Vogue Business spoke about the men’s beauty boom in 2021, and they weren’t wrong. The global skin care industry is expected to be valued at $183 billion by 2025. Men’s skin care also remains a largely untapped market.
As brands like Dove Men and Tiege Hanley respond to men’s growing awareness and acceptance of “beauty” and personal hygiene products, brands need to know how to respond from an inventory and logistics perspective.
This blog will detail how to ship skin care products, what FDA approval is, and how a 3PL can help.
How to Sell Men’s Skin Care Online
Selling skin care products starts with development. Without researching basic chemistry, production standards, and sourcing ingredients, you may run into issues with quality control and meeting FDA regulations down the line.
The good news is it’s an excellent time to start an online business. Even with recent talks of a recession, health & wellness eCommerce businesses remain a competitive vertical.
And traditional brands like L’oreal and Esteé Lauder aren’t growing as fast as smaller, indie brands in recent years.
So let’s dive into some tips for how to sell men’s skin care online.
Look to Skin Care Trends (Sometimes)
It’s no secret that the beauty industry is saturated and trends move fast. By following beauty influencers and publications, and using tools like Google Trends when conducting market research, you can keep your brand innovative and competitive.
Your research should include competitive analysis, market research, and keyword research to determine the viability of your skin care product ideas. Additionally, you should know your costs and budget during this stage of development.
Remember that skin care trends exist within larger eCommerce trends in the health & wellness industry. Beware of the “fleeting trend.” The product development cycle sometimes isn’t fast enough to capitalize on flash trends. By the time your product hits the market, you could be 4 months late to a trend.
Find Your Niche
One way to distinguish your brand is to identify and target an underserved audience with unique pain points that need addressing.
Established skin care brands cast a wide net, but independent skin care brands have the advantage of honing in on niche audiences or tackling specific problems – problems also change less frequently than trends, so it’s important to find your niche.
Appealing to a particular lifestyle choice is another popular way to find a niche in skin care. Cruelty-free and vegan skin care products are becoming the norm. Ensuring your products meet these standards means you don’t have to adjust later when the market demands it.
The wellness movement has also spilled over into skin care, and more brands are carving out niches in the natural/clean beauty skin care space.
Other niches include:
- Skin care products for specific skin conditions (e.g. oily skin, dry skin, eczema, or rosacea).
- Adaptive skin care (e.g. ingredients that respond to your skin’s needs).
- Multi-use products (e.g. all-over face and body balms).
- Skin care cosmetic products (e.g. cream blush and moisturizing properties).
- Innovative products (e.g. hydrocolloid bandages, skin-centric vitamins, and spa-grade tools for home).
- Skin care products marketed to a specific niche audience (e.g. cancer survivors).
- Hot ingredients (e.g. retinol, probiotics, and hyaluronic acid).
- Simple formulations that exclude common allergens or that are offered at lower price points (e.g. organic ingredients, natural ingredients, and clean cosmetics).
Choose White Label vs Private Label
Going the white label route means you put your branding and limited customizations on an existing product.
This route can be helpful for those looking to monetize a personal brand, but who have less interest in product development. For example, popular creators and influencers often use this method to monetize their large audiences.
The private label route is more customized to brand and product specifications. These products are generally developed in partnership with a private label lab, and the product development stage is usually more hands-on.
Test Your Product
Put your skin care formulations through rigorous testing. This step is essential.
You should understand safety and labeling laws in the skin care business too. Operating in the skin care industry carries obvious risk: you’re making products that could potentially harm people.
It’s important to develop a good relationship with your skin care manufacturer. Find a manufacturer that’s willing to walk you through their process and provide you with transparent information about ingredients and sourcing.
Factor in lead time as well. You should account for the time it takes to research, develop, test, and go to market with your product. Also, keep in mind the testing process can be time consuming and comprehensive, so anticipate and account for that in your product rollout timeline.
How to Package Skin Care Products for Shipping
There’s no one right way to do it, but there are a lot of wrong ways to package and ship your product.
Rigorously test your packaging as well as your product, and test how they interact together. For example, your skin care brush product may be incompatible with the glue in your packaging, causing your brushes to fall apart before they reach your customers.
Knowing how to ship skin care products efficiently depends on you having the right packaging materials, so you can’t skip this step.
Get FDA Approval – How to Ship Skin Care Products Safely
While you don’t need a federally recognized license to sell homemade skin cosmetics and skin care products in the US, the FDA does carefully regulate the skin care industry and requires you to have approval for certain ingredients. Do your homework and seek legal advice if you’re ever unsure.
Remember that beauty customers tend to be naturally discerning and skeptical. With so much conflicting information and so many choices, these customers tend to be more shrewd about which products they select and their reasoning behind it.
Many skin care brands try to manipulate the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act in the US, set up by the FDA, that requires manufacturers to list every ingredient in their products.
Manufacturers may try to confuse consumers with ingredients that aren’t necessary in their products, so it’s important to remain transparent with your marketing and ingredient information.
Educate yourself on preservatives, shelf life, allergens, and proper storage and handling of skin care products. Also, research private labs carefully to ensure your partner is knowledgeable in these areas as well.
How a 3PL Can Help You
Warehousing and fulfillment for health and beauty products like skin care can be logistically challenging. Cosmetic fulfillment services require unique storage and strategic shipping conditions to ensure your product doesn’t spoil before reaching your customers.
When you partner with a 3PL like Jay Group, your skin care products can reach more than 99% of the US in 3 days, using ground shipping, from our Lancaster, PA and Reno, NV facilities. You also receive 99.9% on-time shipping and inventory accuracy rates on all shipments.
Jay Group also offers seamless eCommerce integrations with popular shopping carts like Shopify to fulfill your orders more efficiently.
Want to elevate your online skin care brand? Contact our team to learn more about why a 3PL eCommerce fulfillment partner could be right for you.
