different packaging with different features. Packaging also needs to adapt to the changing way we apply the product, such as more sophisticated formulations which need more pMen's Tops