On Target Brands
I went to Target the other day. I love Target.
But I’ve never really thought about why. Or, for that matter, how. How does a massive big box store stay as relevant and trend-forward as Target? How does it manage to consistently stay on pace with niche markets, yet still manage solid mass appeal? What kind of black magic is happening at Target HQ?
The following is my preliminary thinking on Target’s secret sauce in brand selection and retail experience, as concerns skincare.
On target Target brands
Since Target’s 2013 acquisition of the Dermstore Beauty Group (aka dermstore.com), Target has displayed a particular savvy for incubation, acquisition, and curation, fueled in part by its accelerator programs.
Here’s an overview of some personal care brands featured by Target:
Men’s
Oars + Alps participated in the 2018 Target Takeoff Accelerator Program, and was soon after acquired by S.C. Johnson.
Goodfellow & Co launched in Q3 2017 as an in-house men’s line. Most of the collection is elevated men’s fashion basics, but includes a 30 SKU grooming and personal care line.
Haircare
Kristin Ess (at Target) boasts a comprehensive haircare line, including fragrance-free formulations. Side note: Before trying these last week I hadn’t realized just how big a role fragrance plays in my shampooing and conditioning experience. Providing a fragrance-free option in a smell-obsessed market is a BIG deal, and I’m here for it; the formulations are solid. The prices are extremely accessible ($3 for minis, $10-$14 for full size) and fool-proof: all products are effective on their own and are compatible with sister SKUs.
Odele provides all-age, all-gender hair care products. Or, in their words, products meant to be shared. Their packaging simplifies and standardizes salon-quality products, with a color palette akin to Hims.
Shave
Harry’s (at Target) and its feminine off-shoot Flamingo (at Target) provide a modern update to shaving basics. Both brands have a healthy and booming ecommerce presence, and so likely exist in Target primarily as a form of advertisement. Side note: The FTC opened proceedings to preliminarily block Schick parent Edgewell Personal Care from its planned $1.4B acquisition of Harry’s, announced on Monday.
Basics
Smartly provides household and personal care staples for under $3 a pop, including this basic everyday facial cleanser. The IL reads like the textbook definition of what makes a facial cleanser a facial cleanser. It’s a simple answer to all the new over-designed and over-marketed cleansers ~$30/bottle.
Any staple not made by Smartly is generally available from the older in-house generic brand Up&Up.
In each line, Target offers a generic cleansing wipe: an unscented and simplified wipe from Smartly ($0.99 / 30 ct.) and a generic Neutrogena from Up&Up ($2.59 / 25 ct.). The latter is as basic as basic gets; the former is a dupe of a drugstore classic.
Target also stocks beard wash power-house Scotch Porter and nail polish queen Olive & June, among several others.
In their announcement of the Kristen Ess launch, Target spoke of its ability to make discoverable high-quality goods at an “equally incredible value.” This seems to be the common theme with their more recent launches and collaborations. In taking on these smaller lines, Target is showing that Big Box can move fast, and make big moves with small(ish) companies.
In fact, of the major retailers, Target saw the largest percent change in online skincare sales from January-August 2018 to January-August 2019. Target’s Dermstore saw slightly less improvement, but still leads its parent in indexed monthly sales. Neither Target nor Dermstore approach Sephora or Amazon in online sales. However, the Gartner graph illustrates the beginnings of an accelerating masstige market, of which Target seems to be taking full advantage.
Someone at Target pays very close attention to what consumers want, and can mobilize collaboration and distribution quickly enough to satisfy those wants. For the past few years Target has been thinking out of the Big Box box. I don’t think they have any intention of bounding themselves in.
An addictive retail experience
The continual addition of insta-worthy brands undoubtedly makesTarget strolling all the more entrapping. But in the skincare market what’s ultimately more entrapping? Strolling around random Target shelves, or scrolling through curated Instagram content? Who creates a better skincare experience online and IRL, Glossier or Target?
Glossier and Target are two very different brands with two very different retail experiences and product offerings, both in quantity and quality. But I can’t help equating Target fandom with the Glossier cult. Or at least elements of them, particularly when it comes to their addictive retail experiences.
Target doesn’t give you a product-focused immersive and tactile experience, but is guaranteed to stock what you need. Glossier doesn’t have many SKUs, but gives you an immersive experience through scent, touch, and sight. Target has everything I don’t need; Glossier’s limited inventory makes me need everything. Both are successful for different reasons, and exist to serve different consumer behaviors.
I think it boils down to this: Target has something for everyone, but Glossier’s retail experience hinges on creating FOMO. (I think they’re better at creating FOMO than they are at creating high-quality products. But I’m saving my thesis on why/how Glossier sucks for a later date.)
Glossier’s retail spaces are designed with a sense of exclusion. At any one location entrances are limited to a handful of people at a time, like a gallery. Most locations are pop-ups advertised with a close date before they open for business. They’re also designed with a sense of fantasy: the visuals are there, but the actual product is just out of reach, stocked behind the counter. It’s like insta IRL. You can experience the product, but you can’t have it until you add to cart or stand in a checkout queue. They magnify this sense of exclusion by sharing pictures of the spaces on Instagram. Anyone can cultivate the desire to visit, but only a few can. (Of course anyone can kinda get that experience at glossier.com.)
