What wholesale data tells us about beauty & wellness

0:00Jen Burke:Today we have a really good one. We're sitting down with Jen Burke, the chief revenue officer at FAIR, the world's largest wholesale marketplace for independent retailers. We partnered with FAIR on a full report on the beauty and wellness space. And we want to walk you through the key findings before we get into the conversation. While the report is available for your viewing pleasure and you should absolutely dig into it on your own, we will give a little bit of a recap on some of the things that we found. So we talk about beauty and wellness all the time, all the time. We tend towards snacks, but beauty and wellness come up.

0:35And one of the reasons is because this is a growing category within consumer goods. Both prestige and mass grew around four to 5 % in 2025. But that growth piece isn't even what's most interesting. What's really interesting to us is that the beauty and wellness categories aren't really separate categories anymore. They've pretty much merged. We've seen that in a lot of the headlines that we talk about. So one of them being Ulta expanded its in-store wellness shop to up to 45 feet across hundreds of stores. And we're continuing to see a ton of launches within Ulta's wellness shop. We even saw one this week.

1:12Symbiotica just launched in Ulta. At the same time, Target added over 2 ,000 wellness items in just one month. And again, we continue to see supplements and beauty both taking center stage in Target's focus. What we're seeing is something like collagen sitting next to mascara in an Ulta. There's a lot to dig into here. We're realizing that the brands that are winning in beauty and wellness aren't the ones that are trying to define themselves as either beauty or wellness. They're the ones that are trying to figure out what they are as a lifestyle brand.

1:45Jen Burke:Yeah. And I think what makes FAIR and their data specifically interesting is that it gives us a really cool window into independent retail. scale so boutiques gift shop spas a corner of the market that we don't really get great numbers on unless amex is reporting on it for small business saturday and indie retailers really matter that's where a lot of these trends sort of start to bubble up and incubate before they scale before they get to the big guys what's landing at a boutique here in new york or in austin will tend to show up down the line in the targets and the altas of the world 12 to 18 months from now it's very hard to gather all of this data from all of these independent retailers that aren't really speaking to each other or necessarily using the same software to collect their data.

2:32So FAIR was our way in. And when we dug into the data, both from the brand side and the retail side, a few things jumped out. One of the biggest ones was that Bath & Body is commanding nearly a third of all beauty and wellness spend on FAIR. Wild. And we do talk about the Bath & Body segment a lot because consumers are now expecting a lot of the same actives that we see in facial care. So think like peptides, ceramides, hyaluronic acid to show up in their body wash and their lotion. We've seen a ton of different launches in the past few months that reflect that. One that's coming to mind is Tower 28's new body wash, which is specifically for eczema prone skin.

3:15Another is Ollie, which was a vitamin, gummy vitamin supplement brand. It still is a gummy vitamin supplement brand, but they've expanded into body care as well with these functional body washes that contain ingredients like ceramides and other functional ingredients for body care. We've also seen it from the investment side. Naturium sold to Elf for$355 million a few years ago. Dr. Squatch sold to Unilever late last year for$1.5 billion. So we're seeing these big companies take notice.

3:45Jen Burke:Another side of the beauty space that we saw that wasn't big, but really can be, was men's grooming. It's sitting at less than 1 % of gross market value on FAIR, 0.38%. This is alongside a backdrop of more than half of American men actually using skincare products now, which is up like 70 % since 2022. It's just showing that the demand is there. It's starting to grow. It's starting to bubble up. And we're starting to see it on FAIR. And we're seeing the men's skincare space more broadly also start to get a little bit of traction. We've reported on a few different brands launching at Walmart and at Target.

4:24Jen Burke:The Rock skincare brand, which I find it so funny, is a shampoo product because that man is bald as a bee. I like the alliteration, bees are not bald. But, you know, the infrastructure and the bigger guys haven't fully caught up yet, but there is shelf space for it. And we're starting to see it within that fair data. Yeah, that was a really interesting one because as we said, men's grooming is taking up such a small share of what's on FAIR, but the demand is really there and it's just not reflected. So clearly there's this white space and we're starting to see brands capitalize on it, but we haven't really seen it take off yet.

5:00The biggest finding that we discovered from digging into this data with FAIR is something that we have kind of been exploring ourselves a lot, which is that there is this dichotomy of science-backed ingredients and these clean, quote-unquote clean, or free-from ingredients, and they're both trending at the exact same time. So what we mean by this is ingredients like hydrocolloid, retinol, salicylic acid, all of these science-backed, chemical-sounding ingredients were growing. We saw that from the data. But growing right alongside them are really natural-sounding, clean ingredients like rosehip, aloe, turmeric, and then claims like vegan, clean, and allergen-free.

