The beauty industry has long treated a bigger product range as a route to growth. But more launches, more choice and more promotions also bring higher costs, more complexity and harder decisions for customers. For premium beauty, the opportunity may lie in selling less, choosing better and building trust.
Jeri Mookana, founder of Laud Beauty. (Image supplied)
I have spent almost two decades working across retail, beauty, e-commerce and performance marketing. For much of that time, my job was simple: get customers to buy.
The data taught me that volume is one of the easiest ways to grow a beauty business, and one of the most expensive ways to sustain it.
This is an uncomfortable conclusion for someone who has spent much of my career making it easier for people to buy. Performance marketing teaches you to look for the next conversion. Building Laud Beauty has made me more interested in what happens after it.
The hidden cost of choice
Beauty has become a hard category to navigate. A woman looking for a serum may face dozens of formulations, overlapping claims, unfamiliar ingredients and products separated by ever narrower promises.
Choice feels like freedom at first, but past a certain point, it becomes work. A customer who is still comparing has often not yet decided to buy.
According to ECDB, more than 85% of carts in South Africa’s online personal care market were abandoned in 2025. Cart abandonment has many causes, so it would be simplistic to attribute that figure to choice alone. But it does point to a broader challenge: getting a customer to the point of consideration is not the same as making the decision easy.
Too much uncertainty or complexity can make it easier to walk away than commit.
The assortment trap
The industry has confused assortment with value. When demand slows, the reflex is another launch, another variant or another promotion.
The costs pile up quietly. More products need more inventory finance. More launches need more marketing support. More choice requires more customer education. Stock that fails to move ends up in markdowns, and growth looks far less impressive once those are counted.
Black Friday can hide these weaknesses because volume looks good in the moment. A revenue spike shows what was sold, but says little about whether the business got stronger.
The better measures arrive later:
- Did the customer return without another discount?
- How much inventory was left once the promotions ended?
- What did each sale cost to acquire?
These questions reveal the quality of growth far more clearly than a weekend of transactions.
A better definition of premium
The customer is not necessarily looking for more. They are looking for confidence: confidence that what they are considering is worth their attention, their money and a place in their routine.
WGSN’s Future Consumer 2028 points to a growing shift towards buying less, but better. This is shaped by fatigue with digital noise and constant acceleration, alongside renewed interest in intentional consumption, craftsmanship, provenance and longevity.
Importantly, WGSN sees this mindset extending beyond luxury, particularly among Millennials and older Gen Z.
In beauty, where almost anything can be bought with a click, that changes where value sits. The role of the retailer is increasingly not to present the biggest possible range, but to reduce the work of choosing.
That is where curation becomes more than an aesthetic choice. It becomes a customer benefit and a commercial strength.
Exercising judgement, explaining why a product deserves attention and leaving out what does not can make the category easier to navigate. For the customer, the result is less noise, greater clarity and a more confident path to purchase.
Architecture and industrial design learnt this long ago. Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” and Dieter Rams’ “less, but better” were arguments for rigour, in which every element has to justify its presence. Beauty could apply the same discipline to what it formulates, launches and puts on the shelf.
A formula should be able to account for everything in it. A product should have a clear reason to exist. A retailer should know why each item has earned its place, instead of assuming that more choice will create more demand. When every launch is simply added to an already crowded range, complexity becomes the business model.
Lemogang Sebesho 23 Jun 2026 What to measure after the rush
A smaller assortment can seem counterintuitive. More products should mean more chances to sell, but inventory, complexity, discounting and customer acquisition all cost money, and those costs grow with the range.
Trust works the other way and compounds over time. When customers believe that what they are shown has already been considered, compared and questioned, the retailer’s value shifts from access to judgement.
That is the next opportunity in premium beauty. Luxury has always drawn its strength from discernment, provenance, craftsmanship and the confidence to leave out what does not belong.
This Black Friday, the industry should ask more of itself than how much it can sell in a weekend. It should measure repeat purchases, margin after markdowns and how much stock moved without an incentive.
It should count the customers who came back because they trusted the brand.
More will always be easy to count. What is worth keeping is harder to measure, and worth far more.