While Glossier rejects the feeling of mass market, Target fully embraces it. Or at least Target is hitting on the mass appeal of niche markets, while also offering mass-market staples. The effect of which is a retail experience that all but guarantees you’ll walk out with items you didn’t even know you needed. When you go to Target for skincare you can also buy toilet paper, a floor lamp, and a dinosaur shaped couch cushion. When you go to Glossier you can also get...stickers (a sense of inclusion!!).
In their respective retail experiences Target is appealing to insta swipers by offering niche brands, but without giving up the Target identity; Glossier is appealing to insta swipers by making Instagram their complete identity.
Ultimately, I think Glossier’s trend-setter status makes them more vulnerable to the impermanence of trends. Target, on the other hand, has proven time and time that it can be on trend and yet immutable to all of them at the same time. I can imagine a near future in which Glossier is no longer all that relevant. I can’t imagine the same for Target.
Big Brand Gaffes
To throw into focus just how deft Target is, one only needs to look at the inaction or missteps of other large brands. In particular I’ve been brooding over the recent Revlon and Environmental Working Group (EWG) collaboration.
The legacy brand and high-trafficked consumer website have teamed up to certify the beauty brand’s first “EWG Verified™ Clean” primer: the PhotoReady Prime Plus Perfecting + Smoothing.
I generally think pay-to-play certifications are a scam. I absolutely think EWG certifications are a scam. It may seem like EWG has good intentions, but they have yet to prove themselves as a legitimate source of credible, scientific data. So when I saw this launch I was immediately skeptical.
For me to believe that the Revlon x EWG primer launch was done with good intentions, I’d have to see verified information about formulation and final product testing. That’s not at all what I saw on EWG’s profile of the primer; It’s just a list of ingredients.
I was curious to see if this list of ingredients provides any more specific information than that which can be cut and paste from EWG’s existing information on each of the primer’s ingredients. In a few quick minutes I made a chart to aggregate each ingredient’s EWG “Score” and “Data Availability” rating, then compared it to EWG’s product chart. Same exact results. (Minor differences in scores between individual ingredient pages and the Revlon primer page may be simply accounted for: when an ingredient’s safety was ranked within a range, the ingredient was automatically given the range’s lowest—the “safest”—score on the product page.) From this overlap I drew a simple hypothesis as to the method of product “testing.” Any product safety “testing” amounted to merely looking up the pre-existing ratings of individual ingredients. The formula as a whole was not tested by EWG, as the campaign implies.
There was one key difference between my 15 min “analysis” and the primer’s EWG results. It’s subtle, but I think very telling: The EWG product profile lists “concerns” for each ingredient, generally involving some mention of toxicity. Some ingredients are listed with “use restrictions” or “contamination concerns.” Each of the 15 incidences of these phrases are crossed out, indicating that the concern was once a concern, but is no longer in the context of this primer. The crossed out phrases and are all followed by the brief explainer: “(meets restrictions and warnings based on EWG review of company data).”
What company data? How did this concern just magically disappear?! What data could they possibly have that allows them to prove a negative? Crossing out a concern implies that the concern is no longer there. You can’t prove the absence of a concern. The best you can do is demonstrate the probable absence of specifications, which serve as proxies to the concern. Of course no details on these specifications or proxies are given.
If this data does exist, Did Revlon sell them this data? Was EWG paid to look at this data? Why can’t we see this data?
In the guise of transparency, EWG points very directly to information kept from the consumer. Of all the “data” points provided in this product profile, this is the information that potentially has the most to offer on matters of consumer safety and potential toxicity. The other “data” points (“Score” and “Data Availability”) are relative numbers that mean something only in the context of an EWG scale, and have very little to do with how cosmetic science and testing in the real world works.
This is not a safety review of the formulation, this is an out of context scoring of each ingredient. Again, that’s not how chemistry works at all. Ingredients do not exist in a vacuum. But it does seem EWG exists in a world of delusion. In claiming to be an advocate of the people, they’re creating language and campaigns that confuse and muddle the direction of our industry: radical transparency of reliable, verified data.
Repeat: this collaboration is NOT an innovation in formulation, safety-testing, or self-imposed regulation. This is one party (Revlon) paying another party (EWG) (likely) for use of an arbitrary and unfortunately popular “data” set. The EWG sticker is a smokescreen. I would not give it any real weight.
All told, the collaboration feels like it was set up for praise, not to push the industry. Revlon offers a range of primers. Three of which are new, but only one of which is now EWG verified. Praise and attention was, of course, immediate upon launch, with coverage (ha, for a primer!) from Byride, WWD, Fast Company, and themselves. Notice the lack of any scientific accreditation or verification.
Honestly, this partnership makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot of overlap in these companies’ target demographics, and loyalty for both can be strengthened by tapping into each others’ reputations. It makes sense. What angers me is that the industry and press are taking this launch seriously. This is not the release of a revolutionary product. This is a press release moment for a collaboration designed to drive profit.
If the EWG-verified Revlon primer still speaks to your fancy, you can buy it at Target.
-- Lizzy Trelstad, Founder + Chemist
lizzy@hellobeaker.com
Originally published on 7 February 2020 in the Swirl the Beaker industry newsletter.
Additional Resources & Notes
Target’s Board of Directors is stacked with P&G and Clorox alumni, among other CPG and retail behemoths. This is no big surprise for a massive retailer, but I do think it points to Target’s clear command of the CPG space.
Fun fact: Target has its own version of Birchbox: each $7 Beauty Box offers 7-9 sample size products, exclusively online.