5:49Clean, in particular, as a product tag, so a way that a brand tags itself to show up in listings on the fair marketplace, appears on over 17 ,000 products on fair, and it's still climbing. What we determined from this is not that clean is trending or science-backed is trending, but they are both trending at the same time. And while they might seem at odds with each other on paper, it looks like consumers aren't necessarily picking a side.

6:18Jen Burke:No, consumers aren't picking a side and brands are trying not to either. So even if they have an ingredient or tool that delivers a clinical result or even has a clinical nature to it, they're changing the way they talk about it or the way they present it. So it's all about this same mechanism, but a different narrative. We're seeing that the brands who are going to stand out and continue to stand out are the ones that can speak both languages at once. They can appeal to the clean winning side and the science winning side. And the other thing we saw was on price. And this didn't come to as, this wasn't as much of a surprise to us.

7:01We saw that 80 % of beauty and wellness spend on fair is under$25, dollars, which tracks with other data that we've seen at mass. Value-driven efficacy is the dominant consumer behavior right now. And it makes sense that we would see that reflected even in independent retail. And we've, again, seen a lot of launches recently that reflect this. I know we talked about men's grooming earlier, but even this week, something we saw was, as we mentioned, Dwayne The Rock Johnson has a skincare brand that's popping off, Papa Tui. And Papa Tui just launched its first acne line, pimple patches as in hydrocolloid, but the whole range is under$10.

7:42And so seeing that more sub$10 pricing really tracks with a lot of what we saw within this report that again, value-driven efficacy is everything in beauty and wellness right now.

7:54Jen Burke:That's your background on this FAIR report on our conversation with Jen. And so we're really excited to have Jen Burke here to dig into all of it with us. Jen, welcome to The Curious Consumer. Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here and chatting with both of you. I would love a little intro on yourself, your role at FAIR. So I'm the chief revenue officer at FAIR, which probably doesn't mean much to you. I oversee all of our customer facing commercial functions. So the teams that bring on and then help manage once they're live, both the brands on the marketplace, as well as the retailers on the marketplace.

8:31And ultimately, the goal of my teams is to help make FAIR a bigger part of the retailer and brands businesses and help them achieve success on the platform.

8:41Jen Burke:I think to start, we know what FAIR is, but some of our audience might not know what FAIR is. Can you describe what it is as if you were explaining it to my mother or grandparent or somebody who might not be in this lovely ecosystem? At the most basic level, FAIR is an online marketplace for wholesale. So a place where retailers can come and find inventory to stock their shelves. And we focus specifically on independent retailers. So the mom and pop shops you see walking down any main street in America, now increasingly across the globe. We're a global company. On a deeper level, I think what makes FAIR so special and why it's been so impactful is really our mission.

9:24So why we do what we do. and then ultimately how that comes to life and the product experience. So starting with our mission, our founders started FAIR with this core belief that we should live in a world with vibrant local communities and independent retail stores and the small businesses you see on Main Street are really the backbone of those communities. As you guys both probably know, it's harder and harder for those businesses to compete against the likes of Amazon or big box companies. And what we really focus on is how do we level the playing field and help those retailers not just survive, but ultimately thrive.

10:05And we do that by focusing on like three distinct things. The first is just discovery and access. When retailers join FAIR, they get access to over 100 ,000 brands and millions of products, which just from a breadth and depth perspective is more than you can get at any individual sales channel. That said, it can be very overwhelming if you're a retailer joining fair and you have millions of products at your disposal. So we also personalize the experience to every retailer based on what we know about them, what they've been searching for, what they're clicking on. Ultimately, with the goal to help them not just increase conversion on the site, but ultimately sell through to their end customer in their store.

10:42The second is we focus on financial value. This kind of goes back to leveling the playing field. But we think about how do we help retailers save money and then improve their cash flow. So every retailer on FAIR gets net 60 terms and free returns the first time they're ordering from a brand, which means they can buy inventory, hopefully sell it in their stores before they owe us a dime. And if they can't, they can return it to us for free, no questions asked, which is a massive value prop for these small businesses. And then we have other products like our free shipping program, which, again, helps them save money.

11:14And then the last and where we're increasingly focusing our attention and time is what we call like workflows and tools. But how can we help these retailers and brands not just find one another, but ultimately manage their businesses more effectively? So we have like integrations into POS systems for retailers to sync their data and help with reorder reminders. We have CRM tools for brands to nurture relationships and all fundamentally with this idea of discovery, but also like growth and efficiency through our tools. And now we're the largest online wholesale marketplace, I think, in the world.

