Over 70 Clean Beauty Brands Entered Tmall Global in Half A Year

Clean beauty has been a popular concept in the international market for a long time, and it has started to rise in the Chinese market recently.

For Chinese consumers, clean beauty means harmless ingredients, environmental friendliness, animal cruelty-free, and sustainable development.

Some big cosmetic companies and beauty e-commerce operation companies have already noticed this rising trend and are accelerating the speed of introducing more clean beauty brands to China.

Cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) is a priority channel for overseas niche beauty brands to enter China. Data shows that starting from 2021, more than 70 overseas new clean beauty brands joined Tmall Global, a top CBEC channel in China, and sales of this category have increased by more than 600% year-on-year. ¹

Clean Beauty Brands in China

Entered Tmall Global in August 2019, popular clean beauty brand Drunk Elephant attracted nearly 30,000 followers in two months. It was subsequently acquired by Shiseido Group. In the first half of this year, the brand's Tmall Global store sales increased by 370% year-on-year. Snowberry, a clean beauty brand from Procter & Gamble, entered Tmall Global at the end of 2019 and has grown into the No. 1 New Zealand skincare brand on this platform after a year. Only Minerals, a natural makeup brand from the Japanese Company YA-MAN, entered in April 2020. Its sales have increased by more than 400% year-on-year. ¹                                            

Products from Drunk Elephant

Beauty e-commerce operation companies, such as SuperOrdinary and Next Beauty China, have also actively introduced niche beauty products into China through Tmall Global in recent years.  Clean beauty is one of their main focuses. For example, SuperOrdinary introduced the American niche clean skincare brand Farmacy to China. In 2020, its makeup remover ranked NO.1 and smear mask ranked NO.2 in the corresponding category on Tmall Global. It continued its popularity in 2021 with a year-on-year increase of 700%.

Products from Farmacy

In addition, in the first half of this year, several Japanese and Korean clean beauty brands also joined the competition, including Korean brands Cosrx and Abib, and Japanese brand Celvoke.

Products from COSRX

Tmall Global’s Plan

Clean beauty is not the only focus of Tmall Global.

On September 2, Tmall Global announced the “Emerging Beauty Brands Nurture Plan”, aiming to introduce 1,000 overseas emerging beauty brands and nurture over 50 beauty brands with over 10 million yuan annual turnover respectively. 2 The plan will focus on categories such as special ingredient skincare, clean beauty, makeup brands popular on Instragram, and niche fragrance.

The chosen new brands will get full support from Tmall Global in various ways, covering marketing, subsidy, supply chain, traffic, etc.