11:48But we think we're just getting started. So lots more to come. It's really interesting to hear you explain FAIR more from this like retailer lens, because we both come at it more from the brand lens and we're more familiar with FAIR from the brand lens. and hearing how much you've done for retailers is fascinating because we know how much you've done for brands. The fact that this marketplace didn't really exist before meant that these small brands, not just small retailers, but the small brands would have to knock door to door basically to get their brands on shelf. So I'm curious if you could speak a little more to the brand experience of FAIR and the kind of brands that are on FAIR.

12:28I'll start with the brand experience and then I could talk about the archetypes of brands. So in terms of what we focus on, those value props show up for brands the same way as they do for retailers. So on discovery and access, you said it yourself, Jenna, what FAIR gives brands is the ability to get into all of these different stores without having to pursue other, sometimes more expensive sales channels. And then on financial value, we give all those benefits to retailers, but we do it on behalf of brands. So we're not charging brands. We're not passing on defaults or returns. We take on free shipping.

13:05And even when a retailer defaults on us, we guarantee payouts for brands. So it's a way for them to offer retailer benefits to grow their business without having to take on all that risk and expense. And then on the tool side, similarly, we have a bunch of order-taking tools for them to actually facilitate orders outside of FAIR at shows or via reps. We now have tools for them to use FAIR as their direct B2B website without having to charge them for commission. It's basically free. And then we also have like analytics and other programs for them to grow their business on FAIR like ads. But then in terms of what types of brands are using FAIR, we really span like every single consumer category you can think of.

13:44Like anything that you can find on the internet, you can find a wholesale equivalent on FAIR. so products from apparel to food and beverage to gift and home decor to personal care to even now like electronics but there's really three main kind of archetypes of brands that use us the first are brands that are new to wholesale we call them emerging brands they could be big direct-to-consumer brands or just etsy brands that are looking to grow into wholesale they leverage us to get into this space in the first place example of a brand here would be like Graza. They were more of a direct-to-consumer brand.

14:19They were in Brooklyn. They used us to get into wholesale and they are now sold in Whole Foods nationally. We have these anecdotes of brands who tell us like, oh, Whole Foods or another like regional grocery store reached out because they saw them in a local retailer boutique, bought them, tried them and was like, oh, we should stock this product, which is very cool. So that's kind of the first, these like emerging brands. The second are more established brands. So brands that already have massive wholesale distribution. Maybe they're in thousands of stores globally. An example here would be like Kitsch.

14:50They're more in the beauty and bath space. They use this to get into the long tail of independent retailers that they're not getting access to with traditional channels. So for Kitsch, they have now gotten into like spas and salons, yoga studios, massage parlors. I think even like a dermatologist office actually bought Kitsch products. And those are not stores that are like going to your traditional trade shows. So just a great way for them to grow their business. And then the last segment of brands are brands who are really trying to consolidate their business and do everything through fair. Example of a brand here is like Itsy Ritzy and the kids in baby space.

15:25They use us on the marketplace, but they also use us for their direct B2B website and also all of our tools to take orders at shows. Thank you for walking through all of that. And you even mentioned more of the scope of the retailers that work with you, which at first we mentioned mom and pop stores, but obviously it spans far beyond what people might think of when they think of like a boutique grocer. It's, as you mentioned, like a medical spa might be unfair. There are so many different kinds of retailers. I think something that is even more simplifying it for people who aren't unfamiliar with the platform or just how wholesale even works is it's almost like someone who owns a store can go on, this is like Amazon for them to stock their store at wholesale prices.

16:06And having that discovery ability just simply did not exist before FAIR. I think that's right. One thing that's been interesting just to add on to that is we see that we're actually increasing the addressable market of businesses that view themselves as stores. It's like cafes. A gym. A gym who didn't even have like a footprint now using FAIR to build another growth channel for their business. And I think that's really cool too. It's not just becoming a channel for independent retailers. It's like businesses are now seeing themselves as potential retailers. Historically, if a gym decided that they wanted to sell protein bars, how would they have gone about that?

16:45I mean, there are some trade shows they could go to, but in talking to a lot of these businesses, the majority of them were just self-sourcing inventory. So they see a product on Instagram that they're interested in, and then they go to their website and they fill out their contact us form. And then maybe that brand doesn't do wholesale and then And they have to convince the brand to do wholesale. And it's a back and forth on pricing. And that process is extremely long and inefficient. And we've just changed that game. Because even if it happens, what's happening now is they're like, oh, are you unfair?

17:18Jen Burke:Wow. It's amazing that it's gotten to that point, too. Just like how we say we're going to Google something or we'll just buy it on Amazon. Like, it's that equivalent term just on the retailer side of things. I love that you said that, Nate, because our CEO talks about that. He talks about, I just want to fair it, fair it instead of Google it. And I do think that that is happening right now. I think with that, and this sort of relates to some of the stuff that we're working on with fair is how fair structures a marketplace gives you really unique insights into consumer trends and also retail trends.

17:58Jen Burke:How is fair tracking those trends and how is that also bleeding into the retail and the consumer side of the business as well? You just hit the nail on the head. We are not just a technology company. We are increasingly like a data company and we do billions of dollars in transaction volume a year now. So just an enormous number of data points. And if you go more up funnel, that's looking at what retailers are searching for, clicking on converting, but even down funnel, we, because we plug into POS systems, know what's actually selling through to the end customer. And then of course, what they're returning.

18:34So just like a lot of powerful insights. And then we can cut it into various permutations. So how does that differ by geography or store type or price point or business size? And what we've been doing is packaging up all those insights, not just what like products and brands are trending, but even what ingredients are trending, what colors are trending, what themes or cultural moments are happening. And when it's on the upswing and the downswing, we share that back with our retailers, both in the forms of these trend reports that we do on a quarterly or ad hoc basis. And increasingly, we're now putting it in the product experience itself.

19:12So you can see like what's trending on fair. So retailers can actually react to that more in real time than just buy rather than read it, maybe in more of a kind of lagging indicator fashion.

19:23Jen Burke:I think the data side is fascinating, both for the retail and the brand side. We've also been given access to some of that data and have seen some interesting things. Through some of your team's data collection, we discovered that there was equal demand for clean and then also for science-forward ingredients within the beauty and wellness space. I'm curious, how does this reflect what you've been seeing from both sides of the marketplace, from the consumer brand sides coming in and the retail side? We have these kind of two seemingly opposing trends happening right now. The first, this continued rise of clean beauty, which really are just products that focus on natural ingredients like aloe vera or turmeric or shea for like shea butter.

20:09So that's one. And then the science-backed trends or products are really focused on clinical efficiency. And these are ingredients or products that are literally grown in a lab with the idea of trying to increase the potency of certain ingredients or chemicals that are known to help with skincare. Things like retinol or vitamin C are two examples here, collagen. From a consumer and retailer standpoint, there are ones that are very focused on an individual lane. So only do clean beauty or only science forward. But actually what we're seeing is that there's a pretty big overlap between those concentric circles and consumers that are interested in both, right?

20:47If I think about myself, I have my like true botanical skincare line and then I use retinol. And I think a lot of people are very similar in that they shift based on maybe where they are in their life cycle or age and product type. So retailers are stocking both. They are like coming to fair for the depth of inventory that we have across both of those trends. And they're stocking both clean beauty and science forward in order to be able to serve a broader population of customers. That's different from the brand side, which I'm happy to go into. But brands don't really have that luxury of being everything for everyone because it then dilutes a little bit like their brand authenticity.

21:25So they need to choose a lane, own their positioning. Like, who are they? Are they clean beauty? Are they science forward? And then reinforce that in everything they do and say online, like their claims, their ingredients, their product description. Like, even their packaging can sometimes suggest one or the other, right? If you think about different brands, like there are certain aesthetics and materials that suggest clean beauty and others that suggest science forward. And so brands have to be very cognizant of all of those decisions, particularly if they're merchandising online, because like consumer and retailers, attention is scarce.

22:00And you want to make sure you're getting across who you are very, very quickly and concretely. That just brought something up for me. Something that you mentioned of like brands don't as much have the ability to be everything to everyone. Totally agree with that. And that's something that we hone in on a lot. and retailers have a little bit more flexibility there. I'm actually curious, you know that retailer side so much better than we do. I feel like there are brands that do really lean into one side, like Credo Beauty is what's coming to mind, which is a fully clean beauty store. Do you think there are certain advantages for retailers for leaning into one side or the other more?

22:35Do you think retailers do play to the advantage more of being everything to everybody? I think it's maybe a similar thing to like what is their core ethos. If they are a variety store, like a lot of our gift stores, right, they carry multiple brands, multiple products, multiple aesthetics, like minimalist style and then really loud style. So if that's who they are, like I carry something for everyone, then I think, yes, they can and should lean into multiple trends. If you are a clean beauty store or if it's a dermatology office, for instance, and you're actually my differentiation is the fact that I can back a lot of these claims with research evidence and their specific products I really believe are most effective for certain skincare purposes, then it almost feels like often antithetical to who you are to stock both.

23:26So I think that's also true on the retailer side. Most of our retailers are more variety and they're stocking across categories. So a lot of them are leaning into both of these trends, but they also have to ask themselves that question of, is this actually aligned with my ethos and the values that I provide for my local community or for my consumers? I'm also thinking about it from the terms of backing into the brand side of things. Obviously a brand can't be everything to everyone and needs to lean in terms of like it's consumer facing messaging. Do you think that retailer facing messaging is different for brands?